Participatory Action Research

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1978 - 197921980 - 19899

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End date: 1989Subject: search.filters.subject.SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

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    Participatory training and self development
    (0000) Acharya, Binoy; Verma, Shalini
    How should training be undertaken to encourage critical thinking and instill confidence in people? In this article, Binoy Acharya and Shalini Verma discuss the growing emphasis on training within the development sector while questioning approaches that reduce training to the mere transfer of information or techniques. They argue that many people, especially the poor and marginalised, experience the systematic devaluation of their own knowledge and capacities which weakens self confidence and participation. For this reason, simply providing more skills cannot by itself lead to empowerment, though external knowledge may still be useful. The focus of training, they argue, must be to foster critical thinking so that people can analyse their own realities, articulate their experiences, and identify what they need to learn further. Participatory training is highlighted as a process that breaks the culture of silence, restores faith in people’s own knowledge, and builds confidence for collective action. Social development, the authors emphasise, begins with the development of the self.
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    Participatory research as a methodology of development
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 0000) Tandon, Rajesh
    This paper questions how development research has usually been done. It points out that classical research keeps a firm line between the researcher and the people being studied, treats the researcher's own values as something to be kept out of the picture, and leaves control of the whole process in the researcher's hands alone. Participatory research is put forward as a way of working that sets these assumptions aside. Here the problem to be studied comes from the community itself, the people affected take an active part in the inquiry, and the researcher works alongside them rather than above them. Three examples from India carry the idea forward. In West Bengal, sharecroppers were registered through village camps under what became known as Operation Barga. In southern Rajasthan, twelve tribal families built a shared irrigation system by reviving an old local practice of water-sharing. In Maharashtra, an organisation called Shramik Sanghatana brought together landless labourers and tribal women around wages, land rights and the effects of alcoholism on their households. Through these cases, the paper highlights some of the more challenging issues that participatory research raises, such as its closeness to political action, the difficulty of applying it in unorganized communities, and the need for a researcher's personal perspective before people are willing to trust the process.
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    Participatory training: Philosophy and perspective
    (0000) Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA)
    The paper examines the assumptions underlying participatory training as a response to systems of inequality that concentrate power and control over the minds of ordinary people. Education, media and institutional knowledge production have historically devalued popular knowledge and eroded the self-confidence of ordinary people to think, act and transform their own realities. The paper proposes a set of guiding beliefs, termed articles of faith, centred on the capacity of ordinary people to learn, change and grow, as the basis for translating these ideas into practice. Conditions required for this translation include respecting learners and their experience, creating structured opportunities for sharing and critical reflection, strengthening self-esteem, and establishing mutuality between learner and trainer within a learner-centred and learner-controlled process. Training is presented as an ongoing, long-term intervention rather than an isolated event, directed toward generating new knowledge and countering hegemonic control. The paper closes by stating that trainers must first clarify their own assessment of reality, their vision of a better world, and their guiding articles of faith before designing training programmes.
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    Participatory Research Network in Asia
    (1980) Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA)
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    Action research, participatory research, and the political economy of inquiry
    (1982) Brown, L. David; Tondon, Rajesh
    This paper by L. David Brown and Rajesh Tandon compares traditions of applied behavioural science research, action research and participatory research, and how each is shaped by values, ideology and political economy. Two cases anchor the comparison: a joint study of stress-related "sore arm" complaints at a United States electronics plant, and a citizen-led study of land ownership in Appalachia. Both traditions aim for useful knowledge and developmental change. But action research works through individual and group analysis within a consensus view of organizations, while participatory research works through societal and conflict analysis centred on oppression and unequal resources. A political economy framework carries the comparison further, covering problem definition, data collection and analysis, and how results get used, showing how authority and resources are distributed differently in each tradition. Three hypotheses follow, on when each approach fits and how each might spread across Western and Third World settings. The authors conclude that ideological and political economic differences will likely keep the two traditions apart, despite their shared roots in dissatisfaction with conventional social science.
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    Participatory research: An introduction
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1982) Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA)
    This book is about participatory research, put together by the Participatory Research Network and published in 1982 by the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). It frames participatory research as three processes that cannot really be separated in practice, collective investigation, and collective analysis and action. Its roots draw from several places at once- adult education, anthropology, action research, and Paulo Freire's idea of conscientization. A large section covers methods used in the field, group discussions, public meetings, open-ended surveys, community seminars, popular theatre, and educational camps, grounded in real examples such as grain storage in Tanzania, a women's cooperative in South Korea, and sewage problems on a Canadian reserve. Four longer case studies follow, from Appalachia, Tanzania, Chile, and India, each raising doubts about whether the approach can move beyond reform or truly shift control to local people. The book closes with unresolved tensions around funding and training, and a set of poems that place the work within a wider international struggle.
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    From clarity to anarchy: Participatory research approach (A critique of "The methodology of the participatory research approach")
    (1979) Tandon, Rajesh
    In this paper, Rajesh Tandon responds to a critique of a paper on the methodology of the participatory research approach, presented at the African Regional Workshop on Participatory Research in Tanzania in 1979. A central fallacy runs through the original argument that the wide range of political activism within PRA produces naive idealism and methodological adhocism. Participatory research is not an invention of the seventies; only its label is new, since people organising the rural poor had long practised its elements without naming them. Two vantage points inform the approach, the activist's and the professional researchers, and reconciling them forms the real challenge. Classical research confines inquiry to thinking alone, while PRA treats feeling and acting as equally valid modes of knowing. A genuine risk of subjective, superficial analysis remains, addressed through joint analysis between researcher and people. PRA's apparent anarchism reflects unfamiliarity and variety rather than incoherence.