Inglis, A.

This video is one product of a participatory appraisal training workshop held in Hull, England. Following classroom-based learning of methods, participants applied these methods to projects in local communities. The first application shown aimed to help a parish council to understand the leisure needs of teenagers to improve the planning of a youth centre (4). The appraisal team met with the parish council to understand what they wanted to know (6).

Fictional conversation betewn civil servant and citizen concerning the Scottish Rural Development Forestry Programme.

Chapters 4 and 5 of a MSc thesis on the use of RRA in social forestry are available. Chapter 4 assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the RRA approach used in a social forestry study in Sierra Leone, (i) by analysing the biases, decisions and compromises made in planning and implementation of a field test, and (ii) by comparing the results of the field test with those of previous relevant research, including a formal questionnaire survey.

Describes the process of using PRA to plan forestry activities in four rural communities in the Highlands of Scotland. The methods enabled people to put forward their ideas on the future of forestry in the areas, as well as creating wider local involvement and helping to spur people on to further action. The paper concludes by reflecting on some of the constraints and opportunities for using PRA in Scotland.

Taking the form of a play involving foresters, villagers and students, the "conventional" approach to forestry is questioned. The concept of meeting planting targets but failing to encourage communities to look after the trees or manage them is discussed. Through the use of questionnaires the foresters try to discover the importance of trees and different species for firewood. However they discover that there are a number of problems in the questionaire method, such as time, relevance, clarity, enumerator bias, and relevant analysis.

An RRA was conducted by a four person team in Freetown, Sierra Leonne and surrounding villages. Previously a statistical survey had been conducted by a different group of researchers in the same area. As well as the main academic objective of comparing the results of an RRA with a statistical survey, the practical objective was to provide an information for an FAO fuelwood project. A variety of PRA methods were used: key informant interviews, mapping, trading flow diagrams and preference pair ranking (of tree species).

A PRA workshop held in a Canadian university led to reflections on holding PRA training in an academic institution. Points included: underlying tensions between participants who are part of the academic hierarchy, different mix of "starting orientations and personal goals", difficulty of setting up field work. The issues all relate to establishing who the training participants are and the implicit assumptions around the training venue.