Chambers,Robert.Rural Appraisal: Rapid Relaxed and Participatory Rural Appraisal Methods and Applications in Rural Planning

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed more shifts in the rhetoric of rural development than in its practice. These shifts include the now familiar reversals from top-down to bottom-up, from centralised standardization to local diversity, and from blueprint to learning process. Linked with these, there have also been small beginnings of changes in modes of learning. The move here is away from extractive survey questionnaires and towards participatory appraisal and analysis in which more and more the activities previously appropriated by outsiders are instead carried out by local rural or urban people themselves. In these changes, a part has been played by two closely related families of approaches and of methods, often referred to as Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) which spread in the 1980s, and its further evolution into Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) which has come about fast and begun to spread in the 1990s. The purposes of this paper are to outline the origins, principles, approaches, methods and applications of both RRA and PRA; and for PRA, to explore and assess its strengths, weaknesses, potentials and paradigmatic significance.