Resources

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.

This paper describes some innovations to social mapping and geographical transects which emerged during field work in Orissa, India. One innovation resolved the difficulty of mapping a large village of more than 500 households by dividing the settlement into clusters of households. Each cluster was mapped separately and finally amalgamated to provide an overall picture. Another suggestion addresses concerns that transects, which only cover a limited land area, may overlook areas of land that are highly significant. A way of resolving this would be to carry out an 'investigative transect' once different land types had been identified on a natural resource map of the village and surrounding area.

The article focuses on the generation of knowledge about social relationships within participatory rural development projects. In the Kribhco Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project (KRIBP) in India significant constraints were experienced in using PRA techniques for social analysis. Although they were successful at generating agro-ecological information, they were less helpful in revealing the structures of power and influence within a village or in helping project workers identify the social relations which shaped 'public' opinion. It is unlikely that public participatory research methods will prove good instruments for the analysis of local power relations since they are shaped by the very social relations which are being investigated. In fact, an understanding of local social networks is a necessary prerequisite for the organisation of effective PRA based work. In KRIBP understanding of these relations came from participant observation and critical review of the PRA activity itself rather than from the use of PRA methods.

This article discusses concerns that information obtained in the public arena, a common forum for PRA work, can hide disparate, multiple and muted voices. Concern about these 'absent voices' arose during a participatory research workshop held in Uganda to find out how food insecure groups and individuals perceive obstacles to food security. It brought together outside professionals and a number of local people, who were chosen by the sub-county chief. It was found that although some coping strategies, such as food-for-work and collecting wild foods were discussed openly, others such as theft or food for sex/marriage could not be mentioned in public. A major obstacle is the public nature of such workshops, during which certain aspects of everyday social life must remain hidden from the outside world. Other 'absent voices' were those of the very poor, who did not take part in the workshop. The paper concludes that only through more intensive, longer-term field research can we understand how poor people organise themselves in situations of food stress.

Although Malampaya Sound is Palawan's richest fishing ground its resource base is threatened. Logging and upland agriculture inflict serious environmental damage on downstream fisheries, and resource use conflicts between large scale and artisanal fishermen are escalating. In 1990 RRA was used to generate information about problems and opportunities, establish monitoring indicators to determine the impacts of future development, and pinpoint subjects for further research. The paper outlines the procedure followed during a one-week survey of seven villages in the area. From the discussions a network analysis summarizing the problems of the entire sound was formulated, and a matrix was compiled listing the main problems, informant's perceived solutions and proposed projects to implement solutions.

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.

Describes the experiences of a lone researcher using conventional questionnaire surveys as well as PRA methods while carrying out PhD fieldwork in Benin, West Africa. The advantages and disadvantages of using the different research methodologies are discussed. The group nature of the PRA methods inevitably led to raised expectations, and underlying conflicts were exposed in a way that probably would not have occurred with the conventional methods. Combining the two types of methods was found to be rewarding, with the RRA work supplying the contextual information for the quantitative data provided by the conventional research methods. However, it is suggested that if no action is planned it might be better to use RRA methods only to supplement more conventional methods, being careful to avoid raising false hopes or exposing conflicts unnecessarily.