BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON PARTICIPATORY RURAL APPRAISAL
Participatory Rural Appraisal
- Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in participatory
learning in research and extension planning, management and monitoring.
Most common are the approaches of Participatory Rural Appraisal
(PRA) and Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), which have strong methodological
and conceptual similarities with Agroecosystem Analysis, Farmer
Participatory Research, Participatory Action Research, Naturalistic
Enquiry, Méthode Accelérée de Recherche Participative
and many more. These grew out of dissatisfaction with two common
modes of investigation, formal questionnaire surveys and rural
development tourism.
Questionnaires tend to be long, costly and prone to distorting
non-sampling errors, and the short and often rushed visits to
field sites by consultants, officials and researchers are characterised
by haphazard data collection and superficial contact with local
elites. The methods of RRA, and lately of PRA, emerged in the
1980s as alternatives to these two common approaches. They now
comprise a rich menu of visualisation, interviewing and group
work methods that have proven valuable for understanding the local
functional values of resources, for revealing the complexities
of social structures, and for mobilising and organising local
people.
Participatory Rural Appraisal is a family of approaches and methods
to enable rural people to share, enhance and analyse their knowledge
of life and conditions, to plan and to act. PRA methods are based
on principles aimed at offsetting the deficiencies in the former
investigative approaches:
- professionals work in multidisciplinary groups, adopting
sensitive attitudes and devolving the analysis to local people;
- a reversal of learning, to learn with and from rural people,
directly, on the site, and face to face, gaining from local physical,
technical and social knowledge. Professionals explicitly recognise
the need to understand local knowledge, skills and practice;
- learning rapidly and progressively, with flexible use of
methods, improvisation, iteration, and crosschecking, not
following a blueprint programme but being adaptable in a learning
process.
- offsetting biases, especially those of rural development
tourism, by being relaxed and not rushing, listening not lecturing,
being unimposing instead of important, probing keenly and seeking
out the poorer people and women, and learning their concerns and
priorities.
- optimizing tradeoffs, relating the costs of learning
to the useful truth of information, with tradeoffs between
quantity, relevance, accuracy and timeliness. This includes the
principles of optimal ignorance knowing what it is not
worth knowing, and of appropriate imprecision not measuring
more than needed.
- seeking diversity, This has been expressed in terms of
seeking variability rather than averages. This can involve sampling
in a non statistical sense. It means deliberately looking for,
noticing and investigating contradictions, anomalies and difference.
The range of conditions and extremes are sought out through purposive
sampling to ensure that action is based not solely upon the averages;
- triangulating, meaning using a range, (sometimes three),
of methods, types of information, analysts, socio economic groups,
locations, investigators and/or disciplines to cross check.
Probing and triangulation of methods and sources of information
ensures reliability and validity.
- facilitating they do it: facilitating investigation,
analysis, presentation and learning by rural people themselves,
so that they present and own the outcomes, and also learn. This
often entails an outsider starting a process and then sitting
back or walking away, and not interrupting.
- self critical awareness and responsibility: meaning that
facilitators are continuously examining their behaviour, and trying
to do better. This includes embracing error welcoming
error as an opportunity to learn and to do better; and using one's
own best judgement at all times, meaning accepting personal responsibility
rather than vesting it in a manual or rigid set of rules.
- sharing of information and ideas between rural people,
between them and facilitators, and sharing field camps, training
and experiences between different organisations.
But, the approach is more than a simple collection of innovative
techniques. It involves self critical awareness of the attitudes
and behaviour on the part of the investigators towards the people
with whon they work. Moreover, beyond their value for learning
and analysis, some of the methods are are also means of sustaining
the participatory process of which they are part.
The shift from RRA to PRA has been discussed by Chambers (1992).
Table 1 highlights some of these contrasts. There are many overlaps
but PRA explicitely emphasises people's empowerement, in theory
and practice. Whereas RRA is extractive, with outsiders controlling,
analysing and acting on the information, PRA is participatory,
with the control, the analysis and actions coming much more from
the people themselves. As a result local people are no longer
seen as clients or beneficiairies, but as partners and fully active,
sentient human beings in the research and development process.
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