Pratt, Garett

The Pathways to Participation International Retreat was convened in April 2000, as part of the Pathways to Participation Project. The Project aims to support critical reflection on PRA and participation, in order to improve the quality and impact of participatory work. The retreat brought together a diversity of PRA practitioners, and provided a space for people to critically reflect on their own experiences. This document records the events of the retreat, reflecting the diversity of views that emerged, while focussing on some key themes.

Participation is never simply about what development agencies do out there. It is also about the play of power inside such organisations, and about the values, attitudes and behaviour of those who work within them.The Swedish official development cooperation agency, Sida, has long had policies that advocate participation in development. Yet putting these policies, and the ideals they represent, into practice has proven to be very challenging. This paper explores some of the ways in which participation has been interpreted and applied in Sida's work.

Why do government bureaucracies adopt participatory approaches to natural resource management? First, why do governments change their policy to support people's participation in natural resource management? And second, once policy has changed, why do field agents change their behaviour to reflect the shift towards participation in policy statements? More specifically, how can managers induce their field agents to perform well at participatory approaches? The paper will use a case study constructed with original field data to address these questions.

This article draws on findings from the Pathways to Participation project. The project brought together practitioners to reflect critically on what PRA means to them and to explore some of the challenges posed by the rapid spread and uptake of PRA for issues of integrity and quality. The articles discusses the problems of trying to define PRA as the project discovered that people's notions of what being participatory is all about is often quite varied and there are a range of opinions about what PRA is or ought to be.

This paper argues that there are ethical problems raised by the current extractive manner in which PRA has been used in PPAs. The authors suggest that action planning needs to be linked to PPAs to resolve these ethical problems and that this will also improve the quality of the information taken out of the community for policy-making purposes. A case study of the PPA conducted in Shinyanga, Tanzania is presented as an example of where an attempt was made to combine these two objectives. However, an inherent bias towards the objective of extracting information was still present.