Pretty, J.

The report presents the findings of a participatory Target Group Analysis which was conducted in five villages across all five watershed divisions of the Tarbela-Mangla Watershed Management Project. The aims were to assess the relation of local target groups to forests and natural resources and determine the impact of past afforestations on these groups. A wide range of participatory methods were used, including historical matrices, livelihood analyses, venn diagrams, mobility maps, social maps, seasonal analyses, input-output flows, pie diagrams and matrix scorings.

This is a abbreviated section of a full report of a field based training workshop. It includes key findings and methods which together cover most of the main issues and illustrate the PRA approach that was taken. There was a strong fieldwork component to the training, which focused on the issues and constraints faced by potato farmers in Aroop - Punjab province. A specific analysis for the constraints and potentials for a range of farmers was developed. The first section is an overview of the training workshop and its main objective, including several methodological innovations.

This paper was written from the perspective of a rural sociologist doing wealth ranking in Swaziland, with the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) with the intention of identifying the poorest members of the community. It details the process of a decision to use a "rapid" approach, the percieved and actual problems with the said approach. Ranking mechanisms used are described and results and conclusions from the exercise given. It emphasises the need for adequate time for exercises to be conducted if they are to produce 'good' results.

This paper documents the rapid rural training carried out for project workers in the rainfed farming project for Eastern India in 1988. The primary objective of the project was to enhance production in a region where without irrigation only one crop can be cultivated each year. Village motivators were assigned to villages with the aim of animating communities in order to faciltate the potential for sustainability on completion of the project.

Far from being a new approach, RRA can be seen at work in 19th century England. During the last century, William Cobbett, journalist, politician and farmer, set out on a series of 'rural rides' across the counties of southern England, in order to "find out the real state of the countryside". His objective was to write articles based on his findings in order to further the cause of political and financial reform. The paper reports on some of his findings, highlighting the political issues of the day that Cobbett drew attention to.

A new paradigm for sustainable agriculture has emerged with the realisation of the limitations of the dominant scientific method and an increase in interest in the participation of and collaboration with the public in agriculture. This book argues that of the many forms of participation there are some that threaten rather than support sustainable agriculture. It puts forward participatory inquiry; a structured methodology used to bring about changes in problem situations that people see as improvements, portrayed as a constructive and efficient form of participation.

This article reports on Tamil Nadu Agricultural University collaboration with the Ford Foundation in exploring the applicability of recent advances in farmer participatory research and extension methods to rainfed conditions in Tamil Nadu. It reports on exercises conducted over two days in Kalkaruchi village near Aruppukottai. It describes a sequence of participatory social and resource mapping exercises combined with wealth ranking that attempted to discover the poorest people in the village.

The book is aimed at any individual who is attempting to understand, with limited time and resourses, any local system. It describes Agroecosytem Analysis (AA), an exploratory Rapid Rural Appraisal methodology. AA is a systematic but flexible workshop procedure, based on systems analysis, for determining research and development priorities in rural development. The book aims to supplement readings from a bibliography that is supplied.