Resources

The article provides a summary of a new 'Guide to Effective Participation', which offers an effective framework for thinking about involvement, empowerment and partnership. It also provides an A to Z of key issues and practical techniques for effective participation.

This 20 minute video focuses on rural communities in the UK. It demonstrates the use of Village Appraisals and Parish Maps, two creative methods which enable village groups to study and express the needs and feelings of local people and then go on to influence the future of their community. Village appraisals are a systematic 'stock-take' of the resources and services in a community using a local questionnaire survey. Two examples are shown, from the Dene Valley near Bishop Auckland, County Durham and from Motcombe, Dorset. Parish Maps use maps, pictures or any form of art and craftwork to illustrate the natural or human-made features of a parish that people really care about. Two examples are given from Buckland Newton in Dorset and Lockwood in Cleveland.

The report of a training carried out by Myrada, a pre-training course conducted by Myrada and detailed reports in both Khmer and English of a field PRA conducted in Pursat are included in this document. The training followed the pattern of introduction to PRA and development and the tools. There was a field training in one village near to Pursat with a relatively stable security situation. The different stages in the PRA are noted, along with training notes and illustrations. The pretraining is included to give an idea of the information participants received prior to the training, such as the relationship between PRA and Concerns projects, and why an understanding of PRA would be useful to Concern, as well as some information on PRA tools. Concern has subsequently been using PRA in its development work, and the case study illustrates one example of its use.

This paper looks at the role of PRA in addressing inequality and argues that participatory methods themselves contribute very little to an emancipatory process. It suggests that unless PRA is explicitly linked with an educational process which enables people with little power and resources to gain more control over their lives, the term 'participatory' will remain meaningless. A critical step is understanding issues of difference among 'the poor,' especially gender difference. However, it is one thing to identify differences but another to deal with the conflicting interests that emerge. The potential for a backlash against weaker groups is a real concern and must be taken into consideration. While the facilitator has a role to play in enabling groups to analyze the effects of possible reactions to the action they propose, it is the group of participants who must make the final decision.

DELTA (Development Education and Leadership Training for Action) began in Kenya through the Catholic Church and spread rapidly to other countries. This article analyses the use of DELTA in one area of Sierra Leone, bringing out issues around empowerment and action in the context of the implementing institution, the Anglican church. The DELTA method is greatly influenced by Freire's writings. The various stages include: the listening survey, identification of generative themes, from surveys to codes and action planning. Dilemmas that emerged in the implementation of DELTA were around the role of facilitator (how far 'manipulator' would be a better word), how to enable marginalised people to express their concerns and whether a 'project' could actually change the 'root causes of injustice'. 'The ideological strength of DELTA could also be its weakness. It can take people to a place of awareness but is not strong in the organisational and strategic skills which enable them to take their needs further or to draw from other methods.'

This article explores constraints encountered when using PRA on an ODA-funded natural resources project in a tribal area of Western India. It was particularly evident that women's participation in the PRAs was minimal. The reasons for this were practical (women were not available collectively for long periods of time & there were few women fieldworkers as the project had just begun), social (PRA activities tended to take place in public places where women felt awkward) and methodological (women respond to PRA activities in different ways, sometimes feeling bored and "communicating by singing instead"). The author argues that an organised PRA "gives privilege to certain kinds of knowledge and representation and suppresses others" : the emphasis given to formal knowledge and activities tends to "reinforce the invisibility of women's roles". However, once the formal and public nature of PRA is perceived as a problem, it can become a means by which "women's knowledge and activities.. can be transferred from the informal to the formal arena of project planning", thereby increasing women's profile. Suggestions for encouraging women's participation in PRA include: making non-public contexts (since women are more used to the "private sphere"), using women's knowledge and ways of communicating (songs, sayings, proverbs). There are constraints: the "production of observable outputs (maps, diagrams of PRA) have more status for fieldworkers" than scribbled songs or informal interview notes and women's expressed needs (eg a flour mill) "don't fit easily into established categories of natural resource development".

The article discusses four areas of concern in current PRA practice. Firstly, it is likely that investment in careful, long-term and comparative on-the-ground social research will be curtailed in favour of quicker data-gathering using PRA methods. A second concern is whether the routinisation of PRA within the bureaucratic processes of development agencies contradict or divert the original aim of giving more voice and control to the rural poor. A third issue is the lack of clarity on where RRA/PRA practitioners stand in relation to the major debates in social theory. What is to be made of a participatory development exercise that assumes there is a clear split between structure and action, and where structure takes precedence over action? A fourth issue is the question of whether participative initiatives ever break free from the context of local politics. The author argues for a move towards interventions in which attention focuses on action as a key component in the establishment of an emancipatory learning environment.