IDS

As part of a course in forestry and participation, 27 forestry officials from Africa, Asia and Scotland spent 10 days in County Kilkenny, Ireland, using PRA and visualisation methods to help local people develop a local forestry action plan. During meetings with local people, visual tools were used to encourage them to express their preferences about the environment. Methods used included resource and social mapping, Venn diagrams, and matrix ranking or tree species preferences. Local people's views were relayed to the local council, thus giving them a say in environmental management.

This video emphasises the importance of behaviour and attitudes in development processes which are genuinely participatory and empowering. Following an introduction to PRA and its many applications (00-07), the remainder of the video focuses on the nature of relationships between outsiders and the people whom the PRA is intended to empower (08).

Section seven of this workshop report focuses specifically on M&E and Project Benefit M&E (PBME). The introduction to this section lists some of the shortcomings, or 'weaknesses', of a "conventional" M&E program and then highlights some of the main 'potential contributions' from RRA methodologies for M&E activities.