LING 451 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Participatory Rural Appraisal, Hickey, Venn Diagram
9 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Participatory approaches – Gordon hickey
• Background
o Participatory approaches are complicated and evolving
o Common emphasis on putting people at the centre of research and development
▪ To gain knowledge from the perspective of those being studied
▪ To encourage and empower people to be involved in the decision making
processes that affect their lives
o Interactions between researchers, development workers, government agents
and local people
o I the late 0s – rapid rural appraisal ‘‘A
▪ Collect data from rural local people about their perceptions of their
environments and living conditions
▪ Workshops, 1-3 days, with villagers in the field facilitated small teams of
specialists or researchers
▪ Limitation -> extractive; the role of the local people was limited to
providing information, while the power of decision-making remained in
the hands of others
o I the 0s – NGOs uilt o ‘‘A to oe up ith partiipator rural appraisals
P‘A
▪ Designed to follow the participants own concerns and interests;
workshop facilitate by trained teams taking several days (306 days)
▪ Includes the sharing of results, decisions, and planning efforts
o I the 0s – PLA
▪ Emphasis collective inquiry and experimentation grounded in experience
and social history
o I the 2000s – PID
▪ Seeks to include participatory processes and results in a broader, long
term frame of institutionalised activities
• Why participation?
o Arguments for effectiveness: participatory research is better research as more
people are involved in asking questions, doing the research, validating the
findings, and acting on them. People know their challenges – involve them!
o Arguments for democracy – people have the right to be involved in things that
affect them
o But ote the tra of partiipatio
• Traditional research
o We generally think of ourselves as researcher doing research on something:
much like dispassionately examining interesting things in a petri-dish
• Participatory approaches
o Quote by the Brazilian scholar Freire (1982)
o Always power differentials between research subjects/populations and the
researcher or development expert
o How are human being viewed in research
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