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.


Table 1.

Table 2.

Table 3.

PRA and RRA compared

Contrasts between verbal and visual methods and modes

Biodiversity conservation and natural resource management paradigms: the contrast between blueprint and learning - process approaches


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