Key Terms Explained

Many governments have an official agency that audits their departments and programmes, often called a supreme audit institution. In several countries in recent years, these institutions have included alliances of civil society organisations in participatory audits with the aim of promoting transparency in their own work.

Participatory Geographical Information Systems (PGIS) integrate a range of geographic information technologies (GIT) into community-centred initiatives with the aim of creating community-led spatial information gathering and decision making.  Because GITs have often relied on expensive technology, they had a tendency to be exclusive: this differential access has favoured those with the power to use them often to the disadvantage of local people and communities.  PGIS attempts to reverse this and includes a range of 3-D mapping and modelling methodologies that make the most of geographical information technology, are more complex than traditional PRA maps and are accessible to local communities.

Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs) were large-scale research initiatives which used PMs to gather the views of citizens about poverty in order to influence the public policy of developing country governments. Popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, PPAs were mainly carried out as policy research exercises and aimed to bring an understanding of the perspectives and priorities of poor people to poverty reduction agendas.

Giving cameras to people provides a participatory technique for them to take photographs to illustrate their lives and to share their knowledge and expertise of their issues. PhotoVoice allows people to present their voice. Individuals can express their own perspectives on life and enable others to understand their issues.

Photographs produced from PhotoVoice are used to elicit reflection and information on participants’ life experiences through interviews and group discussions, trigger debate, raise awareness and instigate social change. The photos are often presented to the wider community and policymakers through exhibitions, publications or public events.

PhotoVoice has been used across many sectors, including WASH, construction, sexual and reproductive health and climate change.

Popular education is a tradition that arose in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century, although its ideological roots stretch back much further. It is based on the understanding that, in a context of social injustice, education can never be politically neutral. If it does not explicitly attempt to transform society in favour of the oppressed, then it is complicit in maintaining the existing structures of injustice.

During the mid-1990s, when early innovations in Participatory Rural Appraisal were at their height, the Institute of Development Studies in the UK played a key role supporting the growth of practitioner networks. Central to this role was the organisation of ‘South-South’ exchanges, where practitioners from different parts of the global South met in each others’ countries to share experiences and learn from each other and from community members. Village immersions were a key element of these exchanges.

Rapid Action Learning (RAL) methodologies are action-orientated and participatory, but their defining feature is that they are short, intense, largely one-off research projects that are carried out often at a critical point in time. The Sanitation Learning Hub have used these approaches to rapidly gather evidence, often on an urgent overlooked issue, to provide an initial exploration and recommend actions for first steps. Key RAL research methods include debiasing, rapid topic explorations and hunter-gathering.