Revolutions in Development Inquiry

To the memory of
Jimmy Mascarenhas
Revolutions in Development Inquiry
Robert Chambers

London • Sterling, VA
First published by Earthscan in the UK and USA in 2008

Copyright © Institute of Development Studies, 2008

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84407-624-6

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chambers, Robert, 1932-

Revolutions in development inquiry / by Robert Chambers.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-84407-624-6 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-84407-625-3 (pbk.) 1. Rural
development. I. Title.
HN46.C6C53 2008
307.1'4120723–dc22
2008017441

The paper used for this book is FSC-certified and totally

chlorine-free. FSC (the Forest Stewardship Council) is an
international network to promote responsible management
of the world’s forests.
 Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes xiii

Preface xv
Acknowledgements xix
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations xxi

Chapter 1 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 1

Abstract 1
Experiences 2
Starting the journey (2008) 2
Large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys observed 3
Investigator effects 3
Pressures on researchers 4
Convergence on questionnaires (1983) 5
Survey slavery (1983) 6
Data as fabricata (2008) 9
Review and reflection (2008) 11
Types of large-scale survey 12
1 Large-scale time series censuses and surveys 12
2 Large-scale surveys to find out about a topic or context 13
Sustainability, evolution and resilience 13
3 Scientific experimental method, controls and causality 16
Questionnaires, complexity and participation 19

Chapter 2 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 25

Abstract 25
Genesis and rationale (2008) 25
Rural poverty unperceived (1983) 26
The urban trap 26
Rural development tourism 29
Rural poverty unperceived: The six biases 31
Spatial biases: Urban, tarmac and roadside 31
Project bias 33
Person bias 35
viii Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Elite bias 35
Male bias 36
User and adopter biases 36
Active, present and living biases 36
Dry season biases 36
Diplomatic biases 38
Professional biases 38
The unseen and the unknown 39
The biases reviewed (2008) 41
Spatial bias 42
Project bias 43
Person bias 44
Seasonal bias 44
From diplomatic to poverty bias 44
Professional biases 45
Security bias 45
Urban bias? 46
Concluding 46

Chapter 3 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 49

Abstract 49
Microenvironments unobserved (1990) 49
Complexity and diversity underperceived 50
Sites for research and trials 50
Field visits 50
Short time horizons 51
Sheer blindness 51
Livelihoods 52
Microenvironments unobserved 52
Smallness and dispersal 54
Research station conditions 54
Sequential creation 54
Gender 54
‘Unimportant’ crops 54
Misfit with normal research 55
Properties of microenvironments 56
Specialisation 56
Concentration 56
Protection 56
Diversity and complexity 56
Nutrition and health 57
Reserves and fallbacks 57
Restraining migration 57
Innovation, experiment and adaptability 58
 Contents ix

Whose knowledge and creativity counts? 58

Action for the 1990s 59
More observations (2008) 60

Chapter 4 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and

Repertoire 67
Abstract 67
Errors and opportunism: One person’s stumbling (2008) 68
The emergence of RRA 70
Rapid Rural Appraisal: Rationale and repertoire (1980) 71
The problem 71
Quick-and-dirty 72
Long-and-dirty 72
Fairly-quick-and-fairly-clean 73
A start with a repertoire for RRA 74
Existing information 74
Learning ITK (indigenous technical knowledge) 75
Using key indicators 75
Adaptations of Hildebrand’s ‘sandeo’ 76
Local researchers 76
Direct observation 76
Key informants 77
Group interviews 77
The guided interview 78
Aerial inspections and surveys 78
Conclusions 79
Postscript (2008) 79
Appendix: Some sources, approaches and methods 81

Chapter 5 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 85

Abstract 85
Practice: What has happened? 86
Participatory rural appraisal 86
The evolution of PRA and PLA 88
Ahhas! Excitement 89
Spread and applications 91
Co-evolving streams of participatory methodologies 93
Farmer participatory research 93
Integrated pest management (IPM) 94
Reflect 94
Stepping Stones (SS) 95
The Internal Learning System 96
Participatory Action Learning System 96
Community-Led Total Sanitation 96
x Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Principles: Theory from practice 97

Behaviours, attitudes and mindsets: Precepts for action 98
Methods: Visuals, tangibles and groups 99
Sharing: Pluralism and diversity 101
Beyond PRA, brands and boundaries 101

Chapter 6 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 105

Abstract 105
Introduction 106
Gains from quantitative approaches 107
Beyond conventional qual–quant complementarities 107
Modes of participatory number-generating 109
Participatory methods, applications and activities 111
Going to scale with participatory numbers 113
Participatory surveys 113
Aggregation from focus groups 114
Participatory wealth ranking and well-being grouping 115
Poverty: The challenge of comparisons and commensurability 116
Poverty lines from participatory wealth ranking in South
Africa 116
Food security in Malawi 116
Destitution in Ethiopia 117
The Participatory Poverty Index in China 117
The stages of progress method 118
Producing national statistics 119
Who counts? 120
Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) to inform policy 120
Participatory M and E and empowerment 120
Participatory statistics, empowerment and policy influence 122
The best of all worlds? 124
Validity and reliability 125
Insights into sensitive subjects 125
Unexpected and striking insights for policy 126
Power, reversals and learning 127
Alternatives to questionnaires 127
Methodological challenges 128
The future 129

Chapter 7 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 133

Abstract 133
The origins and history of participatory mapping 134
Ground and paper mapping 136
Applications and uses 137
Spatial information technologies and participatory GIS 138
Medium and process 139
 Contents xi

Maps, realities and power 141

Power and realities within communities 141
State maps, counter maps and combinations 142
Facilitation, behaviour, attitudes and ethics 146
Ethics: The Who? and Whose? Questions 147
Who? and Whose? questions 147
Conclusion 149

Chapter 8 Traps and Liberations 151

Abstract 151
Context and challenge: To be in touch and up to date 151
Out of the Jurassic trap: Alternatives to dinosaurs 153
From urban trap to new black hole 154
Out of the black hole: Beating biases is fun 156
Send messages in advance 157
Reflect and offset during a visit 157
Offset biases and enjoy 157
Include the excluded 158
Learning face to face 159
Team reality checks 159
Total participatory research 159
Immersions with overnights 160
Listening and life stories of people living in poverty 161
Learning how to liberate 162
Recovering and reviving the good already known 162
Retaining quality with going to scale 162
Enabling incentives and values 163
Whose trap? Whose liberation? Issues of ethics 163
The paradox of power: Reversals for pro-poor professionalism 164

Chapter 9 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 167

Abstract 167
The journey so far 168
Methodological diversity and pluralism 169
Implicit and resonant theory 171
Paradigms: From things to people 172
Self-organizing systems: Chaos, complexity and emergence 174
Pluralism: Eclectic, versatile and creative 177
Potential to transform: PMs and their facilitation as drivers for change 178
Blocks to realizing potentials 180
Lessons of experience and ways forward 181
The personal dimension: Innovators, facilitators, disseminators 181
Time and space for creativity 182
Methodological diversity: Enriching the repertoire 183
Funders 183
xii Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Transforming university and college teaching 184

Experiential learning, critical reflection and brainstorming 186
Combinations and sequences: Personal, institutional and
professional 187
Coda: Visionary realism 188

References 193
Index 223
 List of Figures, Tables and Boxes

Figures
5.1 Three principal components of PRA 86
5.2 Group-visual synergy 99
6.1 Dimensions of methodology and outcome 109
7.1 Resource map image 144
9.1 Dimensions of a paradigm 172
9.2 Participatory methodologies as drivers for change 179

Tables
1.1 Questionnaire surveys in developed and developing countries:
Divergences in environment and design 10
1.2 Rural people’s knowledge of family planning 11
1.3 Treatment and control: Three applications compared 20
5.1 Some applications of PRA approaches and methods 92
6.1 Household use of health activities 113
6.2 Correlation between receipt of TIP and food security status 117
7.1 Pros and cons of modes of mapping: Ground, paper and
participatory GIS 140
7.2 Relative importance of main crops by agroecological zone –
Adi-ktekla village, Mendefgra, Eritrea 145
9.1 Contrasting paradigms of things and people 173

Boxes
5.1 Behavioural precepts of PRA 98
7.1 Empowerment through mapping: An afternoon in Eritrea 144
9.1 Reflect: From Mother Manual to multiplicity 175
9.2 Transformative action by funding organizations 184
 Preface

I think we are lucky, and that this is a brilliantly exciting time to be alive and
working as development professionals. So much is changing, and changing
so fast, and new potentials are continually opening up. If we are to do well
this means massive and radical learning and unlearning. It means personal,
professional and institutional change as a way of life. For some this is a threat;
for others a wonderful and exhilarating challenge opening up new worlds of
experience.
Participatory methodologies – approaches, methods and attitudes, behaviours
and relationships – are one part of this ... They are different each time. They
improvise and innovate.They fit our world of accelerating change. It is not easy
to keep up to date. I keep on having to revise these notes, and do it sometimes
twice a year. If you see them and they are more than six months old, please
remember that. Much may have changed. And anyway, I am behind the game.
It is creative and reflective practitioners in the field who are making the running
and from whom those of us not in the field have continuously to learn.

Spirit and orientation

These are the opening words in my notes for Whose Reality Counts? workshops
in 2008. I am starting with them because they express the spirit of this book.
Change in our times accelerates in many dimensions. Those that are more
obvious – political, economic, social, cultural and, above all, communications
– receive recognition and attention and are much researched and written about.
But changes in how we inquire and find out, especially in development practice,
are relatively neglected. Methodologies is not a subject in its own right. Yet
recent decades have witnessed not one but many revolutionary innovations in
development inquiry.
The title of the book has itself been subject to accelerating change. It has
progressed through Finding Out in Development and Revealing Realities? before
daring to settle on its present title. Jethro Pettit and others have helped it on its
way. Revolutions has two senses: revolutions that are upending and transformative;
and revolutions like a wheel going round to revisit former positions. Development
xvi Revolutions in Development Inquiry

inquiry refers mainly to approaches and methods for finding out about local
(sometimes described as ‘field’) conditions and individual, group and community
realities.
Most of the innovations, practice and experience on which I draw is from non-
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries,
but their applications in OECD countries have been, and will be, many. Almost all
the transfer of technology has been from non-OECD to OECD, reversing what
earlier had been the normal direction.
On orientation, three points need to be made.
First, with revolution in the sense of a wheel going round, much remains of
enduring value in the approaches and methods of the past. The transient fashions
of development manifest not only in policies, words and concepts, but also in
methodologies. The frenetic search for new fashions abandons and buries a lot
that has lasting value. The succession of acronyms RRA (rapid rural appraisal),
PRA (participatory rural appraisal) and PLA (participatory learning and action)
has misled some into supposing that what had come earlier had been superseded.
Parts of Chapters 1 to 5 draw on lessons from earlier decades that seem to me
as valid today as ever.
Much that matters has slid out of sight. Thus as PRA and PLA (Chapter
5) became fashionable, so it became rare for attention to be paid to the art of
observation and noticing small things like microenvironments (Chapter 3), or
to the other key skills of RRA (Chapter 4), like semi-structured interviewing.
Activities once seen as state of the art became rare in training, crowded out by the
more trendy, visible and photogenic diagrams and maps of PRA. But observation
and RRA are not second bests in inquiry. They are overdue for rehabilitation and
restoration to their proper places in the professional repertoire.
Second, new methodologies and their applications continuously open up.
RRA (Chapter 4) led on to PRA (Chapter 5) with its visuals and analyses by
groups, which in turn gave rise to participatory approaches and methods for
generating numbers (Chapter 6) and participatory spatial analysis (Chapter 7).
All these innovations raised anew, and sometimes more acutely, issues of ethics
in inquiry, and questions of who found out what, for what purpose, and for
whom (Chapter 8). And this is the beginning, not the end, of innovation and
excitement, with potentials for branching out in many directions, cross-fertilizing,
and opening up many frontiers (Chapter 9). With methods of inquiry, especially
those that are taught, there is a tempting illusion that we have arrived. Chapters 8
and 9 challenge any such view, considering the traps we are caught in and how to
escape them, and then proposing innovation of modes of inquiry as a permanent
part of professional practice.
Third, methodological pluralism has been and has to remain the way
forward. My ideology, my fundamentalism almost, is that fundamentalisms
are flawed. Monocultures of methods misfit much of our complex, diverse and
dynamic world. This can apply to questionnaires, or RRA, or PRA, or any other
methodology. Each of these in its time was a revolution. Now many good new
modes of inquiry are hybrids or mixtures; many are improvised adaptations; many
are inventions. As Chapter 9 concludes, critical eclectic pluralism, ever combining,
 Preface xvii

ever experimenting, ever innovating, and ever learning and unlearning, is the key
to good practice. It can even lead to discovering that what was thought to be
undoable and unknowable can now be done and known.
So in this book I seek to describe some of the practical experience and theory
of these revolutions, to bring them up to date with developments in the latter
2000s, and to outline potentials for the future. In doing this, I try to give some
sense of history, of what things were like and how they were done and seen in the
past. I have been astonished at myself when recollecting, as this book has forced
me to, how differently I saw and did things in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and even 90s,
believing at each time that we were at a methodological frontier beyond which
discovery would diminish. Every time I failed to imagine what was to come. The
lesson from this reflection back into the frames and mindsets of earlier decades is
to recognize that now in the latter 2000s, we are still, perhaps even more, in a state
of transition; that this is a lasting part of the human and professional condition;
and that when those who are still around in 2020, 2030 or 2040 look back on
the latter 2000s, they similarly will marvel at how we too, once again, had not
imagined what was to come.

Limitations
A first limitation is about scope. Much of this book is about one stream of
methodological revolutions. The main subject matter is the sequence and family of
approaches and methods which includes agroecosystem analysis (Gypmantasiri
et al, 1980; Conway, 1985), RRA, PRA and PLA. This stream is only one
among many which mingle now more and more in a whole river. Among these
are Naturalistic Inquiry (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Guba and Lincoln, 1989),
action research and participatory action research (Greenwood and Levin, 1998;
Bradbury and Reason, 2001), action learning (Taylor et al, 1997), Appreciative
Inquiry (Hammond and Royal, 1998; Elliott, 1999), Planning for Real (Gibson,
1996), Stepping Stones (Welbourn, 1995, 2007) and Reflect (Archer and
Newman, 2003; Archer and Nandago, 2004). There is no pretence of balanced
or comprehensive coverage in this book. The best I can do is provide references
to some of the main sources for some of the more widespread and promising of
other approaches, remembering and warning the reader that there is much, much
more out there that I do not know about or refer to.
A second limitation is more personal. The book began with the fond fantasy
of republishing some earlier papers. I soon realized that they would have to be
brought up to date. At the same time colleagues urged me, twisting my somewhat
compliant arm, to cover some parts of my personal journey. So these chapters
represent one person’s fallible view. It has been a privilege to have been alive and
around during this period, when so many have been pioneering. I have had the
freedom and time to visit some of the innovators and to watch, listen, learn and
write. It is part of the injustice of our world that someone like myself from the
North can gain credit by writing and publishing about the work of colleagues in
the South who then pass unrecognized. They are many, too numerous to name,
xviii Revolutions in Development Inquiry

but I wish to acknowledge them and thank them, and also to note that with their
greater field experience, they and others are likely to disagree with or wish to
qualify some of the views expressed.
Let me warn the reader about some of my predispositions and biases. I have
been fascinated by evidence, myth and realities since studying history, notably
the Risorgimento – the unification of Italy. Scepticism about evidence carried over
into research in Kenya where I was exposed to the limitations and inefficiencies
of questionnaire surveys. This was reinforced by experience as one of a research
team in India and Sri Lanka. These and later experiences made me not just a
happy sceptic about traditional modes of inquiry, but prejudiced against them,
vulnerable to glee when finding errors, and an enthusiastic companion to those
who were evolving alternatives. I am also biased from having been an intermittent
participant–observer in the revolutions of RRA and PRA and PLA. I have often
been wrong, and am surely wrong about some of the assertions in this book.
It is in all our interests that it be read through a critical lens, and its errors and
omissions identified and corrected.

Overview
The first five chapters are about those parts of the stream where I have found
myself being carried along. The last four chapters – on participation and
numbers, participation and space, traps and liberations, and eclectic pluralism for
the future – are largely new. They suggest that change is accelerating. They could
not have been written five years ago. The rate of innovation, and of evolving new
applications in new domains, shows no sign of slowing. For those concerned, the
challenges and excitement do not diminish; the frontiers continue to expand; the
revolutions, it seems, will keep on coming.
These revolutions have been, but should not have been, quiet. For many
they have been imperceptible and unperceived. This book does not set out to
shout from the rooftops. But what has been happening is important, inspiring
and exhilarating. More people should know about it. More professionals need
to embrace new ways of finding out, and to become innovators themselves.
Participatory inquiry takes us into new spaces. What began as a search for cost-
effectiveness has evolved into a movement carrying with it the seeds of social
transformation. This, then, is about more than modes of inquiry. It comes to be
about ways of living and being.
Robert Chambers
April 2008
 Acknowledgements

Colleagues and friends from whom I have learnt on my journey are too numerous
to name. They include those who undertook evaluation research on the Kenya
Government’s Special Rural Development Programme (SRDP) (1969–71),
co-researchers on the project on agrarian change in South India and Sri Lanka
(1973–74), many who developed RRA in the 1970s and 1980s, innovators and
collaborators in the International Institute for Environment and Development
(IIED) and in India, Kenya and many other countries who developed the
approaches and methods of PRA from 1988 onwards, colleagues working on
participation and reflective practice at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS)
(over the past decade and a half), and most recently pioneers with participatory
numbers and Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS).
For constructive criticism, comments and suggestions which led to re-
organizing and rewriting the book I thank Rosalind Eyben, John Gaventa and
Jethro Pettit. Others who have made useful comments on drafts of chapters and
related papers at different stages include Carlos Barahona, Andrea Cornwall,
Colette Harris, Dee Jupp, Henry Lucas, Joy Moncrieffe, Zander Navarro, Peter
Reason, Cathy Shutt and Bill Torbert. Other ideas, information and advice have
come from Laura Cornish, Leslie Groves, Renwick Irvine, Penny Lawrence,
Sonya Ruparel, Koy Thomson and many others.
For help with the production of this book and related papers I am grateful
to Birte Bromby, Dee Donlan, Samantha Finn, Jeanne Grant, Alison Norwood,
Georgina Powell-Stevens, Patsy Tayler and Sinnet Weber. I thank them all,
both those who have given sustained and detailed support and those who have
cheerfully stepped into the breach at short notice. They have all made my life
easier and the production of the book quicker and more enjoyable.
My greatest debt is to Jenny without whom this would never have been
written.
Chapters 1–7 include some text that has already been published. This is
indicated by the date of earlier publication given in brackets at the head of the
text, with new text preceded by (2008). Chapters 8 and 9 are new. Permission
from the publishers to reproduce the source papers in whole or part is gratefully
acknowledged, as follows:
xx Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Chapter 1: The republished text is from Chapter 3 of Rural Development: Putting

the Last First, Longman, Harlow (now Pearson Scientific) 1983 pp49–55.
Chapter 2: The republished text is from Chapter 1 of Rural Development:
Putting the Last First, Longman, Harlow (now Pearson Scientific) 1983 pp7–27.
The second section updates and adds from subsequent experience.
Chapter 3: The first section is abridged from ‘Microenvironments unobserved’
in R. P. Singh (ed) Proceedings of the International Symposium on Natural Resources
Management for a Sustainable Agriculture, 6–10 February 1990, New Delhi,
republished edited by Jules Pretty with the same title as Gatekeeper Series SA22,
International Institute for Environment and Development, London 1990.
Chapter 4 is in part Rapid Rural Appraisal: Rationale and Repertoire, Discussion
Paper 155, IDS, Brighton 1981 republished in Public Administration and
Development, vol 2, no 2, pp95–106, 1981.
Chapter 5 includes material from a chapter written for the second edition (2008)
of Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, edited by Peter
Reason and Hilary Bradbury, Sage Publications.
Chapter 6: ‘Who Counts? Participation and Numbers’ is updated and expanded
as the latest of several incarnations, including Who Counts? The Quiet Revolution
of Participation and Numbers, IDS Working Paper 296, December 2007, ‘The
best of both worlds’ in Ravi Kanbur (ed) Q-Squared: Qualitative and Quantitative
Methods of Poverty Appraisal, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2003, pp35–45 and
‘Participation and numbers’, PLA Notes, vol 47, August 2003 pp6–12.
Chapter 7: ‘Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics’ is an expanded version
of Participatory Mapping for Change, a paper written for the International Con-
ference on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication:
‘Mapping for Change’, held in the Kenya College of Communication and
Technology, Nairobi, 7–10 September 2005.
 List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

AAI ActionAid International, Johannesburg

ABC attitude and behaviour change
AI Appreciative Inquiry
AKF Aga Khan Foundation, Geneva
AKRSP Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) (Pakistan)
ALPS Accountability, Learning and Planning System of AAI
CBCRM Community-Based Coastal Resource Management
CDD Community-Driven Development
CDRA Community Development Resource Association, Cape Town
CGIAR Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research
CLTS Community-Led Total Sanitation
cPPIPs cumulative Prioritized Problem Indices of Poor
DFID Department for International Development, London
EDP Exposure and Dialogue Programme, Bonn
ERR egocentric reminiscence ratio
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome
GDP gross domestic product
GIS Geographic Information Systems
GIT & S Geographic Information Technology and Systems
GPS Global Positioning Systems
ICRISAT International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics,
Patancheru, Hyderabad (CGIAR)
IDRC International Development Research Centre, Ottawa
IDS Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK
IFPRI International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC
IIED International Institute for Environment and Development, London
ILAC Institutional Learning and Change (CGIAR)
ILS Internal Learning System
INGO international non-governmental organization
IPM integrated pest management
ITK indigenous technical knowledge
KKU Khon Kaen University, Thailand
M and E monitoring and evaluation
MDG Millennium Development Goal
xxii Revolutions in Development Inquiry

ME microenvironment
MISR Makerere Institute of Social Research, Kampala
MYRADA MYRADA, Bangalore
NCAER National Council for Applied Economic Research, Delhi
NESA New Entity for Social Action, Bangalore
NGO non-governmental organization
NOVIB NOVIB, Netherlands, now Oxfam Novib
NRI Natural Resources Institute, Chatham, UK
NSO National Statistical Office, Malawi
ODA Overseas Development Administration (now DFID), London
ODI Overseas Development Institute, London
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PALS Participatory Action Learning System
PC personal computer
PE participatory epidemiology
PGIS Participatory Geographic Information Systems
PIA Participatory Impact Assessment
PLA participatory learning and action
PLWHA Person Living With HIV and AIDS
PM and Eparticipatory monitoring and evaluation
PM participatory methodology
PPA Participatory Poverty Assessment
PPI Participatory Poverty Index
PRA participatory rural appraisal
Pradan Professional Assistance for Development Action
PRGA Participatory Research and Gender Analysis programme
PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
PTD Participatory Technology Development
R&D research and development
RAP Rapid Assessment Process/Procedures
RCT randomized control trial
REFLECT now Reflect, originally Regenerated Freirian Literacy through
Empowering Community Techniques
RRA rapid rural appraisal
RRA1 Paper to the Workshop on Rapid Rural Appraisal, 26–27 October
1978 at the IDS, Sussex
RRA2 Paper to the Conference on Rapid Rural Appraisal, 4–7 December
1979 at the IDS, Sussex
SARAR Self esteem, Associative strength, Resourcefulness, Action planning
and Responsibility
SCF Save the Children Fund, London
SDC Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Bern
SEWA Self Employed Women’s Association, Ahmedabad
SIDA now Sida. Swedish International Development Agency, Stockholm
SIT spatial information technology
SOSOTEC self-organizing systems on the edge of chaos
 List of Acronyms and Abbreviations xxiii

SPSS Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

SRDP Special Rural Development Programme, Kenya
SS Stepping Stones
SSC Social Science Council, UK
STAR Stepping Stones and Reflect
TIP Targeted Inputs Programme (Malawi)
TOT transfer of technology
UNDP United Nations Development Programme, New York
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNHS Uganda National Household Survey
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund, New York
UPPAP Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Process
USAID United States Agency for International Development, Washington
DC
VERC Village Educational Resource Centre, Bangladesh
WCED World Commission on Environment and Development
WSP Water and Sanitation Program, World Bank, Washington DC
 1

The Provocation: Dinosaurs

In late Cretaceous times the mammals were developing at a rapid rate ... As
contrasted to the mammals, the dinosaurs were virtual walking automatons.
(Colbert, 1951, p116)

Abstract
Experiences in the 1970s, in Kenya, India and Sri Lanka, sparked critiques of the use
of large-scale multi-subject questionnaires (the dinosaurs) for rural research.They were
ponderous, costly and vulnerable to many errors. Of these, investigator effects appeared
as serious as they were overlooked. Such surveys placed heavy burdens on researchers
whom they trapped and enslaved. And even with the best efforts they tended to generate
data that were bad, unusable and unused. All data are artefacts, or fabricata, but those
from large-scale multi-subject questionnaires especially so through their preset categories
and structured interactions.
Large-scale questionnaire investigations have proved robustly sustainable. Three
types are: large-scale time series surveys like censuses; surveys that seek to find out about
topics and context; and surveys that apply an experimental design of treatment and
controls. Classical scientific methodology with treatment and controls fits for research
with large numbers, standard treatments, uniform receiving environments, measurable
outcomes and plausible causal linkages. At high cost they have been made to work with
standard social treatments as with a study of the effects of women’s groups in Nepal on
neonatal mortality.With Community-Driven Development, this approach, embraced,
propagated and sponsored by the World Bank has been a costly and ineffective way of
trying to learn.
Other approaches and methods are needed for finding out about complexity. The
issues are paradigmatic, and basic to this book.

The dinosaurs that provoke are large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys.

Starting with the dinosaur analogy, I first called this chapter ‘Jurassic Park’. But
the dinosaurs in Stephen Spielberg’s film are not survivors from the past, but
clones from the bellies of fossilized mosquitoes. Nor are dinosaur questionnaires
confined in a park, but spread worldwide And rather than the Jurassic, the late
Cretaceous was more apposite and reflected my wishful thinking, for by then
2 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

the dinosaurs were in decline and the early mammals, small, nimble and more
intelligent, were at their feet.
The provocation is both personal and paradigmatic. The personal reasons are
my own experiences with these dinosaurs and with the search, on which so many
have been engaged, for better modes of inquiry. Paradigmatically, the provocation
is that many powerful professionals are trapped in the mindsets and methods of
a deductive paradigm of things, standardized blueprints like questionnaires, and
reductionism, when for many purposes we can find out and learn better through
an inductive paradigm of people, diverse processes and methodologies, and
holism.

Experiences
Starting the journey (2008)

Let me describe where I am coming from1 and describe some of my biases.

Research experiences in the early 1970s in Kenya and in South Asia exposed
me to large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys. In Kenya I was involved in
coordinating evaluation for the Kenya Government’s Special Rural Development
Programme (SRDP) in six sub-districts. The results of a major survey for the
SRDP were long delayed and emerged in a large report delivered long after it
was due. I do not think it had much influence. On top of this, Jon Moris wrote a
comprehensive critique of multi-subject surveys (1970) which sadly was never
published. He listed 40 such surveys. He had taken some part in 14 of them
himself. His long list of defects indicated major flaws and cast doubt on many
‘findings’.
I went on from Kenya to become assistant director for a research programme
on technology and change in rice-growing areas of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu
(Farmer, 1977). We were a multidisciplinary and international team. That we
would use a questionnaire was never questioned. Meeting in Cambridge (UK),
we drew up a long list of questions, covering our varied disciplinary and research
concerns. Each of us added questions. None of us wanted to challenge the
questions of others. With hindsight it is easy to see that this was an error and
arrogant. But unlike many of the East African surveys reviewed by Moris, this
one was conducted well in the field. My colleagues were highly professional,
committed and well qualified. The investigators, as they were called, were well
selected, well trained, and conscientious. Internal checks were followed up when
they showed inconsistencies. Through Herculean efforts, the data were collected,
processed and analysed, and findings were indeed derived from the survey. But
nagging questions would not go away: was such a gargantuan effort really needed
to learn what we wanted to learn? How much of the mass of data was unused?
How timely was the analysis and presentation? How much of what we came to
know was derived from the survey? How reliable were the findings? And then
there was the ‘so what?’ question – what difference did it make?2 Who were the
main beneficiaries of the survey? Was it the people among whom we worked, or
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 3

was it us, the researchers, because it gave us processed data for our academic
papers?
Thus, both the Kenya and the India/Sri Lanka projects included the large-
scale application of lengthy questionnaires. I was a free-rider, privileged not to
be engaged directly in the management or analysis of either. This gave me space
to follow up on unexpected leads,3 and to observe what the surveys entailed. For
those involved, the surveys themselves were irreversibly committing, and exacting
and demoralizing. They generated mountains of data, much of it of doubtful
value, and demanded much time, money, diligence and patience – far more than
anticipated4 – to process and analyse.
These experiences were the beginning of the journey, the threads of which
weave through this book. They also conditioned me so strongly that I have carried
with me biases and preconceptions, some might say prejudices, that predispose
me to ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ dichotomies in which large multi-subject
questionnaires have two legs and almost anything else four. In criticizing them, I
recognize the danger of being out of touch and out of date. I am grateful to those
who, in correspondence and conversation, have corrected errors and updated
insights. There have been improvements in questionnaire survey methodology.
Nevertheless, normal pathology persists. These dinosaurs of inquiry may be
overdue for extinction but continue to reproduce and flourish.

Large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys observed

During the India and Sri Lanka fieldwork and after it, I watched the stress and
agony of my colleagues who were to varying degrees engaged in the survey and
its analysis. I then wrote about some of the many drawbacks I had observed.
But these large-scale questionnaire surveys seemed to be immune to any radical
challenge. Heresies like mine were not well received. The institution and rituals of
surveys were preserved and performed with something close to reverence. Many
researchers were socialized into them, trained to carry them out, and seemed
willing to be enslaved by them.

Investigator effects
Whatever their weaknesses, these surveys were well protected, as a story against
myself can illustrate. In the Tamil Nadu research we had eight investigators for
12 villages: four of them had two villages each, and four had only one. I analysed
the findings on agricultural extension, and drafted a paper. Something was wrong
but I could not put my finger on it. Then I matched the findings for each of the
pairs of villages with the same investigator. The similarities in the pairs, one
might say twins, were so striking that it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the investigator was the main explanatory variable. So I wrote a paper entitled
‘Up the garden path’. However, it so upset some in our team that I never sent
it for publication and now it is lost. So I never passed the warning on to others.
Loyalty and friendship took precedence over sharing with others what I believed
I had learnt.
4 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

I am not alone in this finding and this delinquency. Gerry Gill, in his pen-
etrating critique O.K., the Data’s Lousy, But It’s All We’ve Got (Being a Critique of
Conventional Methods) quotes a colleague who told him that in a situation:

...where the coefficients were ‘all over the place’, he ran an analysis of variance
on a randomly selected subset of the data, using the enumerators’ identification
numbers as the independent variable. He was alarmed, if not totally surprised,
to find that the values of the F statistics were consistently so high as to be ‘off
the end of the scale’! He did not, for some reason, try to publish his findings.
(Gill, 1993, p9)

After the South Asia survey experience, I twice challenged the National Coun-
cil for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), one of the largest survey
organizations in India, to analyse their data treating the enumerator as an
independent variable. On both occasions the director of the time agreed to do so.
But to my knowledge it was never done, or if done, never published. There are
standards of rigour associated with sampling and sample size, and it is normal
practice to make these transparent. Arguably, there should equally be standards of
rigour for enumerator effects and it should be normal good professional practice
to publish tables of enumerator variance. If this is not done, it raises suspicions
that those who manage and analyse data are as guilty as I was of withholding dis-
cordant information. The analysis is not technically difficult and publishing the
results ought to add to overall credibility. The NCAER, National Sample Surveys
in various countries, and the research departments and Independent Evaluation
Group of the World Bank could set examples.5

Pressures on researchers
Participant observation in the Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu research showed that
pressures on senior researchers could be almost intolerable.6 While they were
conducting, managing, processing and analysing a survey, their domestic life
cycles with children at school and the stage of their career with teaching and
administrative as well as research responsibilities, placed almost insufferable
demands on their time and energy. On top of all this, they faced pressures and
temptations to take on extra research and other work, leading to pathological
overcommitment. This imposed a paradoxical urban bias on rural research as
senior researchers had more and more to do in town, and less and less time for
the field. Office working conditions also exposed them to endless interruptions.
Under such time pressures, senior researchers were trapped in the inescapable
and necessary activities of managing the survey process instead of themselves
conducting research and themselves learning. They too, like the field staff, were
enslaved.
Ten years after these experiences, and drawing also on other sources, I wrote
a book Rural Development: Putting the Last First, from which the following extracts
are taken. The two cultures referred to are those of negative academics and
positive practitioners (Chambers, 1983, pp29–35).
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 5

Convergence on questionnaires (1983)

The most common method of formal rural research is the questionnaire survey.
The purpose of outsiders may be to find out about subjects as diverse as farming
practices, family planning, agricultural extension, child care, nutrition, medical
knowledge, household income, literacy, or use of the media, but whatever the
purpose the reflex is the same. A questionnaire is drawn up, a sample selected,
and the questionnaire applied.
Several forces combine to promote these questionnaire surveys. The strongest
bridge between the two cultures, of practitioners and academic social scientists, has
been the rubric and reality of ‘planning’. To academics, planning is an acceptable
activity, being concerned less with instant nuts and bolts and more with policy in
the medium or longer term. But planning, whether national or local, requires ‘data’
about rural people which can be aggregated to give an overall view. What other
mechanisms for obtaining such data than surveys? Again, agencies concerned
about the effectiveness of projects they have funded want to know what they have
or have not achieved. What better than a benchmark survey of the project area
and of a control, with follow-up surveys later? Then, many non-social scientists,
and especially natural scientists, have a mathematical training, a reverence for
hypothesis-formulation and testing, and a belief that the social sciences should
strive for a rigour similar to that of the natural sciences. Questionnaire surveys
subject to statistical analysis seem to meet these requirements. Another factor is
professional predispositions in economics and statistics. Economists are better
able than those in most other disciplines to straddle between practitioners and
academics. They therefore unduly influence the nature and style of collaboration.
Statisticians, for their part, whether in ministries or research institutes, must
justify their existence; and to do this they need numbers. So economists and
statisticians, both numerate, both acceptable to both cultures, and both required
in ‘planning’, demand surveys and the statistical data which they generate, and
which allow them both to consummate their professional skills and to be, or at
least appear to be, useful.
Convenience, class, prestige and power also play their part in promoting
surveys. The analysis of survey data can be done safely and comfortably in
an urban office without rural exposure. It reinforces what M. N. Srinivas has
described as ‘The division of labour between the theoretician-analyst and the
fact-gatherer’, the latter constituting a ‘helot class’ which does the rural work
of investigation and enumeration, allowing the analyst to work away without
the inconvenience of contact with the reality (Srinivas, 1975, pp1389–1390).
The manipulation of figures is a clean, tidy and unpolluting activity. Arcane
mathematical mystery allows its high priests to criticize, veto or amend the re-
search of others; and it demands sophisticated computers for its devotees.
These forces help to explain why an urban-based industry of rural social
surveys has mushroomed, financed by national governments, research councils
and foundations, and following the changing fashions of topics – the diffusion
of innovations, family planning, the green revolution, agricultural practices,
6 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

cooperatives, credit, rural industries, employment, self-help, baseline or bench-

mark surveys for projects and programmes, and the plight of women. Surveys
are a respectable reflex. It is scarcely surprising that a 1974 Conference on field
data collection in the social sciences concerned itself mostly with data collection
through surveys and little with other techniques (Kearl, 1976). In the minds of
some, rural research is surveys.
But questionnaire surveys have many well-known shortcomings. Unless
careful appraisal precedes drawing up a questionnaire, the survey will embody the
concepts and categories of outsiders rather than those of rural people, and thus
impose meanings on the social reality. The misfit between the concepts of urban
professionals and those of poor rural people is likely to be substantial, and the
questions asked may construct artificial chunks of ‘knowledge’ which distort or
mutilate the reality which poor people experience. Nor are questionnaire surveys
on their own good ways of identifying causal relationships – a correlation alone
tells us nothing definite about cause – or of exploring social relationships such
as reciprocity, dependence, exploitation and so on. Their penetration is usually
shallow, concentrating on what is measurable, answerable, and acceptable as a
question, rather than probing less tangible and more qualitative aspects of society.
For many reasons – fear, prudence, ignorance, exhaustion, hostility, hope of
benefit – poor people give information which is slanted or false.
For these and many other reasons, conventional questionnaire surveys have
many drawbacks if the aim is to gain insight into the lives and conditions of the
poorer rural people. Other methods are required, either alone, or together with
surveys. But extensive questionnaire surveys pre-empt resources, capturing staff
and finance, and preventing other approaches. Let us examine this phenomenon
more closely.

Survey slavery (1983)

The costs and inefficiencies of rural surveys are often high: human costs for the
researchers; opportunity costs for research capacity that might have been better
used; and inefficiencies in misleading ‘findings’.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of researchers have surrendered
their freedom to surveys; and if field workers are helots, their masters can also
be slaves. For preparing, conducting, analysing and writing up a rural survey are
heavily committing activities, the demands of which are habitually ignored or
underestimated, and the duration of which almost always exceeds that planned.
Commitment to surveys is all too easily and willingly accepted. It is not just
that statisticians, economists and others have professional preferences. Research
institutions and universities need to obtain funds; once they have conducted
some surveys, there are pressures and obligations to find further employment for
field staff, who then go from project to project for years; and funding sponsors
are prepared to pay for surveys because they feel that they will get at least
something, an identifiable and justifiable product, for their money. Commitment
then deepens. The more complicated, extensive and expensive the survey, so
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 7

the more sophisticated will be its data processing (more marks for computers,
programming, tapes and printouts than for anything as primitive as hand
tabulation),7 the greater the prestige for the senior researchers, and the more
time required. There is also a ‘because it’s there’ element, a sense that until social
scientists have conducted their surveys and struggled with their computers, they
have not climbed their Everests. And like attempts to climb Everest, extensive
surveys require much administrative and logistical support, cost a lot, and often
fail.
The pathology of rural surveys follows common paths. Its demands are not
properly estimated. At the planning stage, it is easy and tempting to expand the
geographical area to be covered, the numbers in the sample, and the questions
to be asked. Where a team is involved, with each member contributing ideas, the
questionnaire grows. The more multi-disciplinary the team, the greater is the
questionnaire’s potential for growth: the more disciplines, the more questions. It
is also easier to admit a new question than to argue with a colleague in another
discipline (and with whom one has to work for months or years to come) that his
or her question is unnecessary. Short-term peace in the team is bought at the cost
of long-term liabilities. The outcome is excessive data to collect and therefore less
likelihood that the data will be well collected or that they will be checked, coded,
punched, processed, and analysed, and less chance of the distant consummation
of the survey being written up, let alone read and acted on. And on top of this
there are the administrative demands of recruiting and training enumerators, the
logistics in the field, and the thousand and one technical and practical problems
of implementation.
Whatever the problems, commitment to completing a survey is irreversible,
often from the start; there is no going back. Under pressure of the immediate
need to keep the survey running, its objectives slide out of sight; the means – the
collection of information – become the end. There is neither time, energy, nor
resources to explore new questions or to notice the unexpected. Urban bias grows
with unkind irony, as administrative and logistical demands tie senior researchers
to urban areas and confine their brief field activities to administrative matters
– housing and allowances for investigators, supplies of schedules, pay. The survey
becomes a juggernaut pushed by and pulling its researcher slaves, and sometimes
crushing them as it goes.
As data collection is completed, processing begins. Coding, punching and
some simple programming present formidable problems. Consistency checks are
too much to contemplate. Funds begin to run out because the costs of this stage
have been underestimated. Reports are due before data are ready. There has been
an overkill in data collection; there is enough information for a dozen Ph.D. theses
but no one to use it. Much of the material remains unprocessed, or if processed,
unanalysed, or if analysed, not written up, or if written up, not read, or if read,
not remembered, or if remembered, not used or acted upon. Only a miniscule
proportion, if any, of the findings affect policy and they are usually a few simple
totals. These totals have often been identified early on through physical counting
of questionnaires or coding sheets and communicated verbally, independently of
the main data processing.
8 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

A report is required. It has to be written late, by dispirited and exhausted re-

searchers who have already begun new tasks. Their families do not thank them
for their absences, late nights, and short tempers. They stare at printouts and
tables. Under pressure for ‘findings’, they take figures as facts. They have neither
time nor inclination to reflect that these are aggregates of what has emerged from
fallible programming of fallible punching of fallible coding of responses which
are what investigators wrote down as their interpretation of their instructions as
to how they were to write down what they believed respondents said to them,
which was only what respondents were prepared to say to them in reply to the
investigators’ rendering of their understanding of a question and the respondent’s
understanding of the way they asked it; always assuming that an interview took
place at all and that the answers were not more congenially compiled under a
tree or in a teashop or bar, without the tiresome complication of a respondent.
The distortions are legion. But mercifully, however spurious their precision,
‘findings’ printed out by a computer have a comforting authority. The machine
launders out the pollutions of the field and delivers a clean product, which looks
even cleaner and more comfortingly accurate when transferred to tables and text.
These ‘findings’ are artefacts, a partial, cloudy and distorted view of the real rural
world. But in the report they are, they have to be, facts.
Writing the report, then, demands casuistry. Conclusions have indeed been
arrived at, but they are based on anecdote, common sense, observations incid-
ental to the survey, ‘I-once-met-a-farmer-who-’ statistics, and the opinions of
local people and officials. But the report-writer feels obliged to derive them from
the survey’s formal statistical output. Cosmetic surgery on the body of data
improves appearances; sloppy syntax slurs non-sequiturs; concluding paragraphs
assert that the data showed, or proved, what careful reading would show they
did not show, or prove, but which may be true nonetheless. As it is, no one will
read the report in enough detail to notice this, for the writers have compulsively
crammed it with almost raw data. They have felt that all, or most of, the data
must be presented, lest all that awful effort should have been in vain. It must all,
surely, have some value sometime to someone somewhere. And indeed, it has. It
is there, undigested and unabsorbed. It is not read, because it has been written
in execrable style: jerky, unmemorable and ugly. Tables, statistics and turgid
prose cloy the reader’s critical faculties. So either the text goes unread; or if read,
not understood; or if understood, not remembered. This serves the report well,
investing it with authority; for who can challenge the conclusions without being
sure that they are not supported somewhere in the document or its appendices?
Dull survey data badly written up present a background against which other
information stands out; and what stand out and may be remembered are those
simple conclusions gained outside the survey which, happily, are more likely to
combine truth with usefulness.
Finally, after the report or the book, evaluation of the survey process is un-
thinkable. It has taken so long that the main actors are exhausted or have moved
on. The staff in the funding agencies who sponsored the survey are now in other
jobs, and their successors have other surveys planned or in progress. There is
an (unread) report as a monument or tombstone for the project. At least this is
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 9

something to show for the money. And in any case evaluation might be damaging
because of what it would reveal, if, that is, it was more accurate than the survey
itself. Honest self-criticism is neither easy, rewarded, nor popular. There is no
Journal of Misleading Findings. To describe the muddle, shortcuts, and fudging
might destroy the survey in the eyes of colleagues, peers and sponsors. Too
much is at stake: the reputation of the institution, the career of the researcher,
the chances of future contracts and jobs; or so it is believed. Criticism is not
put in writing; or if it is, it is the first victim of the editor’s pencil. It would be
damaging in the report; or the publishers demand that the book be shortened,
and since none of the findings in the chapters by individual authors can easily
be cut, the section on methodology suffers most.8 And honesty loses friends and
may be disloyal. To criticise one’s own shortcomings is one thing; let the solitary
social anthropologists with their disarming candour by all means continue to
tell stories against themselves. But to criticise the shortcomings of a team is to
impugn colleagues, perhaps friends. Better, it will seem, to remain silent. And so
it is that myth masquerades as fact, unchallenged, to two places of decimals, and
new innocents plunge unwarned into the morass.

Data as Fabricata (2008)9

This 1983 critique has been described as ‘withering’ (Holland and Campbell,
2005, p8). I am human and confess that it was fun to write. Perhaps it exaggerates.
The reader will judge. It reflected my experience at the time I wrote it. What I did
not realize was that I was missing a whole dimension of criticism and weakness.
In his incisive review of data sources, Gerry Gill (1993, p1) considered that the
large-scale customized survey (his phrase) had to a large extent been discredited.
It had characteristics of inappropriate technology. And he added additional
disadvantages when applied in developing, compared with developed, countries.
These, listed in Table 1.1, are what I had missed.
These, especially the first, may apply less in the latter 2000s than they did in
the early 1990s. They do, though, present a checklist for reflection on what actually
takes place in any survey and add to the other actual or potential weaknesses.
Of these divergences, enumerator–respondent differences – of literacy,
language, gender, demeanour, power – and their relationship in the interview
situation, have perhaps been the most serious. Social anthropologists may
reflect critically on what goes on between individuals in interviews, and how this
co-constructs a reality, how prudence, presentation of the self, saying what is
expected, refraining from sharing information that would be personally shameful
– how these can distort. With questionnaire surveys they are neither seen nor
reflected on. Though cases should exist, I have never seen them discussed in a
survey write-up.
A questionnaire survey in the Maheshwaram watershed in Andhra Pradesh,
recorded only one farmer among 272 (0.4 per cent) as cross ploughing (a practice
officially frowned upon) but group discussions generated a figure of 28 per cent,
itself also, from casual observation, probably an understatement (Sitapathi Rao
pers. comm.). Farmers who were uncooperative had been penalized by being
10 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Table 1.1 Questionnaire surveys in developed and developing countries:

Divergences in environment and design

Developed Country Developing Country

1. Questionnaire generally designed by 1. Questionnaire often designed by persons
specialist with appropriate training with no specialist training in questionnaire
design

2. Questionnaire written in language in 2. Questionnaire normally written in another

which it will be administered language and translated, either beforehand
or during the interview

3. Respondents normally familiar with the 3. Respondents unfamiliar with rationale

general purpose of surveys behind surveys; often apprehensive as to
use of data

4. Restricted scope, simple issues 4. Complex issues; information often

addressed, short questions; usually sensitive; long questionnaires; wide scope;
‘opinion type’ surveys need for many ‘open-minded’ questions

5. Built-in reliability checks 5. Often little scope to check reliability of

findings

6. Repeat surveys routine if trend 6. One-shot, cross-sectional; trend

information required estimation very difficult

7. Respondents tend either to give a flat 7. ‘Conspiracy of courtesy’: tendency to give

refusal or else cooperate fully answers respondent thinks are wanted

8. Little if any systematic gender bias 8. Enumerators usually men; often severe
problems in interviewing women
respondents

9. Literate respondents 9. Respondents either non-literate or

unrepresentative

10. Enumerators from roughly the same 10. Enumerators often from very different
socio-economic background as socio-economic background from
respondents respondents

11. Respondents can understand what 11. Non-literate respondents cannot correct
enumerator is writing; can correct errors any mistakes or misunderstandings
Source: Gill, 1993, p10

denied inputs. On their own with an interviewer with clipboard, they knew what
not to admit to. And the interviewers may have known not to record it. Anonym-
ous and more secure in a group of colleagues, the farmers were more open.
Other distorting effects are suggested in the results of the Nepal Fertility
Survey (Campbell et al, 1979, p5). These purported to show that people were
ignorant of family planning. However, a field investigation found that 80 per
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 11

cent of the sample respondents were unable fully to understand the questions
asked. So their apparent ignorance was a fabrication of the questionnaire and
the nature and context of the interview. When social anthropologists, on a small
and different sample, asked the same questions the positive responses were much
higher. When they checked again with those who had given negative responses,
the total positive were all over 90 per cent (but one may ask whether the social
anthropologists scored an own goal here, when people remembered they had
been asked the day before).

Table 1.2 Rural people’s knowledge of family planning

Per cent of positive Per cent positive Per cent

responses according to according to the positive after
Nepal Fertility Survey study survey N=76 cross-checking
(national sample) N=76
Heard of pills 12 63 97
Heard of loop 6 56 91
Heard of condom 5 45 95
Heard of vasectomy 16 58 95
Heard of abortion 5 64 100
Source: Campbell et al (1979, p5). Percentages rounded to whole numbers.

This example dramatizes the extent to which poor people’s ‘ignorance’ can be
an artefact, a construction of survey interaction and context. Such an extreme
case may be rare. But it is a warning to all researchers. Data are ‘things given’
in the Latin. But data are a social product (Herring, 2003). In training sessions,
Henry Lucas (pers. comm.) refers not to data collection but data production.
When data result from interviews, as above, they are better described as fabricata,
‘things made’.10

Review and reflection (2008)

One danger in development practice is being out of touch and out of date. People
who are considered to have passed their youthful prime are especially vulnerable.
In what follows, I struggle to be informed and fair. The question is, since the
1970s and 1980s, what has changed and what more can be said?
Thomas Henry Huxley’s dictum is a warning here, ‘It is the customary fate of
new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.’ I have asked myself
whether the critiques of questionnaires in the 1970s, which seemed new truths
then, may by now have become superstitions held on my part. In writing this
chapter evidence has made me qualify my critical view in a few respects, not least
because of improvements in the practice of surveys. Many professionals struggle
through their careers to do large-scale questionnaires better, to modernize the
12 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

dinosaurs. Despite this, pathology seems still common, perhaps still the norm.
If much has changed, that has not been indicated by examples which have come
my way in the 2000s.
A questionnaire survey with 10,000 respondents proposed in 2007 in South
Africa, aimed to ‘empower marginalised communities with necessary capacities
to access services and resources that will enable them to improve and sustain
their livelihood status’; yet the long questionnaire was anything but empowering.
In another recent case I inquired about the findings of a survey sponsored by the
World Bank in India. I was met first with no response, then later with ‘the data
are still being cleaned’ and finally with the silence of the grave. One can ask how
often ‘cleaning the data’ is code for ‘please spare us the embarrassment, don’t
press us, have the decency to let us abandon our terminal care and bury our
patient in privacy and peace, and at all costs please don’t exhume the corpse’.
Contamination, morbidity and the death rates would seem to remain high. There
are no mortality statistics for failed or abandoned questionnaire surveys. There
are no death certificates to be registered and counted. They are abandoned and
laid to rest quietly, furtively even. Those who have been involved in them hope
that questions will not be asked, that senior staff or those who commissioned the
research will move on, and that their successors will either not know about or
will tacitly and tactfully overlook the costly non-event. All of which means that
nothing will be learnt and nothing will change.
At one level, the issues are paradigmatic and basic to this book, contrasting
top–down standardized reductionism which has preset categories with bottom–
up diverse complexity and emergence. Between these paradigms, it is not an
absolute case of either/or but of an optimal balance and mix. This is hard to
achieve when top–down has the power, the funds, the patronage, and the learning
disabilities of ‘all power deceives’.11 As we shall see in Chapters 4–9, there are
many alternatives to the standardized long questionnaire approach, especially
with sequences, improvisation and innovation, but these are not part, even now,
of dominant normal professionalism.

Types of large-scale survey

Three families of large-scale questionnaire surveys can be distinguished:

1 Large-scale repeated time series censuses and surveys.

2 Surveys which seek to find out about a topic or context.
3 Surveys which apply a ‘scientific’ experimental design.

Let us consider the first two together, and the third separately since it has
controversial interest which leads in to the rest of the book.

1 Large-scale time series censuses and surveys

Large-scale time series surveys like national censuses, the National Sample
Survey in India, and Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMSs) in many
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 13

countries, and panel studies present many problems and are often much less
accurate than they appear. Careful cross-checking of the official Malawi census
suggested an undercount of the rural population of the order of 35 per cent
(Barahona and Levy, 2003, pp4–9) (see page 119). At the same time, expensive
and inaccurate though they may be, such censuses and surveys can and usually
do add value in insights into totals, proportions and changes, especially if they are
in comparable time series and there is extensive triangulation and cross-checking.
Most of them should be improved, not abandoned.

2 Large-scale surveys to find out about a topic or context

In the 1970s and 1980s, these surveys were in high demand in African and
Asian countries. The Kenya SRDP and Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka surveys
were examples. Though big and clumsy, such surveys still survive and remain
vulnerable to systematic error, especially misleadingly positive evaluations. A well
documented and researched example is Jean Dreze’s (1990) devastating critique
of evaluations of the Indian Government’s flagship anti-poverty Integrated Rural
Development Programme. Not all such surveys may produce such biased results,
but over-favourable findings resulting from factors like deference and prudence
in the interview interaction are likely to remain widespread.

Sustainability, evolution and resilience

Apart from utility and cost-effectiveness, or the lack of these, the survival of these
two families of large-scale surveys into the 21st century can be in part understood
in terms of five factors: demand, utility, routine reproduction and supply; more
timely processing – with shorter gestation periods; mixed methods with qual–
quant sequences; failure to perceive alternatives; and power and pathology.
First, demand, utility, routine reproduction and supply. Large questionnaire
surveys continue to flourish through sustained demand. Census and other
time series studies embed themselves in statistical series which cry out to be
continued. While these are expensive and can mislead, the state needs, in James
Scott’s (1998) term, to ‘see like a state’: to have a sense of numbers of people,
their location, characteristics, living standards and so on. For their part, ad hoc
studies are repeatedly sought for many topics and contexts. And there is routine
reproduction of people to provide the supply. University and training college
courses teach questionnaire surveys and the statistics that go with them. Teachers
repeat courses year after year with less and less effort, and little or no incentive
to change. Textbooks are handed on or sold second-hand by one generation
of students to another. A steady flow of trained, one might say conditioned or
indoctrinated, professionals feeds the machine.
Second, shorter gestation. Timeliness has improved. In 1983 I wrote:

The worldwide acceptance of late submission of post-graduate theses teaches

academics early in their careers not to take writing deadlines seriously. The
secure tenure of many university posts is relaxing. Priority goes to immediate
14 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

demands of lecturing, teaching, administration and university politics. The

culture of university life is detached and reflective compared with government
departments or voluntary agencies.The inability of most academics to manage
a personal work programme pushes research again and again to the end of the
queue. Finally, respectable rural research methodology requires either extensive
surveys or long residence in the field, and both of these take much time. For all
these reasons tension over getting results on time is almost universal between
agencies which commission research and university departments or institutes
which carry it out.

Since then several factors have contributed to more timely delivery.

One is the discipline of the market and the decline in the security of university
tenure. These combine as incentives. For all its defects, competitive bidding for
research projects, now common in many countries, has played a part. University
researchers are less feather-bedded with core grants, more dependent on projects,
and more reliant on consultancies to augment their incomes. They have been
driven to become more efficient and prompt in delivery.
Another is the numbers of firms of consultants, in North and South, that now
conduct research. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was more universities and institutes
that did this. More than for university staff, who have a basic assured income, the
livelihoods of the staff of consultant organizations and their reputations depend
on doing what is required and delivering a product on time.
Yet another factor is ease of processing: now that computers are fast, portable
and widespread, analysis has speeded up, and become easier, more versatile
and less risk-prone. Something has been lost from the more tactile and legible
(usually) days of punched cards when it was exciting to thread needles through,
lift them out and read the richness of detail, sparking hypotheses, insights,
and ‘ahhas!’ But anyone less than a Luddite has to recognize that the gains in
speed outweigh the losses in fun and serendipity. And with very short surveys,
a different genus altogether, analysis is sometimes conducted in the field and
can even be done overnight in a village on a laptop.12 Going even further, with
handheld computers data can be recorded during an interview, easily aggregated
and quickly analysed.
Third, mixed methods and qual–quant sequences. This is the most significant
improvement. The combinations and sequences of methods in research have
received increasing attention. The Department for International Development
(DFID) commissioned a report in 1998 ‘Participation and Combined Methods
in African Poverty Assessment: Renewing the agenda’ (Booth et al, 1998) which
opened up some of the issues. A DFID-funded research project led in March
2001 to the collection ‘Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Survey Work:
Methodological framework, practical issues, and case studies’ (NRI, DFID and
SSC, 2001). A Cornell workshop in 2001 led to the publication of ‘Q-Squared:
Combining qualitative and quantitative methods in poverty appraisal’ (Kanbur,
nd, c. 2003). A conference at the University of Wales, Swansea in 2002 led to
‘Methods in Development Research: Combining qualitative and quantitative
approaches’ (Holland and Campbell, 2005). Particular research projects in
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 15

which a large-scale questionnaire survey is a component have increasingly mixed

and sought synergies between qualitative and quantitative methods. A study of
poverty and vulnerability in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar used qualitative methods
both before and after a questionnaire survey (Parker and Kozel, 2007). A study
of destitution in Ethiopia used qualitative and quantitative methods and included
participatory visuals (pile sorting) in the interview (for example, Sharp et al,
2003). Sequences and mixes like these, when used, can enhance the relevance
and accuracy of a questionnaire.
Fourth, unrecognized alternatives. With the imagery of dinosaurs, ponderous
surveys may (or may not) be gradually declining in numbers, but no exterminating
meteors are on the horizon. Other new modes of inquiry, like the little mammals
at their feet, are often ignored, trampled on or brushed aside. Alternatives are
not considered rigorous. They are on wavelengths outside the normal spectrum
of scientific sight. Early participatory alternatives to questionnaires (for example
ActionAid-Nepal, 1992; and Eldridge, 1995, 1998, 2001) were peripheral,
evanescent eddies bypassed by the mainstream. But this has been changing.
To inquire into changes over time, for example, participatory trend and change
diagramming (International HIV/AIDS Alliance, 2006b, pp80–81, 178–179;
Jones, 1996), and innovations like those of Anirudh Krishna (2004, 2005,
2006), have many advantages over large-scale surveys – speed, low cost, range
of insight, emergent categories, cross-checking and debate between participants,
identification of key events, sense of trends, and opportunities to interview the
diagrams and learn more. As we shall see (Chapters 4–7) there are now many
better modes of inquiry and learning – cheaper, faster, more insightful, and with
at the same time scope to empower local people.
Fifth, power and pathology. The dinosaurs of long, detailed multi-subject
questionnaire surveys may have evolved slightly but they remain archetypically
lumbering, clumsy, slow and inefficient. But they are far from endangered as
species. And they have a safe haven in the World Bank (henceforth the Bank).
This is not surprising. The biggest users of questionnaire data or fabricata are
economists. The Bank is dominated by economists: they are the great majority of
its staff. The Bank has also become ‘the largest center of development research
in the world’ (Broad, 2006, p388). In early 2007, of the 83 full-time staff under
the Development Economics Vice-Presidency which is responsible for research,
all but 4 were economists13 (Rao and Woolcock, 2007). Economists, and per-
haps especially macroeconomists, live off numerical data and their analysis.14
Questionnaires, however unreliable their outputs, are reliable in supplying them.
And however unreliable and inaccurate the data are, they can be used. So large-
scale surveys with long questionnaires continue to be widely commissioned by the
Development Economics Vice-Presidency, the Independent Evaluation Group
(formerly the Operations Evaluation Department) and field offices. Through its
international status and muscle, the Bank sets standards and norms for much
development practice, including research methodology. It sponsors research in
many countries, and researchers have plenty of incentives to obtain and supply
the data in the traditional manner and on the scale expected or required.
16 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The system is self-referential and incestuous. The 20 members of a team

that evaluated the research of the Bank were all development economists! (Rao
and Woolcock, 2007). Damning though much of their evaluation report was, it
does not appear to have considered field research methodology.15 That, one may
surmise, was not perceived as a problem because the evaluators were themselves
economists. The epistemological concerns of the team focused on the analysis
and interpretation of data, not their genesis and quality.
Were the Bank like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, an isolated plateau
with its own primeval fauna and ecosystem, cut off from the rest of the world
by high cliffs, this would be of little concern. Unfortunately, lost world or not, it
is highly connected and influential, and at the same time unaware of its learning
disability. Despite the alternative methods that have been evolved over the past
three decades (Chapters 4–7),16 the Bank has to my knowledge little used them
or commissioned their use. Methodologically out of touch and out of date, it is
stuck in its Jurassic.17

3 Scientific experimental method, controls and causality

The pathology of method is most marked with inappropriate attempts to apply
‘rigorous’ scientific methodology. The model is experimental. The large-scale
survey with long questionnaire is used to compare effects on a population
receiving an intervention with a matched control population without the
intervention.
Let me start with confession. In about 1970, when I was working on the
SRDP in Kenya, a well-informed doctor shot down my proposal for a follow-up
questionnaire survey, with a classic treatment and control structure, to identify
benefits from the Zaina water scheme in Nyeri District. I was upset. This was
the first gravity-reticulated water scheme in Africa. It seemed to me important
to know what effects it was having. A baseline survey had been carried out in the
area, together with a neighbouring control area. A repeat survey was crying out to
be done. It did not help that I was almost inarticulate with passion in my advocacy.
The doctor countered calmly that the quality and content of the original survey
were so poor, the control and treatment areas so different, the causality of impacts
so imponderable, and the difficulties of inferring cause–effect relationships so
great, that whatever the ‘findings’ it was unlikely that any useful conclusions could
be drawn. This shook me, coming moreover as it did from a medical doctor for
whom experimental method with treatment and controls might be considered a
norm. I was deflated. The follow-up survey never took place. The original survey
had been a waste of time and resources. And I believe the doctor was right.
The scientific and medical model has standards of rigour. What I had to
learn was where these could be applied, and where not. I had to learn that I was
proposing to extend the method beyond its limits into a realm where those forms
of rigour could not apply.
Here is my best understanding now. Favourable conditions for the experi-
mental method with intervention and controls are:
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 17

• a standard, uniform, measurable and verifiable treatment

• conditions closely similar in both treatment and controls
• a standard and measurable effect or effects
• size of treatment and control populations sufficient to test for statistical
significance with randomized samples (unless total populations are
involved)
• a plausible hypothesized causal link between treatment and effect
• means of investigating potential confounding (e.g. covariant) factors and
verifying the causal link.

Hypotheses can then be tested. Often this is comparing treatment with control,
with random sampling, the method being known as randomized control trials,
often referred to simply as RCTs. When these conditions are met and in other
respects an experiment is conducted well, the results can be valid according to
conventional scientific and statistical canons.
This is well applied in some medical research. An example is giving vitamin
A supplements to large numbers of under-five-year-old children and measuring
their mortality. Such research has usually shown a significant decline in mortality
in the treatment group compared with the control. The causality is credible
because these conditions are met:

• A standard uniform input. The process of treatment is one-off, observable

and clearly yes–no (taking vitamin A pills).
• The receiving environment (the inside of the human body) is standardized
within narrow tolerances in both treatment and control groups.
• An impact can be counted (fewer child deaths) and being common knowledge
can be cross-checked.
• Large numbers of children provide the basis for statistically significant
findings.
• (I presume) a plausible hypothesized causal link.

In these conditions, credible findings can result from statistical rigour with large
randomized samples and experimental rigour with controls, placebos and a
double-blind methodology (meaning that not even the researchers know who
receives the treatment and who the placebo).18
Confirming these points, the examples of experimental method to identify
associations and causality laid out authoritatively in a classic textbook of the
1970s – Moser and Kalton’s (1971) Survey Methods in Social Investigation – are
mostly close to this medical model. In the chapter ‘Experiments and Invest-
igations’ the hypothetical and actual illustrations to which more space is given
include:19 drinking methylated spirits as a cause of hallucinations; the effective-
ness of a film in changing attitudes to drinking and driving; vaccinating children
against polio; smoking and cancer of the lung; the effect of alcohol on the ability
of subjects to solve problems; and the effect of an educational film on children.
How to find out about all of these is discussed in terms of variants of conventional
scientific experimental design. These and the other examples used in the book
18 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

can be classed as medical or educational. They have single standard treatments,

large populations of similar subjects, effects hypothesized which are measureable
and usually single, plausible causal linkages between treatment and effect, and
scope for quite short questionnaires. Conventional scientific rigour is a credible
aspiration.
The boundaries of this scientific and medical approach have been extended,
albeit at great cost, to a participatory intervention with women’s groups in
Nepal (Manandhar et al, 2004; Morrow and Dawodu, 2004). In this case the
intervention and the receiving environment were more variable: the intervention
was facilitation and the immediate receiving environment was women’s groups
identifying perinatal problems. The women’s groups were in matched pairs of
geopolitical clusters, one treatment and one control, and the impacts – neonatal
and maternal mortality, could again, as with vitamin A, be counted. The research
was a major enterprise, and at the same time an impressive application of the
exacting methodological and ethical standards required by medical research
to assess the impact of a participatory intervention. The cost of achieving con-
ventional credibility was very high. Unlike vitamin A trials, the impact numbers
were small but the results considered credible. Neonatal deaths were 30 per cent
lower in the treatment. Reported maternal mortality also reduced, though the
numbers were tiny (11 in the control, as against 2 in the treatment). The cost of a
similar research project in progress in Malawi has been withheld, possibly because
it is embarrassingly high.
It is in trying to go further, into more complexity, diversity, dynamism and
multiple causality, that we run into deep, even terminal, trouble. Some in the
Bank, aspiring to the high status rigour of the scientific experimental method,
have sought credibility by trying to apply randomized control trial methods to
Community-Driven Development (CDD). These are conditions where there
are:

• different interventions (roads, schools, clinics, markets, water supply, san-

itation, micro-credit, other infrastructure . . . moreover differing within each
type), unlike, say vitamin A supplements
• complex variable environments (Chambers and Harriss, 1977), making
matching problematical to say the least
• multiple hypothesized effects (income, nutritional status, social capital)
• relatively small populations (where the unit is the community, ruling out the
large numbers of a medical trial)
• indeterminate multiple causality for impacts
• factors which vary seasonally and between years
• externalities – a new facility may inflict costs elsewhere as staff and other
resources are diverted to it
• (possibly) systemic differences (in access, political influence etc.) between
treatment and control communities.

Any one or even two of these on its own might be manageable: the Nepal study
of women’s groups faced the problem of matching communities, but controlled
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 19

much else. But when all or almost all these factors combine, as they do with CDD,
there is so much ‘noise’ – variance, diversity and complexity – combined with the
normal difficulties and distortions of survey methodology, that seeking this form
of conventional scientific rigour makes no sense. Communities are not like human
bodies: bodies have skin boundaries, identical internal structures, and homeostatic
controls with narrow tolerances; communities are porous, idiosyncratic, with
many varying and interlinked social, economic, political and cultural variables.
Put starkly, bodies are bounded and alike; communities are permeable and differ.
And to try to overcome these intractable incompatibilities by increasing the
sample size may do little more than raise costs, delay processing, and amplify
noise, quite apart from ethical considerations of taking more of people’s time and
raising their expectations. Rigour is unrigorous.
There is a cruel irony with such studies. The more complex the reality and
multiple the causality, the longer the questionnaire becomes and the more prone
it is to fabricating garbage, to longer processing, and to inconclusive findings.
Difficulties are compounded when a long questionnaire is to be applied to a
random sample of respondents who have then to be found and persuaded to be
interviewed. Were the methodology participatory, with local analysis of causes
and effects (including unanticipated effects) credible insights might be gained
(Chapters 5 and 6). But in the pursuit of scientific rigour, the reflex is not to go
deeper but wider, with ever larger samples. In a proposed evaluation of CDD in
Indonesia, for example, a comparison was to be made between 160 communities
which had had CDD interventions and 100 control communities which had
not. The mind boggles at the scale and cost of the effort required, the many
professional years to be devoted, the probability of great struggles to ‘clean the
data’, and the likelihood, as with the early 1970s survey in South India and Sri
Lanka, that many of the most useful (and timely) insights would be gained by the
enumerators not through the questionnaire at all but coincidentally through their
presence and casual encounters and conversations in the communities.
The three approaches are compared in Table 1.3.

Questionnaires, complexity and participation

A common view has been that the more complex and variable the phenomena
and relationships, the more inclusive and comprehensive the questionnaire should
be.
Leaving aside questions of data accuracy, this is a paradigmatic misfit for
complexity (see Chapters 8 and 9). Despite pilot testing, large questionnaires
are liable to be preset, top–down, imposing fixed categories on realities, in
contrast with learning processes which are iterative, interactive and emergent. Put
differently, these surveys belong to a paradigm of things rather than a paradigm of
people. Also they ask mainly ‘what?’ questions, and much less the complementary
‘how?’ and ‘why?’ questions which illuminate ‘what?’ findings.
My own journey has been further than I realized. I have been astonished and
appalled to read that in 1972 I wrote:
 Table 1.3 Treatment and control: Three applications compared

Vitamin A Women’s groups Proposed CDD impact

Over 10 studies Nepal Studies questionnaire
Experimental intervention Vitamin A tablets Facilitation of women’s groups Road, clinic, school, water, sanitation,
micro-credit etc.

Treatment sample size Typically thousands Approx 54 women’s groups and 14,884 160 communities
women – 3190 pregnancies

Control sample size Typically thousands 14,047 women – 3524 pregnancies 100 communities

Receiving environment Bodies of under-five-year-old Women’s groups and Communities

children pregnant women Varied, uncontrolled, unpredictable
Uniform, homeostatically controlled, Intermediate
predictable

Double-blind placebo control In some cases, considered No No

Impacts measured Child deaths Neonatal and maternal deaths Various

Hypothesized causal link Physiological effects of Vitamin A on Facilitated groups improve care and Apparently not made explicit
the body conditions

Credible rigour of causal Very high where well conducted High Low
inferences

Cost of research High High High

Learning High High Low

Participatory alternatives None developed Was participatory, combined with See Chapters 4–7
conventional rigour
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 21

Large-scale surveys still have a place, particularly when little is known about
rural conditions, where issues are being investigated which have complex inter-
relations with many aspects of rural life and economy, and where the intention
is to exploit economies of scale by investigating several themes simultaneously.

I could scarcely have been more wrong. There are many alternatives and com-
plements to questionnaire surveys, as we shall see in Chapters 4 (rapid rural
appraisal) and 5 (participatory rural appraisal) as modes of inquiry, in Chapter
6 for ways of generating numbers, and in Chapter 9 for working with complex
causality. There can be a case for lean ad hoc questionnaires with checklists,
complementing and triangulating with other methods, as in the Malawi rural
population study (p119). But large-scale multi-subject questionnaire surveys
remain a trap. Unless informed and qualified by face-to-face fieldwork, they
invite misleading reductionism in analysis. The longer the questionnaire, the
larger the sample, and the more questionnaire length and sample size combine,
the more vulnerable the research is to inflexibility, superficiality, distortion,
invention without interviews, inadequate supervision, low motivation, the
projection and mirroring back of researchers’ categories and perspectives, failures
to achieve timely analysis, laborious cleaning of data, dilemmas of analysis and
interpretation, and rejection of bad data. And the more complex the issues and
causality, the harder they are to unravel and understand through the crude
standardized template of a questionnaire and correlations.
When Carlos Barahona, a professional statistician and pioneer of combining
participatory generation of numbers and statistical methods and rigour, reviewed
the research methods used in the ‘Malawi Starter Pack’ studies, he noted that
the choice of a (questionnaire-based) survey ‘imposed a constraint on the
complexity of the questions that could be asked’ (Barahona, 2005, p80). In his
view (Barahona, 2005, p82)

Complex questions demand the use of sophisticated methods of enquiry such

as participatory methods ...

Let the last words come from a Ugandan researcher in a letter dated 6 September
1993. This starts with conventional approaches, and then flips into another
paradigm, here characterized as participatory rural appraisal (PRA). It is a cameo
and foretaste of much that the rest of this book is about:

Being a statistician by profession and now working as a research associate

with Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) I first came across PRA
in a workshop organised by ‘Forests,Trees and People Programmes’ in Uganda,
where I was nominated to represent my institute in the training.
I had quite extensively used traditional questionnaire method in ground
water resource management, socio-economic study funded by the International
Development Research Centre and always remained cursing the limitations of
these questions in the questionnaire.We designed them in the office, pre-tested
and re-designed. Yet whenever we got to the actual fieldwork they seemed
22 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

to have needed re-designing again. So we had to accept, just to work to an

approximation.
...our respondents kept on asking us ...‘You have asked us all these questions,
so what next?’ Or intervened to say ‘But you have asked us that question what
about this and that, don’t you think it is also useful, since it is connected to
water?’Yet others surprisingly requested that they also wanted to be availed
with the final report of the study findings, since they had contributed their
answers.
In the course of the interview, many would crowd around and try to guide
the interviewee. But I would kindly request them to allow one respondent at
a time participate and avoid prejudice, and in the name of confidentiality
– Was this not against participation? Yet we wanted to work out a community
participatory ground water resource management strategy to be implemented by
the Uganda Government for rural water supply programmes in the country.
I personally kept being defeated by this traditional method. In carrying out
the analysis back in the office, we got all the beautiful statistics, with the SPSS
software computer package and with our intellectual knowledge, sat down to
interpret, analyse and write a report.
I would always look at the report and feel offended! Can we say statistics
mean this? ... How do I get together with the poor and plan. I would sit down
to think! ... Just as I was wondering whether my efforts had not been frustrated,
like a ‘saviour’, I met Mr Shah Parmesh and John Devavaram – our trainers
in PRA.
...after this ten days of intensive training, I got back and trained some of my
fellow researchers at MISR. They were so impressed. What an overwhelming
methodology – ‘PRA is the only way forward.’ one of them expressed. ‘With
PRA you will not get it wrong.’ yet another said.
I redesigned my methodology for the next field work on ground water
research.
It was fantasy in the field:

• Mapping was applauded by the local people.

• The local people excelled in the analysis of water related diseases with the
aid of seasonal calendars.
• Gender income/expenditure differentials came out quite clearly.
• To mention but not least, the setting up of water committee, local by-laws,
educational campaigns on use of clean water, suggestions for financial
contribution for minor repairs, spontaneously evolved from the community
itself.

...here you are, the rural people had done these themselves. I am now to tell the
government that water committees are set up, the community is financing minor
repairs [with] an enabling economic environment to sustain the peoples’ ability
to manage their own water supply systems ...

Yours sincerely,
Orone Patrick (Research Associate)
 The Provocation: Dinosaurs 23

Notes
1 Older men have a notorious and lamentable tendency to talk about them-
selves and their experiences. There are five hypotheses about the ERR – the
egocentric reminiscence ratio – the proportion of a person’s speech devoted
to their past: that it is higher among men than women, rises with age, on
retirement leaps to a new upward-sloping plateau, is higher in the evening
than the morning and rises sharply with the consumption of alcohol. My
excuse or explanation for the egocentric thread that runs through this book
is that I am driven by the first three, but only occasionally, and not at the time
of writing, by the last two.
2 For the main findings see Farmer (1977).
3 This led to a paper ‘Opportunism in rural research’ (Chambers, 1974b) in
which I puzzled about what I had actually been doing.
4 Jon Moris, on the basis of his review of 40 large questionnaire surveys,
concluded that a reasonable rule of thumb was that processing, analysis and
writing up would take twice as long and cost twice as much as budgeted.
5 Jean-Louis Arcand (pers. comm. 22 Aug 2006) reports that the use of
handheld PCs in a paperless survey in Senegal made it easy to track the
performance of enumerators. The inclusion of enumerator-specific effects
contributed nothing to the results, but led to the firing of one of them. There
must surely be cases of published tables of enumerator effects, but I do
not know of any. I shall be indebted to any reader who can draw any to my
attention.
6 This paragraph is summarized from ‘Practices in Social Science Research:
Some heresies’, paper to a workshop at the Agrarian Research and Training
Institute, Colombo (Chambers, 1973).
7 I have not edited out these brackets because they are a marker of how far
we have come, and how rapid has been the development of survey data
processing.
8 The B. H. Farmer (ed) 1977 Green Revolution? book published the results of
Sri Lanka and South India study. It was precisely the methodology chapter
that was shortened.
9 For more detailed analysis and examples, see Chambers (1997) pp93–97,
the section on ‘Confirmation by Questionnaire’.
10 Fabricate vb (tr). 1, to make, build, or construct; 2, to devise, invent or
concoct (a story, lie etc.); 3, to fake or forge [C15 from Latin fabricare to
build, make, from fabrica workshop . . .] (Collins English Dictionary, Seventh
Edition, 2005). I have a photograph on my office door of the sign outside a
rural workshop in Kerala QUALITY FORGINGS AND FABRICATIONS.
To what extent there are forgings and fabrications, and of what quality, in
this book is for readers to judge.
11 For evidence and elaboration of the theme ‘All power deceives’ see Chapter
5 of Chambers (1997) Whose Reality Counts?
24 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

12 Analysis overnight on a laptop is done ‘by us’. A better alternative is likely to

be analysis ‘by them’, in which case they will be empowered, will learn for
themselves (for example a relationship between source of water and episodes
of diarrhoea) and will be more likely to act.
13 Rao and Woolcock do not give the number of four for non-economists. I have
inferred it from two percentages given in their paper.
14 It is beyond the scope of this chapter or book to consider other mutually
reinforcing links between methodology and ideology in the World Bank.
For an example of how alarming these can be see Rodriguez (2007) ‘Policy-
makers Beware: The use and misuse of regressions in explaining economic
growth’. I thank Henry Lucas for bringing this to my attention.
15 For a summary review of the evaluation of World Bank research www.
brettonwoodsproject.org/art.shtml?x=549070
16 A two-hour presentation I gave in the World Bank in 2005 on numbers from
participatory approaches and methods did not as far as I know make any
significant impression or lead to any change.
17 My better judgement tells me that I should delete this purple paragraph but
mischievous fun has got the better of me.
18 For a review of 12 studies conducted 1966 to 1992 see Fawzi et al, (1993)
‘Vitamin A supplementation and child mortality: A meta-analysis’, Journal
of the American Medical Association, 17 February, vol 269, no 7, pp878–903.
For debate over the rigour of methodologies used see Reddy, V. and
Vijayaraghavan, K., (1991) letter to Lancet, 26 January, vol 337, no 8735,
p232. In UNICEF’s view ‘. . .Vitamin A Supplementation can save over a
quarter of a million lives a year’, www.unicef.org/mdg/childmortality.html
(accessed 4 January 2008).
19 I have not included whether psychotherapy improves the mental health of
neurotic patients because I am sceptical of the credible feasibility of such
studies. Others to which less space is devoted include effects of fluoride
in water on tooth decay, and a speed of reaction test after living in a cold
climate.
 2

Rural Development Tourism:

Poverty Unperceived

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve about. (Old English
proverb)

Abstract
With the priority of poverty reduction and with accelerating change in many
dimensions, up-to-date and realistically informed perceptions of the lives and conditions
of people living in poverty have come to matter more than ever. At the same time, new
pressures and incentives increasingly trap decision-makers in headquarters and capital
cities, reinforcing earlier (1983) analysis of the attraction of urban ‘cores’ and the neglect
of rural ‘peripheries’. These trends make decision-makers’ learning about poverty and
from people living in poverty rarer and ever more important. One common means has
been rural development tourism, the phenomenon of the brief rural visit from an urban
centre. In 1983, six biases of such visits – spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic
and professional – against seeing, meeting and learning from the poorer people, were
identified and described.
In the mid 2000s, these biases persist, and security considerations have emerged as
another factor. It is now more accepted and expected that visitors will want to meet poor
people. In offsetting the biases, critical awareness is a key factor.

Genesis and rationale (2008)

The wonderful freedom and opportunities I had in India and Sri Lanka gave
space for many short rural visits, and then reflection on these, on what I was
seeing and not seeing, whom I was meeting and not meeting, what I was
learning and not learning. Some of the visits were with government staff. Some
with colleagues. Some simply with an interpreter. One series was when Benny
Farmer, the director of the project, came out for a visit. We all began to realize
how such visits were slanted, and how they reinforced selective perceptions
and misperceptions. This provoked, in a 1974 paper on Opportunism in Rural
Research (Chambers, 1974b):
26 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The most important injunction of all is to sustain a very high degree of

scepticism about the information derived verbally from such visits. It is
alarming how quickly, through notes, writing and conversation, some small
piece of verbal information about which one is initially very sceptical,
becomes transformed into an established ‘fact’. The rural development tourist
may be trying to jump to conclusions, lacking time to take a more leisurely
and certain path; but he [sic!] must try to retain a high degree of self-doubt
and self-critical appreciation of the selective and uncertain nature of his
perceptions.

Later, in the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), a day’s brainstorming with

Ian Carruthers, Scarlett Epstein, Richard Longhurst and others covered the walls
of a room with lists of features of these visits, and the biases of rural development
tourism – the phenomenon of the brief rural visit by the urban-based outsider
– were named.
The theme of this chapter is that because of these biases rural poverty has
been largely unperceived. Part of Chapter 1 ‘Rural Poverty Unperceived’ of
Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983) is reprinted to raise questions
about contemporary relevance. This is then qualified and updated with other
experience, and the newly recognized security bias added.
My conclusion is that the biases are all alive and well, but they have tended
to slip out of sight and off the agenda. In the otherwise useful book Finding Out
Fast (Thomas et al, 1998) the biases of rural development tourism receive only
one mention (p151) and that does not say what they are. If even the authors of
a book like that do not describe the biases, few development professionals may
now be aware of them. Further, in the mid-2000s, the core or urban trap appears
tighter than it was. Road travel may generally have become easier, but rural
visits, especially by aid agency staff, are widely acknowledged and agreed to have
become less common. The quality of such visits therefore matters more now than
ever. Finally and as indicated in Chapter 8 (pp156–158) the biases can be offset.

Rural poverty unperceived (1983)1

The urban trap

. . . the international system of knowledge and prestige, with its rewards and
incentives . . . draws professionals away from rural areas and up through the
hierarchy of urban and international centres. They are also attracted and held fast
by better houses, hospitals, schools, communications, consumer goods, recreation,
social services, facilities for work, salaries and career prospects. In third world
countries as elsewhere, academics, bureaucrats, foreigners and journalists are all
drawn to towns or based in them. All are victims, though usually willing victims,
of the urban trap. Let us consider them in turn.
For academics, it is cheaper, safer and more cost-effective in terms of acad-
emic output, to do urban rather than rural research. If rural work is to be done,
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 27

then peri-urban is preferable to work in remoter areas. Rural research is carried

out mainly by the young and inexperienced. For them, rural fieldwork is a rite
of passage, an initiation which earns them the right to do no more, giving them
a ticket to stay in the town. But the fieldwork must first be performed in the
correct manner as prescribed by custom. The social anthropologist has to spend
a year or so in the village, the sociologist to prepare, apply, analyse and write
up a questionnaire survey. The ritual successfully completed, the researcher is
appointed and promoted. Marriage and children follow. For women, pregnancy
and child care may then dislocate a career and prevent further rural exposure.2
For men, family responsibilities tie less, but still restrain. Promotion means
responsibility and time taken with teaching, supervising, administration, and
university or institutional politics. The stage of the domestic cycle with small
children means accumulation of responsibilities – driving children to school and
picking them up again, family occasions, careful financial management to make
ends meet, moonlighting and consultancies to supplement a meagre salary – all
of which take time.
The researcher has now learnt enough to make a contribution to rural re-
search. He or she has the confidence and wit to explore new ideas and to pursue
the unexpected. There is evidence enough of this in the books by social anthro-
pologists who have undertaken second and subsequent spells of fieldwork. But
it is precisely at this time that the able academic is chained to desk, lectern and
home. If the university rewards ability, then the more able persons are likely to
be most trapped. Ageing, ability, promotion and the domestic cycle conspire to
prevent further rural contact.
The amalgam which glues these forces together and finally immobilises the
would-be rural researcher in mid-career is over-commitment. It is a mystery
why so many of the presumably intelligent people who do research are so
miserably incompetent at managing their own lives. Academics can be found
who are simultaneously supervising half a dozen theses (if their students can get
near them), managing a major research project (actually managed by a junior
administrator and by field staff), lecturing (from old notes or off-the-cuff),
sitting on a dozen committees (or sending in, or failing to send in, apologies for
absence), writing a couple of books (or adding notes to the draft by the junior
author), developing a new curriculum or course (which for lack of time ends
up much like a previous one), and carrying out a consultancy for an aid agency
(which, for inescapable financial reasons, takes priority over all else). To judge
from a limited and scattered sample, I suspect a positive correlation between
over-commitment at work and size of family, though whether this reflects a lack
of restraint and planning in both domains may be an idle speculation. But for
such people, over-commitment is an addiction. In extreme cases, they take on
more and more and complete less and less, complete it less and less well and, as
they become more eminent, are less and less likely to be told their work is bad.
Needless to say, there is also less and less time for any direct rural exposure; for
the demands of students, researchers, administrators, committees, new curricula,
books and consultancies all require presence in town. Ambition, inefficiency, and
an inability to say no, tie the academic down, as an urban prisoner. Parole is rare
28 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

and brief; rural contact is restricted to hectic excursions from the urban centre
where the university or institute is sited.
For government staff, there are similar pressures and patterns. On first
appointment, when ignorant and inexperienced, technical or administrative
officers are posted to the poorer, remoter, and politically less significant areas.
Those who are less able, less noticed, or less influential, remain there longer. The
more able, and those who come favourably to attention or who have friends in
headquarters, are soon transferred to more accessible or more prosperous rural
areas, or to urban centres.
Administration is, anyway, an urban-based and urban-biased activity. So
with promotion, contact with rural areas, especially the remoter ones, recedes.
If a serious error is committed, or a powerful politician offended, the officer
may earn a ‘penal posting’, to serve out punishment time in some place with
poor facilities – a pastoral area, an area without irrigation, an area distant from
the capital, an area which is hot and unhealthy – in short, a place where poorer
people will be found. But the pull of urban life will remain; children’s education,
chances of promotion, congenial company, consumer goods, cinemas, libraries,
hospitals, and quite simply power; all drawing bureaucrats away from rural areas
and towards the major urban and administrative centres.
Once established in offices in the capital city, or in the regional or provincial
headquarters, bureaucrats too are trapped. Unless they are idle and incompetent,
or exceptionally able and well supported, they are quickly over-committed. They
are tied down by committees, subcommittees, memoranda, reports, urgent papers,
personnel problems, financial management, and the professional substance of
their work. There are political demands to which they must be able to react swiftly
and efficiently. There are times of the year, during the budget cycle, when they
cannot contemplate leaving their desks. The very emphasis on agricultural and
rural development creates work, which holds them in their offices.
If the government is inactive, they may be relatively free. But the more
the government tries to do, so the more paperwork is generated, the more co-
ordination and integration are called for, the more reports have to be written and
read, and the more inter-ministerial and inter-departmental coordination and
liaison committees are set up. The more important these committees become,
so the more members they have, the longer their meetings take, and the longer
their minutes grow. The demands of aid agencies are a final straw, requiring data,
justifications, reports, evaluations, visits by missions, and meetings with ministers.
More activity, more aid, more projects, more coordination – all these mean more
time in the office and less in the field.
Foreigners are also urban-based and urban-biased. Foreigners in third world
countries who are concerned with rural development and rural poverty include
staff in voluntary agencies and aid organisations, technical cooperation personnel
of various sorts, and consultants. Many voluntary agency workers and a few
technical cooperation staff do live in rural areas. But most of these foreigners are
also urban-based, many of them in capital cities, and have the familiar problems
of paperwork, meetings and political and family pressures which tie them there.
In addition, their rural movements may be restricted by a suspicious government,
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 29

or smothered in protocol. Their perceptions vary from the acute and correct to
the naive and mistaken. They often labour under the notorious difficulties and
distortions of having to rely on interpreters, of being taken on conducted tours,
and of misleading responses from those met.
A final group, neglected yet vital for the formation of opinion about rural
life, are journalists. They combine the most direct access to mass media with the
severest constraints on rural exposure. Journalists who wish to visit a rural area have
three problems. First, they must persuade their editor that the visit is worthwhile.
This is difficult. In terms of news, it is almost always quicker and cheaper to look
for and write up an urban story; moreover a disproportion of newspaper readers
are urban dwellers interested in urban news. Second, journalists must be sure to
get a story. This usually means a visit either in special company (for example, the
Prime Minister’s visit to a region) with an official entourage and all that goes with
it, or to an atypical rural place where there is either a project or a disaster. Third,
journalists cannot hang around. They must find out what they want quickly and
write it up quickly. Checking information is difficult, and with rural people who
are unlikely to read what is written let alone sue, the incentive to check it is low.
It is the one-off rushed and unconfirmed interview which appears in quotation
marks in the newspaper article. Like academics, bureaucrats and foreigners,
journalists are both actors and victims in the brief rural visit.

Rural development tourism3

For all these urban-based professionals, the major source of direct experience
of rural conditions is, then, rural development tourism, the phenomenon of the
brief rural visit. This influences and is part of almost all other sources of informa-
tion. It is extremely widespread, with perhaps tens of thousands of cases daily
in third world countries. In spite of its prevalence, it has not, to my knowledge,
been seriously analysed. This omission is astonishing until one reflects on the
reasons. For academic analysis, rural development tourism is too dispersed and
ephemeral for convenient rigour, not neatly in any disciplinary domain, and
barely conceivable as the topic for a thesis. For practical professionals engaged
in rural development, it is perhaps too near the end of the nose to be in focus.
Rural development tourism is, moreover, a subject of anecdote and an object
of shame. It generates stories for bar gossip rather than factors for comparative
study, and evokes memories of personal follies one prefers not to expose to public
ridicule. In any case, self-critical introspection is not one of the more prominent
characteristics of rural developers. Yet it is through this rural development tour-
ism, if at all, that ‘core’ (urban based, professional, powerful) visitors see and meet
those who are ‘peripheral’ (rural, uneducated, weak). The brief rural visits by
‘core’ personnel can scarcely fail to play a key part in forming their impressions
and beliefs and influencing their decisions and actions.
Let us examine the phenomenon. The visits may be for one day or for several.
The ‘tourists’ or visitors may come from a foreign country, a capital city, a seat
of regional or provincial government, a district headquarters, or some smaller
30 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

urban place. Most commonly, they are government officials – administrators,

health staff, agriculturalists, veterinarians, animal husbandry staff, educators,
community developers, engineers, foresters, or inspectors of this and that – but
they may also be private technical specialists, academic researchers, the staff of
voluntary agencies, journalists, diplomats, politicians, consultants, or the staff
of aid agencies. Differing widely in race, nationality, religion, profession, age,
sex, language, interests, prejudices, conditioning and experience, these visitors
nevertheless usually have three things in common: they come from urban areas;
they want to find something out; and they are short of time.
Rural development tourism has many purposes and many styles. Technical
specialists concerned with physical resources may in practice have little contact
with rural people, and there may be little formality about their visits. Others
– those concerned with administration and human development in its various
forms – may in contrast be involved in many meetings with rural people. It is with
these kinds of visits that we are primarily concerned. It is tempting to caricature,
and exaggeration is built into any process of induction from anecdotes which
are repeated and remembered because they make good stories. There are also
differences between cultures, environments and individual tourists. But it may
hold generally that the older, more senior, more important, and more involved
with policy the tourist is, so the larger will be the urban centre from which he4
leaves, and the more likely his visit is to be selective and formally structured. The
more powerful professionals are, the less chance they have of informal learning.
A sketch can illustrate the problems5 of such visits by the powerful, important,
and distinguished. The visitor sets out late, delayed by last minute business, by
colleagues, by subordinates or superiors anxious for decisions or actions before
his departure, by a family crisis, by a cable or telephone call, by others taking
part in the same visit, by mechanical or administrative problems with vehicles, by
urban traffic jams, or by any one of a hundred forms of human error. Even if the
way is not lost, there is enough fuel, and there are no breakdowns, the programme
runs behind schedule. The visitor is encapsulated, first in a limousine, Land
Rover, Jeep or car and later in a moving entourage of officials and local notables
– headmen, chairmen of village committees, village accountants, progressive
farmers, traders, and the like.
Whatever their private feelings (indifferent, suspicious, amused, anxious,
irritated, or enthusiastic), the rural people put on their best face and receive the
visitor well. According to ecology, economy and culture, he is given goats, garlands,
coconut milk, coca-cola, coffee, tea or milk. Speeches are made. Schoolchildren
sing or clap. Photographs are taken. Buildings, machines, construction works,
new crops, exotic animals, the clinic, the school, the new road, are all inspected.
A self-conscious group (the self-help committee, the women’s handicraft class),
dressed in their best clothes, are seen and spoken to. They nervously respond in
ways which they hope will bring benefits and avoid penalties. There are tensions
between the visitor’s questions and curiosity, the officials’ desire to select what is
to be seen, and the mixed motives of different rural groups and individuals who
have to live with the officials and with each other after the visitor has left. Time
and an overloaded programme nevertheless are on the officials’ side. As the day
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 31

wears on and heats up, the visitor becomes less inquisitive, asks fewer questions,
and is finally glad to retire, exhausted and bemused, to the circuit bungalow, the
rest house, the guest house, the host official’s residence, or back to an urban home
or hotel. The village returns to normal, no longer wearing its special face. When
darkness falls and people talk more freely, the visitor is not there.
Shortage of time, the importance of the visitor, and the desire for informa-
tion separately or together influence what is perceived. Lack of time drives out
the open-ended question; the visitor imposes meanings through what is asked.
Checking is impossible, and prudent, hopeful, or otherwise self-serving lies
become accepted as facts. Individually or in groups, people are neglected while
formal actions and physical objects receive attention. Refugees in a rural camp in
Tanzania said of UN and government officials that ‘They come, and they sign the
book, and they go’, and ‘They only talk with the buildings’. A villager in Senegal
said to Adrian Adams concerning visitors: ‘Ils ne savent pas qu’il y a ici des gens
vivants’.6 (Adams, 1979, p477). Above all, on such visits, it is the poorer people
who tend not to be seen, far less to be met.

Rural poverty unperceived:The six biases

Many biases impede outsiders’ contact with rural poverty in general, and with the
deepest poverty in particular. These apply not only to rural development tourists,
but also to rural researchers and local-level staff who live and work in rural areas.
Six sets of biases stand out:

Spatial biases: Urban, tarmac and roadside

Most learning about rural conditions is mediated by vehicles. Starting and ending
in urban centres, visits follow networks of roads. With rural development tourism,
the hazards of dirt roads, the comfort of the visitor, the location of places to visit
and places for spending the night, and shortages of both time and fuel dictate a
preference for tarmac roads and for travel close to urban centres. The result is
overlapping urban, tarmac and roadside biases.
Urban bias concentrates rural visits near towns and especially near capital
cities and large administrative centres. But the regional distribution of the poorest
rural people often shows a concentration in remoter areas – north-eastern Brazil,
Zambia away from the line of rail, lower Ukambani in Kenya, the Tribal Districts
of Central India, the hills of Nepal. In much of the developing world, some of
the poorest people are being driven from those densely populated areas better
served with communications and are being forced, in order to survive, to colonise
less accessible areas, especially the savannahs and forests. Hard to reach from the
urban centres, they remain largely unseen.
Tarmac and roadside biases also direct attention towards those who are less
poor and away from those who are poorer. Visible development follows main
roads. Factories, offices, shops and official markets all tend to be at the sides of
main roads. Even agricultural development has a roadside bias: in Tamil Nadu
agricultural demonstrations of new seeds and fertilisers have often been sited
32 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

beside main roads; and on irrigation systems, roads follow canals so that the
farms seen are those of the topenders who receive more water and not those of
the tailenders who receive less or none. Services along roadsides are also better.
An improved tarmac or all-weather surface can bring buses, electricity, telephone,
piped water supply, and better access to markets, health facilities and schools.
Services near main roads are better staffed and equipped; Edward Henevald
found that two schools near a main highway in Sumatra had more than their
quota of teachers, while a school one kilometre off the road had less than its
quota.
When roads are built, land values rise and those who are wealthier and more
influential often move in if they can. In Liberia, new rural roads were followed
by speculators rushing to acquire deeds and to buy or to displace local farmers
(Cobb et al, 1980, pp12–16). For part of western Kenya, Joseph Ssennyonga
had described a similar tendency for the wealthier and more influential to buy
up roadside plots, creating an ‘elite roadside ecology’ (1976, p9). So the poorer
people shift away out of sight. The visitor then sees those who are better-off and
their houses, gardens, and services, and not those who are poorer and theirs.
Ribbon development along roadsides gives a false impression in many countries.
The better the road, the nearer the urban centre, and the heavier the traffic, so
the more pronounced is the roadside development and the more likely visitors
are to see it and be misled.
Nor does spatial bias apply only to main roads. Within villages, the poorer
people may be hidden from the main streets and the places where people meet.
M. P. Moore and G. Wickremesinghe, reporting on a study of three villages in the
Low Country of Sri Lanka, have this to say about ‘hidden poverty’:

In retrospect at least, one of the most obvious aspects of poverty in the study
villages is the extent to which it is concealed from view ... the proportion of
‘poor’ households ... varies from 14 per cent in Wattegama to 41 per cent in
Weligalagoda.Yet one could drive along all the motorable roads in the villages
and scarcely see a single ‘poor’ house. Here, as in most of rural Sri Lanka,
wealthier households use their social and economic power to obtain roadside
homestead sites. Not only do these confer easier access to such tangible services
as buses, electricity connections or hawkers, but they provide such intangible
benefits as better information and gossip from passers-by. Equally, the roadside
dweller has a potential site for opening a small shop, especially if located near
the all-important road junctions, which provide the focus of commercial and
social life in almost all rural areas. To even see the houses of the poor
one often has to leave the road. Many visitors, including public
officers, appear not to do so very often. (1980, p59; emphasis added)

The same can be said of Harijan colonies in or near villages in South India,
and of Basarwa (Bushmen) in or outside the villages of the Kalahari. Peripheral
residence is almost universal with the rural poor.
It is not just the movements of officials that are guided by these spatial biases
of rural development tourism. Social science researchers are far from immune.
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 33

There are honourable exceptions, but urban and tarmac biases are sometimes
evident in choices of villages to study. Of all specialists, social anthropologists are
perhaps the least susceptible, but even they sometimes succumb: as they have
grown, Bangalore and Bangkok have each swallowed up a social anthropologist’s
village.7 Again, when Indian institutions were urged to adopt villages, two
research and training organisations in Bangalore, unknown to each other,
included the same village: it can scarcely be a coincidence that it was close to the
main Bangalore-Mysore road, a decent but convenient distance from Bangalore
itself. Within villages, too, the central, more prosperous, core is likely to attract
researchers.
Moore, again describing three villages in Sri Lanka, writes:

Apart from the roadside issue, the core can exercise a great pull on the outsider
who decides to do a few days’ or a week’s fieldwork. Apart from the facilities
and the sense of being at the strategic hub of local affairs, it can claim a sense
of history and tradition, to which sociologists especially appear vulnerable.
(1981, p48)

He considers that sociologists writing on Sri Lanka have mostly focussed on core
areas and completely ignored the peripheries. One may speculate about how
generally the location of good informants and of facilities at the cores of villages
prevent perception by social scientists of the peripheral poor.
Urban bias is further accentuated by fuel shortages and costs. When fuel costs
rise dramatically, as they have done in recent years, the effect is especially marked
in those poor countries which are without oil and also short of foreign exchange.
The recurrent budgets of government departments are cut. Staff are difficult
to shed, so the cuts fall disproportionately on other items. Transport votes are a
favourite. Rural visits, research and projects shrink back from more distant, often
poorer areas to those which are closer, more prosperous, and cheaper to visit.8
In Zambia, the travel votes of the Ministry of Agriculture and Water
Development could buy in 1980 only one fifth of the petrol they could buy in
1973 (ILO, 1981, p74) and senior agricultural extension staff were virtually
office bound. In Bangladesh, similarly, district agricultural officers have been
severely restricted in their use of vehicles. In India, cuts have occurred in transport
allocations for staff responsible for supervising canal irrigation: the likely effects
include less supervision leading to less water reaching the already deprived
areas and less staff awareness of what is happening there. Every rise in oil prices
impoverishes the remoter, poorer people by tilting the urban–rural terms of trade
against them, and at the same time reduces the chances of that deprivation being
known. Visits, attention and projects are concentrated more and more on the more
accessible and more favoured areas near towns.

Project bias
Rural development tourism and rural research have a project bias. Those
concerned with rural development and with rural research become linked to
34 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

networks of urban–rural contacts. They are then pointed to those rural places
where it is known that something is being done – where money is being spent,
staff are stationed, a project is in hand. Ministries, departments, district staff,
and voluntary agencies all pay special attention to projects and channel visitors
towards them. Contact and learning are then with tiny atypical islands of activity
which attract repeated and mutually reinforcing attention.
Project bias is most marked with the showpiece: the nicely groomed pet
project or model village, specially staffed and supported, with well briefed mem-
bers who know what to say and which is sited a reasonable but not excessive
distance from the urban headquarters.9 Governments in capital cities need such
projects for foreign visitors; district and sub district staff need them too, for visits
by their senior officers. Such projects provide a quick and simple reflex to solve
the problem of what to do with visitors or senior staff on inspection. Once again,
they direct attention away from the poorer people.
The better known cases concern those rural development projects which
have attracted international attention. Any roll of honour would include the
Anand Dairy Cooperatives in India; the Chilalo Agricultural Development Unit
in Ethiopia; the Comilla Project in Bangladesh; the Gezira Scheme in Sudan;
the Intensive Agricultural Districts Programme (IADP) in India; Lilongwe in
Malawi; the Muda Irrigation Project in Malaysia; the Mwea Irrigation Settlement
in Kenya; and some ujamaa villages in Tanzania. These have been much visited
and much studied. Students seeking doctorates have read about them and then
sought to do their fieldwork on them.10
Research generates more research; and investment by donors draws research
after it and funds it. In India, the IADP, a programme designed to increase
production sharply in a few districts which were well endowed with water,
exercised a powerful attraction to research compared to the rest of India. An
analysis (Harriss, 1977, pp30–34) of rural social science research published in
the Bombay Economic and Political Weekly showed an astonishing concentration
in IADP districts, and an almost total neglect of the very poor areas of central
India. In a different way, the Comilla Project may also have misled, since Comilla
District has the lowest proportion of landless of any district in Bangladesh.
Research on ujamaa in Tanzanian in the clusters of villages (the Ruvuma
Development Association, Mbambara and Upper Kitete) which were among the
very few in the whole country with substantial communal agricultural production,
sustained the myth that such production was widespread. Research, reports and
publications have given all these atypical projects high profiles, and these in turn
have generated more interest, more visitors, and yet more research, reports and
publications.
Fame forces project managers into public relations. More and more of their
time has to be spent showing visitors around. Inundated by the celebrated, the
curious, and the crass – prime ministers, graduate students, women’s clubs,
farmers’ groups, aid missions, evaluation teams, school parties, committees and
directors of this and that – managers set up public relations units and develop
a public relations style. Visitors then get the treatment. A fluent guide follows
a standard route and a standard routine. The same people are met, the same
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 35

buildings entered,11 the same books signed, the same polite praise inscribed in
the book against the visitors’ names. Questions are drowned in statistics; doubts
inhibited by handouts. Inquisitive visitors depart loaded with research papers,
technical evaluations, and annual reports which they will probably never read.
They leave with a sense of guilt at the unworthy scepticism which promoted
their probing questions, with memories of some of those who are better-off in
the special project, and impressed by the charisma of the exceptional leader or
manager who has created it. They write their journey reports, evaluations and
articles on the basis of these impressions.
For their part, the project staff have reinforced through repetition the beliefs
which sustain their morale; and their projects take off into self-sustaining myth.
But in the myth is the seed of tragedy, as projects are driven down this path
which leads, step-by-step to self-deception, pride, defensiveness, and ultimately
debunking.

Person bias
The persons with whom rural development tourists, local-level officials, and
rural researchers have contact, and from whom they obtain impressions and
information, are biased against poorer people.

Elite bias
‘Elite’ is used here to describe those rural people who are less poor and more
influential. They typically include progressive farmers, village leaders, headmen,
traders, religious leaders, teachers, and paraprofessionals. They are the main
sources of information for rural development tourists, for local-level officials, and
even for rural researchers. They are the most fluent informants. It is they who
receive and speak to the visitors; they who articulate ‘the village’s’ interests and
wishes; their concerns which emerge as ‘the village’s’ priorities for development.
It is they who entertain visitors, generously providing the expected beast or
beverage. It is they who receive the lion’s share of attention, advice and services
from agricultural extension staff (Chambers, 1974a, p58; Leonard, 1977, ch 9).
It is they who show visitors the progressive practices in their fields. It is they too,
who, at least at first, monopolise the time and attention of the visitor.
Conversely, the poor do not speak up. With those of higher status, they may
even decline to sit down. Weak, powerless and isolated, they are often reluctant to
push themselves forward. In Paul Devitt’s words:

The poor are often inconspicuous, inarticulate and unorganised. Their voices
may not be heard at public meetings in communities where it is customary
for only the big men to put their views. It is rare to find a body or institution
that adequately represents the poor in a certain community or area. Outsiders
and government officials invariably find it more profitable and congenial to
converse with local influentials than with the uncommunicative poor. (1977,
p23)
36 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The poor are a residual, the last in the line, the most difficult to find, and the
hardest to learn from: ‘Unless paupers and poverty are deliberately and persist-
ently sought, they tend to remain effectively screened from outside inquirers’
(Devitt, 1977, p23).12

Male bias
Most local-level government staff, researchers and other rural visitors are men.
Most rural people with whom they establish contact are men. Female farmers are
neglected by male agricultural extension workers. In most societies women have
inferior status and are subordinate to men. There are variations and exceptions,
but quite often women are shy of speaking to male visitors. And yet poor rural
women are a poor and deprived class within a class. They often work very long
hours, and they are usually paid less than men. Rural single women, female heads
of households, and widows include many of the most wretched and unseen people
in the world.

User and adopter biases

Where visits are concerned with facilities or innovations, the users of services and
the adopters of new practices are more likely to be seen than are non-users and
non-adopters. This bias applies to visitors who have a professional interest in, say,
education, health or agriculture, to local-level officials, and to researchers. They
tend to visit buildings and places where activity is concentrated, easily visible, and
hence easy to study. Children in school are more likely to be seen and questioned
than children who are not in school; those who use the health clinic more than
those who are too sick, too poor, or too distant to use it; those who come to market
because they have goods to sell or money with which to buy, more than those
who stay at home because they have neither; members of the cooperative more
than those who are too poor or powerless to join it; those who have adopted new
agricultural, health or family planning practices more than those who have not.

Active, present and living biases

Those who are active are more visible than those who are not. Fit, happy, children
gather round the Jeep or Land Rover, not those who are apathetic, weak and
miserable. Dead children are rarely seen. The sick lie in their huts. Inactive old
people are often out of sight; a social anthropologist has recorded how he spent
some time camping outside a village in Uganda before he realised that old people
were starving (Turnbull, 1973, p102). Those who are absent or dead cannot be
met, but those who have migrated and those who have died include many of the
most deprived. Much of the worst poverty is hidden by its removal.

Dry season biases

Most of the poor rural people in the world live in areas of marked wet–dry
tropical seasons. For the majority whose livelihoods depend on cultivation the
most difficult time of the year is usually the wet season, especially before the
first harvest. Food is short, food prices are high, work is hard, and infections
are prevalent. Malnutrition, morbidity and mortality all rise, while body weights
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 37

decline. The poorer people, women and children are particularly vulnerable.
Birth weights drop and infant mortality rises. Child care is inadequate. Desperate
people get indebted. This is both the hungry season and the sick season. It is also
the season of poverty ratchet effects, that is, of irreversible downward movements
into poverty through the sale or mortgaging of assets, the time when poor people
are most likely to become poorer.
The wet season is also the unseen season. Rural visits by the urban-based
have their own seasonality.

Nutritionists take care to plan

To do their surveys when they can
be sure the weather’s fine and dry,
the harvest in, food intake high.

Then students seeking Ph.D’s

Believe that everyone agrees
that rains don’t do for rural study
– suits get wet and shoes get muddy

And bureaucrats, that urban type,

wait prudently till crops are ripe,
before they venture to the field
to put their question: ‘What’s the yield?’

For monsoonal Asia, which has its major crop towards the end of the calendar
year, it is also relevant that:

The international experts’ flights

have other seasons; winter nights
In London, Washington and Rome
are what drive them, in flocks, from home

since they then descend on India and other countries north of the equator in
January and February at precisely the time of least poverty and when marriages
and celebrations are to be seen and heard. Some opposite tendencies, however,
deserve to be noted:

And northern academics too

are seasonal in their global view
For they are found in third world nations
mainly during long vacations.

North of the equator this means visits at the bad time of the monsoon in
much of Asia and of the rains of West Africa. There are also professionals like
agriculturalists and epidemiologists whose work demands rural travel during the
rains, for that is when crops grow and bugs and bacteria breed.
38 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

But the disincentives and difficulties are strong. The rains are a bad time for
rural travel because of the inconveniences or worse of floods, mud, landslides,
broken bridges; and getting stuck, damaging vehicles, losing time, and enduring
discomfort. In some places roads are officially closed. In the South Sudan, there
is a period of about two months after the onset of the rains when roads are im-
passable but when there is not yet enough water in the rivers for travel by boat.
Many rural areas, especially those which are remote and poor, are quite simply
inaccessible by vehicle during the rains. The worst times of the year for the poorer
people are thus those that are the least perceived by urban-based outsiders.
Once the rains are over such visitors can however travel more freely. It is in
the dry season, when disease is diminishing, the harvest in, food stocks adequate,
body weights rising, ceremonies in full swing, and people at their least deprived,
that there is most contact between urban-based professionals and the rural poor.
Not just rural development tourism, but rural appraisal generally is susceptible
to a dry season bias. A manual for assessing rural needs warns of an experience
when ‘Once, the jeeps needed for transporting the interviewers were recalled
for a month during the few precious months of the dry season’ (Ashe, 1979,
p26; my emphasis). Whole institutes concentrate their field research in the dry
seasons; the rains are for data analysis and writing up with a good roof over one’s
head. Concern to avoid inconveniencing respondents when they are busy and
exhausted with agricultural activities provides a neat justification, both practical
and moral, for avoiding research during the rains. Many factors thus conspire to
ensure that the poorest people are most seen at precisely those times when they
are least deprived; and least seen when things are at their worst.

Diplomatic biases: Politeness and timidity

Urban-based visitors are often deterred by combinations of politeness and timid-
ity from approaching, meeting, and listening to and learning from the poorer
people. Poverty in any country can be a subject of indifference or shame, some-
thing to be shut out, something polluting, something, in the psychological sense,
to be repressed. If honestly confronted, it can also be profoundly disturbing.
Those who make contact with it may offend those who are influential. The not-
ables who generously offer hospitality to the visitor may not welcome or may be
thought not to welcome, searching questions about the poorer people. Senior
officials visiting junior officials may not wish to examine or expose failures of
programmes intended to benefit the poor. Politeness and prudence variously
inhibit the awkward question, the walk into the poorer quarter of the village, the
discussion with the working women, the interviews with Harijans. Courtesy and
cowardice combine to keep tourists and the poorest apart.

Professional biases
Finally, professional training, values and interests present problems. Sometimes
they focus attention on the less poor: agricultural extension staff trained to advise
on cash crops or to prepare farm plans are drawn to the more ‘progressive’
farmers; historians, sociologists and administrators, especially when short of
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 39

time, can best satisfy their interests and curiosity through informants among the
better-educated or less poor; those engaged in family welfare and family planning
work find that bases for the adoption of any new practices can most readily be
established with better-off, better-educated families. But sometimes, in addition,
professional training, values and interests do focus attention directly on the poor.
This is especially so in the fields of nutrition and health, where those wishing to
examine and to work with pathological conditions will tend to be drawn to those
who are poorer.
More generally, specialisation, for all its advantages, makes it hard for ob-
servers to understand the linkages of deprivation. Rural deprivation is a web in
which poverty (lack of assets, inadequate stocks and flows of food and income),
physical weakness and sickness, isolation, vulnerability to contingencies, and
powerlessness all mesh and interlock. But professionals are trained to look for
and see much less. They are programmed by their education and experience to
examine what shows up in a bright but slender beam which blinds them to what
lies outside it.
Knowing what they want to know, and short of time to find it out, profession-
als in rural areas become even more narrowly single-minded. They do their own
thing and only their own thing. They look for and find what fits their ideas. There
is neither inclination nor time for the open-ended question or for other ways of
perceiving people, events and things. ‘He that seeketh, findeth.’ Visiting the same
village, a hydrologist enquires about the water table, a soils scientist examines soil
fertility, an agronomist investigates yields, an economist asks about wages and
prices, a sociologist looks into patron–client relations, an administrator examines
the tax collection record, a doctor investigates hygiene and health, a nutritionist
studies diets, and a family planner tries to find out about attitudes to numbers of
children. Some of these visiting professionals may be sensitive to the integrated
nature of deprivation, but none is likely to fit all the pieces together, nor to be
aware of all the negative factors affecting poorer people.
Specialisation prevents the case study which sees life from the point of view
of the rural poor themselves; but where such case studies are written (e.g. Gulati,
1981; Howes, 1980; Ledesma, 1977; Lewis, 1959) their broader spread helps
understanding and points to interventions which specialists miss. In contrast,
narrow professionalism of whatever persuasion leads to diagnoses and prescrip-
tions which underestimate deprivation by recognising and confronting only a
part of the problem.

The unseen and the unknown

The argument must not be overstated. To all of these biases, exceptions can be
found. There are government programmes, voluntary organisations, and research
projects that seek out those who are more remote and poorer. Some projects
and programmes, such as those for the weaker sections and vulnerable classes
in rural India, have an anti-poverty focus. Person biases can work the other way:
women’s groups and women’s programmes attract attention; doctors see those
40 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

who are sick; nutritionists concentrate on the malnourished; agriculturalists

and epidemiologists alike may have professional reasons for travel during the
rains; and during an agricultural season, a daytime visit to a village may provide
encounters with the sick, aged and very young, and not with the able-bodied
who are out in the fields. Such exceptions must be noted. At the same time, there
are dangers of underestimating the force of the biases by failing to see how they
interlock and by underestimating their incidence.
The way in which spatial, project, person, dry season, politeness/timidity and
professional biases interact can be seen by analysing almost any example of an
urban-based outsider investigating rural conditions. With many ‘insights’ and
beliefs about rural life, the several biases can and do reinforce each other. The
prosperity after harvest of a male farmer on a project beside a main road close to a
capital city may colour the perceptions of a succession of officials and dignitaries.
The plight of a poor widow starving and sick in the wet season in a remote and
inaccessible area may never in any way impinge on the consciousness of anyone
outside her own community.
Nor are those professionals and rural staff who originate from rural areas, who
have a home, second home, or farm there, or who live and work there, immune
from these tendencies. Three examples can illustrate that their perceptions too
can be powerfully distorted by the biases.
The first example is from a densely populated part of western Kenya. Junior
agricultural extension staff and home economics workers were each given a
random sample of hundred households to survey. The households were in the area
where they worked. After the survey, those who had conducted it all considered
that the sample had been unfairly weighted against the more progressive and
better-educated households, over-representing those that were poorer. One of
the agricultural staff complained that of his hundred households, only one had
an exotic grade cow, and that there would have been several more if the sample
had been truly representative. In reality, however, in that area there was only one
exotic grade cow for every two hundred households, so each sample of hundred
had only a fifty per cent chance of including one at all. A home economics worker
said that she was appalled at the poverty she had encountered among her sample.
On two occasions she had burst into tears at what she had found. She had not
known that there was such misery in the area. ‘These people,’ she said, ‘do not
come to my meetings.’
For the same area, David Leonard (1977, p178) has documented the marked
tendency for extension staff to visit progressive farmers and not to visit non-
innovators (57 per cent of visits to the 10 per cent who were progressives and
only 6 per cent to the 47 per cent who were non-innovators). Thus, it is not
only outsiders who are affected by anti-poverty biases. Local-level rural staff are
also affected, and unless there are strong countervailing incentives, they too will
under-perceive deprivation in the very areas where they work.
The second example is from a study by Moore and Wickremesinghe (1980,
p98) in Sri Lanka. After observing how the houses of the poor are physically
hidden from the core of the villages they studied, and how public officers appear
not to see them very often, Moore and Wickremesinghe noted:
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 41

Although most of the rural population ... are poor and dependent in part or
whole on wage labour, one hears comments of the nature:‘Of course, most of the
people around here have some job or little business in Colombo.’

The implication of such comments was that most people in the villages had other
incomes and a modest well-being. This might be true of those who lived at the
centres of the villages, who were better off and with whom there was contact; but
it was unlikely to be true of many of those who lived on the peripheries, who were
poorer, and with whom there was no contact.
In the third example, a senior official in a ministry in a capital city stated that
in his rural home area no one ever went short of food. But a social anthropologist
working in the area reported families seriously short of food during the annual
hungry season; twice women were interviewed who said they had not eaten for
three days. There was, however, food in the shops nearby, giving the impression
that there was no reason for anyone to go hungry.
Perhaps this phenomenon is world-wide, as marked in rich urban as in poor
rural agricultural society. Compared with others, the poor are unseen and un-
known. Their deprivation is often worse than is recognised by those who are not
poor.
Finally, we may note additional factors often missed by rural development
tourists, local-level staff and even researchers. It is not just a case of the invisible
poorer people. There are also other invisible dimensions: international influences
on rural deprivation; social relations (patron–client, indebtedness, webs of
obligation and exploitation); and trends over time. The very act of being in a rural
area and trying to learn about it creates biases of insight and interpretation to-
wards what can be seen; and the observer’s specialisation increases the likelihood
of one-sided diagnoses, explanations and prescriptions. Poor people on disaster
courses may not be recognised. A nutritionist may see malnutrition but not the
seasonal indebtedness, the high cost of medical treatment, the distress sales of
land, and the local power structure which generate it. A doctor may see infant
mortality but not the declining real wages which drive mothers to desperation, still
less the causes of those declining real wages. Visibility and specialisation combine
to show simple surface symptoms rather than deeper combinations of causes. The
poor are little seen, and even less is the nature of their poverty understood.

The biases reviewed (2008)

The six biases – spatial, project, person, seasonal, diplomatic and professional
– continue to manifest in many ways, and continue to interlock. To these can now
be added a seventh, security bias. Whether there is a new urban bias is open to
question. And to some degree offsetting all these is a new degree of understanding
and acceptance that visitors may wish to visit poorer places and meet poorer
people. To the original analysis there are now illustrations and qualifications; and
readers will have more to contribute to what was, until the recent decline of rural
visits, becoming a flourishing folklore.13
42 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The biases continue to reinforce misperceptions. How this could happen

was an ahha! moment in the early 1970s research in India. We were working in
12 villages. At different times, and separately, the four of us who were the main
researchers – Barbara Harriss, John Harriss, Nanjamma Chinnappa and myself
– visited each of the villages, often with the investigator working in that village.
In conversation we discussed the villages’ characteristics and built up an image
of each. The ‘ahha!’ was when we realized that we had been taken to the same
farmers and visited the same fields, and were reifying and generalizing from
similar slanted experiences, reinforced through repetition and agreement.

Spatial bias

‘Airport bias’ eluded me in the early 1980s. It may have become more common.
In the late 1980s, the chief executive of ActionAid issued an instruction that all
ActionAid growth projects had to be within four hours’ drive of an airport (pers.
comm. Tom Thomas). Dr Reddy, the director of the Indian Institute of Public
Administration, has noted that the location of airports is a determining factor in
where research occurs (pers. comm. David Hulme). The existence of poverty
and accessibility to airports interact to influence choice of location so that places
which have high poverty or ‘backward’ indicators which are one or two hours
from airports tend to get selected.
Airport and other spatial biases were evident around 1990 with the
Maheshwaram watershed development programme in Andhra Pradesh, about
an hour’s drive from the Hyderabad International Airport. This was so much
visited that the staff had routinized what they called a ‘two-hour treatment’ and
a ‘four-hour treatment’ for visitors. The reality in the watershed was that on the
sloping land the anti-erosion works created rather than prevented erosion: stone
gully plugs intended to reduce erosion instead increased it as they were bypassed
and water cut into the banks; and water built up behind the irregular contour
earth bunds made by bulldozers and broke through to start new gullies. Farmers,
moreover, were angry at the damage done to their land without their permission:
one told me that he woke up one morning to find a bulldozer making these
destructive bunds on his land but he felt unable to stop it, and did not want to
get on bad terms with the government.
In this watershed, though, the route on which visitors were taken followed
roads on the flat land of ridges where the erosion caused by the anti-erosion
works was not visible, except in one place. As an important World Bank visitor
passed this place on the way in, one of the government district staff pointed out
something on the other side of the road. On the way out, the distraction was
repeated as we passed it again. At no point during the four hours did the visitor
see any of the extensive damage done by this World Bank-funded programme. He
was, however, no naive newcomer to this sort of treatment, and repeatedly asked
to meet a farmer. This proved embarrassing, time-consuming and difficult to
arrange; perhaps farmers were fed up with visitors and refused to give their time,
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 43

or perhaps officials judged there would be too much danger of the truth coming
out, to the extent, that is, that they were themselves aware of it.
Some spatial biases, as I described them in 1983, need qualifying. ‘Roadside
bias’ remains widespread. Those who are better off still speculate in buying
roadside land, and build their houses there. But sometimes the poorest people are
to be found at roadsides. In famines in Ethiopia, those who are desperate often
migrate to the main roads in search of relief. In his Rural Rides, that pioneering
and polemical rural development tourist, William Cobbett, describing his horse
ride from Cricklade to Cirencester in England, observed:

The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-
beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a
pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the road
side, where the space has been wider than the road demanded ... it seems as if
they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found
shelter under the banks on the road side! (Morris, 1984, p21. Emphasis in
the original)

Perhaps it was only on the public roadside that they could find any space to live
on that was not private property. In the 1990s I noticed a similar phenomenon in
the railway reserve between Mombasa and Nairobi where very poor looking huts
had been constructed between the railway line and its boundary fence.
Within cities and villages, the biases of cores persist with the poorer people
often at the peripheries. But poor people can also be seen in core places. Beggars
are an example, when they are not driven away. And in India, landless labourers
seeking work sometimes congregate in the centre of villages in early morning to
wait for those who may employ them for the day.

Project bias

This is alive and well, even though among lenders and donors projects have
fallen somewhat from grace. That said, the project subspecies island of salva-
tion has proved resilient, and finds varied habitats. In the early 1980s, visiting
Sukhomajri, the village in Haryana famous for its exceptionally equitable and
sustainable natural resource management, I found myself in trouble because I
had arrived ahead of a group of prominent visitors and taken the best guide. The
plaques by the eucalyptus by the Sukhomajri school were a Who’s Who of the
agricultural establishment of India and of the World Bank who had planted them
on their visits. In 2003, visiting Community-Led Total Sanitation in Bangladesh,
the salvation was on a literal, if seasonal, island, exceptional for its isolation and
cohesive minority population. I arrived by boat just as another boat was leaving
with senior staff of an international non-governmental organization (INGO), and
in due course signed my name after theirs in the visitors’ book. More recently, the
Millennium Villages in African countries have received so much special treatment
and so much publicity that they must surely join the family of earlier islands of
salvation, also much visited unless visitors are kept away.
44 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Person bias

Person bias remains strong and serious. It has been reduced by the shift in gender
awareness, and a weakening in some, perhaps most societies of the barriers to
women talking to visitors, especially men, though in some these remain strong or
almost overwhelming.14 It has also been offset by changes in diplomatic bias (see
below). Questions always remain about who is being left out, and these as ever
often include old people and children.

Seasonal bias

This has not diminished except to the extent that many tarmac road networks
are more extensive, and to some degree where helicopters are used. They are
much maligned and mocked. Much can be misperceived on their short stops. For
example, arriving by helicopter, it must be easy to overlook or underestimate the
degree of seasonal isolation since this is not confronted or experienced through
days of difficult travel on the ground. All the same, the access they can provide
to places seasonally cut off can be remarkable.
The tendency for Northerners to flock from their cold winters to warmer
climes continues and is recognized in Bangladesh by calling them sheether pakhi
– winter birds who come in January to March. Seasonally there can, too, be
questions of whose convenience counts? When the Select Committee on Overseas
Aid of the British House of Commons wanted to visit India in the winter, the
Indian authorities requested postponement; it was inconvenient to receive visitors
so near the end of their financial year, which was 31 March. But the convenience
of the MPs prevailed, and they too visited at what for many poor people in rural
India was their least bad time of year – cool, dry, relatively healthy and after
harvest.

From diplomatic to poverty bias

Diplomatic bias, not visiting or seeing poor people, is still there, but has to a
degree been offset and even in places reversed. The widespread rhetoric on pov-
erty has made it more acceptable in many countries and regions for a visitor to
ask to go to the poorest villages or slums, or the poorest part of a village or slum
or to meet poorer people. Even here, though, there can be a person bias, of a new
sort; the poor people met may be practised, rehearsed and reliable performers,
as I have experienced with at least one women’s organization. And in one Indian
village, it was the same Dalit, with the same milch buffalo supplied through the
Integrated Rural Development Programme, who was paraded to a succession of
visitors to whom he dutifully explained the benefits he and his family had gained
from that misperceived and overrated programme.15
In some cases diplomatic bias has been turned on its head and replaced by a
poverty bias. In Kenya, tourism proper has seized on the opportunities presented
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 45

by the interest in poverty through organized visits to Kibera in Nairobi, one of

Africa’s largest slums. The general manager of the Kenya-based Victoria Safaris
was reported to have said: ‘People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wild-
life. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I’ve come up with a new
thing – slum tours.’ A proportion of tourists’ fees go to a local project. But it is by
no means only tourists who visit Kibera. It has become ‘the de rigueur stop off
for caring foreign dignitaries . . .’ including the Secretary General of the UN, Ban
Ki-Moon. Reported comments have been that ‘any journalist wanting a quick
African poverty story can find it there in half an hour . . .’, ‘. . . there’s the plethora of
self-help, art, dance, drama, and sports projects going on in Kibera but people just
want to talk about poverty, poverty, poverty all the time’. Reactions of Kenyans
have been mixed.16

Professional bias

This remains powerful, but the multidimensionality of poverty is better rec-

ognized. The vocabulary of development common to disciplines has expanded
to more often include words like vulnerability, marginalization, exclusion,
discrimination, gender, powerlessness, rights and social justice. The widely
adopted sustainable livelihoods framework has provided common neutral ground
on which professions and disciplines can meet, and has broadened professional
perspectives, including as it does the five capitals – natural, physical, human,
social and financial, and also processes and institutions.
To these original six, security bias can now be added, and it can be asked
whether there is a new urban bias.

Security bias

As pointed out by David Hirschmann (2003, p488), this is probably becoming

more important in development work. Considerations of security discourage or
exclude visits to areas where the visitor might not be safe. The cumulative effect
of this exclusion is that visitors lack experience of being personally insecure, and
may fail to appreciate what physical insecurity means to many poor people and
the priority many accord to peace and civil order.
Security can be a legitimate concern of hosts. It can also be a convenient
excuse for denying access to an area or a group of people. I believe this has been
used to prevent me staying in villages overnight, when the real reasons have been
the trouble involved and other concerns, however considerate, about food and
toilet.
A subset of security bias concerns sickness. When in the 1970s, it was sug-
gested that every donor official should be exposed to and learn about rural life
and especially rural poverty by spending two weeks in every year actually living
in a village, a senior UN official objected on the grounds of the health risks to his
staff (Chambers, 1978). In 2003, when a serious form of malaria broke out in
46 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

part of Gujarat where SEWA International was organizing immersions for World
Bank staff and others, the visitors were diverted to another area unaffected by
the outbreak. This cannot have been an easy decision. The issues here are not
simple, but they need to be recognized, confronted and the trade-offs seriously
assessed.

Urban bias?
Whether there is a new urban bias is open to question. Soweto in South Africa has
for many years attracted outsider visitors. Urban slums like Kibera in Nairobi, as
we have seen, are increasingly visited. It can be asked whether with less time for
visits of any sort those who make them now go to urban more than rural areas.
Urban slums and squatter settlements are more accessible, especially during
rains. Urban visits may be more convenient, easier to arrange, easier to cancel,
and above all take less time. On the other hand, what is close by can be more
threatening, and more habitually shut out. Of donor agency staff a well-informed
observer has written:

I know very few who have ventured into urban slums – fear of something on
their own back doorstep seems even greater – perhaps I’ll be recognised and
pestered? It is less easy to put out of mind ... (pers. comm. Dee Jupp)

Concluding
There is nothing final about this listing. Biases are many, and they change. And
crucially they can be tackled in many ways (Chapter 8, pp156–158). At least
as important as offsetting those named, is the practice of being critically aware
and reflecting on what is happening on a visit, of what is being seen, shown and
said, of what is not being seen, shown or said, and how this limits or distorts the
reality perceived. Each actor can examine their own experience and identify and
enjoy the mistakes made, the traps fallen into, and the successes in avoiding them.
This too can generate stories to be told against oneself, help us to take ourselves
less seriously than we take our work, and contribute to the folklore of shared
understanding and the repertoire of how to do better.

Notes
1 This section is from my book (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First,
pp7–25, Longman now Harlow, Pearson Scientific, London
2 Changes in gender relations and an organization’s policies mean that women’s
careers are perhaps on the whole less disrupted by pregnancy and parenthood
than they were, but it still happens on a wide scale.
3 The term ‘rural development tourism’ was adapted from John P. Lewis, who
in 1974 described himself as a ‘rural area development tourist’ in India.
 Rural Development Tourism: Poverty Unperceived 47

4 The male biased syntax is deliberate and descriptive. Most rural develop-
ment tourists are men.
5 Another problem is the cavalcade. The more the layers of hierarchy – inter-
national, national, regional, district, sub-district – and the more the depart-
ments and institutions involved, so the number of vehicles increases. This
adds to dust and mud if the tarmac is left, and to delay even if it is not. The
record is held by a visit in Indonesia to inspect a road being financed by
United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Douglas
Tinsley reports that there were 47 vehicles involved. Ferries had to be used
where bridges were not complete. At one ferry, it took three hours to get the
whole procession across. But there was a positive side, one supposes. The
christening of the road was substantial, and the visitors cannot have been
too rushed in their inspection of the quality of the roadwork, at least near the
ferries.
6 ‘They do not know that there are living people here.’
7 This does not necessarily reflect adversely on the choice of villages, since
peri-urban villages, like any others, are a legitimate subject of study.
8 An early example is provided by Zambia’s fuel shortage which led to fuel
rationing, following Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence in
1965. One effect was that the Universities of Nottingham and Zambia joint
research project concerned with the productivity of agricultural labour was
restricted to work in two areas instead of three, and these were areas which
were relatively well developed agriculturally, having had large inputs of
education, extension and communication (Elliott 1970, p648).
9 Or close to the famous tourist site for the VIP, such as the Taj Mahal at
Agra in India. J. K. Galbraith has written that as hopes and enthusiasm for
rural community development in India waned, ‘a number of show villages
continued to impress the more susceptible foreign visitors’. He records this
incident:

In the spring of 1961, Lyndon Johnson, then vice-president, was taken

to see one of these villages in the neighbourhood of Agra. It was, of the
several hundred thousand villages of India, the same one that Dwight D.
Eisenhower had been shown a year or two before. It was impressive in its
cleanliness, simple cultural life, handicrafts, and evidence of progressive
agricultural techniques. Johnson, an old hand in problems of agricultural
uplift and difficult to deceive, then demanded to see the adjacent village a
mile or two away. After strong protesting words about its lack of preparation
to receive him, he was taken there. This village, one judged, had undergone
no major technical, cultural, or hygienic change in the previous thousand
years. (1979, pp106–107)

10 Mea culpa. In the 1960s, so many of us students and other researchers were
attracted to work on the (well-documented, well-organized and well-known)
Mwea Irrigation Settlement in Kenya that farmers complained about
interview saturation.
48 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

11 In February 1979, two British Members of Parliament visited the Anand

Cooperatives in India. They saw and were impressed by the delivery of milk
from small producers to one centre. Inside, hung a photograph of James
Callaghan, the British Prime Minister, taken during his visit to the same
centre. Asked if they would like to see a second centre they readily assented.
Once inside they found another photograph, this time of the visit to that
centre of Judith Hart, the British Minister of Overseas Development.
12 For the statements in this paragraph see Longhurst and Payne (1979) and
Chambers et al (1981).
13 Any reader with anecdotes and advice to add, please write to me:
[email protected] and indicate whether you wish to be acknowledged as
the source or prefer to be anonymous. Who knows, we might in due course
be able to put together an anthology.
14 In May 2006 in three days of visits to rural areas outside Kabul, I was only
able to have a conversation with two females. I was told that I was excep-
tionally privileged. I have never experienced such a spectacular male bias,
or such meagre scope to offset it.
15 The IRDP was subject to innumerable questionnaire evaluations which
were shown by Jean Dreze (1990) in a devastating, detailed and entirely
credible article to have built-in positive biases while participant observers
in villages often found the programme did more harm than good. Sub-
sequently, attempts were made to rectify some of the worst defects of the
programme, but I doubt whether these went far to offset the deep flaws of
concept and implementation.
16 I am grateful to Tobias Denskus for drawing my attention to the report
by Andrew Cawthorne and Wangui Kanina on which this paragraph
is based. See www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L06818999.htm
Since writing this Kibera has become tragically notorious for violence fol-
lowing the flawed election of late 2007.
 3

Microenvironments:
Observing the Unobserved

. . . you see, but you do not obser ve. Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson
(Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891)

Abstract
Professionals underperceive the complexity and diversity of farming and livelihood
systems for several interlocking reasons. These include the sites chosen for research and
trials, the biases of field visits, short time-horizons, and sheer lack of observation. One
consequence is that microenvironments like home gardens and silt trap gully fields
are often unobserved and their significance not recognized. They are found in many
forms and in almost all conditions. Their properties point to their importance: they are
often specialized in their use, with concentrations of nutrients, protected, and diverse
and complex in their content. They can provide reserves and fallbacks for bad times,
and restrain migration. As sites for innovation and experiment, their complexity and
diversity give farmers, with their flexibility, a comparative advantage over scientists.
To further exploit the potential of microenvironments requires secure rights and tenure
for farmers, and on the part of agricultural and social scientists more acute observation
and awareness and a participatory farmer-first approach. Ability to observe and
notice things, and then to retain visual images are skills neglected in many ‘developed’
societies.

Microenvironments unobserved (1990)1

As we enter the 1990s, the dominant paradigm of development expressed by
normal professionals and implemented through normal bureaucracy is still top-
down and centre-outwards. Power is concentrated in hands of the old men in high
offices and central places. Knowledge is generated in universities, laboratories,
engineering workshops and research stations, and then transferred packaged for
adoption. The approach is centralised, standardised, and simple. Non-adoption
by farmers is still attributed to their ignorance and to imperfect communication.
When farmers do not adopt, it is not the technology that is to blame but a failure
of communication, top-down and one-way, from scientist through to farmer.
50 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

In recent years this Transfer of Technology (TOT) paradigm has been in-
creasingly questioned, even in the citadels of normal professionalism. Reductionist
research, high input packages, and top-down extension have had their successes:
in the uniform and controlled conditions of industrial and Green Revolution
agriculture they have raised output per unit of land. But the sustainability of
that increase is open to question, and TOT does not work well with the more
complex, diverse and risk-prone rain-fed agriculture of much of the poorer
South. Explanations of non-adoption are now increasingly sought not in the
ignorance of farmers, not in the methods of communication, not even so much
the lack of access to inputs, but in the technology itself, the concept of package,
and the processes whereby the technology is generated.
With this shift of understanding, a new family of complementary approaches
to agricultural research and extension have evolved. These are variously described
as farmer-back-to-farmer (Rhoades and Booth, 1982), farmer participatory
research (Farrington and Martin, 1988), and farmer first (Lightfoot et al, 1987).
These seek to reverse centralist tendencies, emphasising farmers’ participation
in most or all stages of research, and farmers’ own analysis, choice and
experimentation. The package of practices is replaced by a basket of choices.
Searching for what farmers need becomes an important activity for scientists and
extensionists. While TOT simplifies and standardises, farmer first enables farmers
to do better by complicating and diversifying their farming systems.

Complexity and diversity underperceived

In both agricultural and social sciences, however, complexity and diversity are
underperceived, and consequently undervalued.

Sites for research and trials

Sites chosen for research and trials tend to screen out topographical and soil
variability. One of the first measures undertaken when the International Crops
Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics (ICRISAT) was founded was to
bulldoze and smooth out some of the surface irregularities of the land, making it
more amenable to normal experimental procedures. Sites for on-farm trials may
similarly be selected for being flat or having an even inclined slope. According to
textbooks, soil variation is a problem in selecting land for trials: the patch of land
chosen as a block must be as uniform as possible. For research purposes then,
uniform conditions are actively created or sought out.

Field visits

Field visits by scientists are vulnerable to the biases of rural development tour-
ism – spatial, project, person, seasonal, professional and diplomatic [Chapter 2].
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 51

They then see field trials, not indigenous experiments; earth bunds covered in
good grass near the main road, not the breached bunds which have contributed
to erosion further away. Sometimes roads follow flat ridges, as in parts of Kenya,
running through fields of arable crops which are then observed and walked
through, to the neglect of the steeper slopes and intensively cultivated valley
bottoms (Dewees, 1989). Professionals notice and ask about what concerns their
specialisation. Since so many are commodity specialists, this focuses attention
on field crops. Prudent officials who are hosts and guides follow the same route
and the same rigmarole with a succession of visitors, and themselves have their
selective perceptions reinforced through repetition of what they see and say.

Short time horizons

In the on-farm situation, it is less farmers and much more non-farming pro-
fessionals who have short time horizons. Agronomists tend to be concerned with
field trials over one or at most a few seasons. Agricultural engineers and soil
conservation staff usually work at one-off conservation, carrying out physical
works and then moving on to another area. They miss the farmers’ experience of
what happens to their works over the subsequent years.

Sheer blindness

Observation that is needed and ‘natural’ to cultivators and pastoralists has often
been trained out of professionals. Book and classroom learning de-skill and
dampen curiosity, deterring enquiry beyond narrow physical and disciplinary
domains. It is also astonishing how easy it is to fail to notice and ask about
something of significance. On a recent village Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA),
when trying to observe points of interest, I nearly walked right past a superbly
constructed and exploited silt deposition field. And that was while walking a
transect and consciously trying to observe. Ken Wilson reports (1989, p374)
from Zimbabwe:

During one trip with senior agricultural extension officers, in which I was
drawing attention to the positive effects that trees were having on early season
crop growth, one of them pondered: why is it that I have been telling farmers to
remove them all my life, without ever bothering to look at the effects?

Combined, these biases in perception screen out much of the diversity and com-
plexity of farming systems. To be sure there have been significant shifts among
agricultural scientists, recognising the value of the complications of intercropping
and of agroforestry. But even with these concerns, scientists and extensionists
are still inclined to imprint linear and large-scale patterns, which may or may not
make sense. Line sowing is preferred to broadcast sowing; intercropping is in tidy
lines; and agroforestry is often taken to mean alley cropping, with trees and crops
in straight lines. Trials on farmers’ fields are placed on flat or evenly sloping land.
52 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

However ‘good’ the reasons are, the result has been that much has been missed,
including farmers’ own technology, their experiments, interlinkages within their
farming systems, changes over the seasons, and farmers’ long-term strategies for
soil, water and nutrient concentration.

Livelihoods

In the social sciences, reductionism and professional convenience have also

generated a simplified view of rural people’s livelihoods. Livelihood can here be
defined as means to gain adequate stocks and flows of food and cash to meet
basic needs, together with reserves and assets to offset risk, ease shocks, and meet
contingencies (WCED, 1987, p3).
In practice, the livelihood strategies of poor people, including resource-poor
farmers, are often complex and diverse. Different household members undertake
different activities in different places at different times of the year. Besides
farming themselves, these can include labouring for other farmers, share-rearing
of livestock, work on or for non-farm enterprises, migration, craft work, petty
trading, and the gathering, consuming and selling of a large range of common
property resources. The livelihoods of poor people can be both complex and dif-
ferent even in the same village (Beck, 1989; Heyer, 1989).
These complexities and differences are underperceived for many reasons:

• The stereotype of poor people is as a simple, uniform, unskilled and inert

mass.
• The lack of direct exposure of urban-based professionals to the realities of
poor people’s livelihood strategies.
• Survey questionnaires for social surveys which are drawn up in offices and
omit categories of which urban-based professionals are unaware, thereby
excluding many livelihood activities.
• Survey investigators and respondents whose interest lies in short and simple
answers which finish the interview faster.
• The tendency of poor people to give prudent replies to questions and to
understate their sources of food and income.
• Incomplete accounts in surveys of activities which take place at times of the
year other than that of the interview.
• Neglect of the economic activities of women and children.

In consequence, survey data and professional opinion sustain an oversimple view

of how poor people gain their livelihoods.

Microenvironments unobserved
These general biases in both agricultural and social sciences combine to hide
microenvironments (MEs) from sight, to understate or exclude them in statistics,
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 53

and to undervalue their importance for livelihoods. In addition, there are other
factors specific to the nature of MEs which conceal them from view or insulate
them from attention. These can be understood by considering examples of MEs
and reflecting on some of their characteristics.
Most agriculture creates or alters microenvironments, through ploughing,
irrigation, the micro-climatic effects of crop canopies, effects of grazing and
browsing, and so on. The MEs with which we are concerned are more separate
and distinct. A microenvironment is a distinct small-scale environment which
differs from its surroundings, presenting sharp gradients or contrasts in physical
conditions internally and/or externally. Microenvironments can be isolated, or
contiguous and repetitive, and natural or made by people or domestic animals.
Microenvironments include:

• home gardens (also known as homestead, or household, kitchen, backyard or

dooryard gardens)
• vegetable and horticultural patches (protected, with wells etc.)
• river banks and riverine strips
• levees and natural terraces
• valley bottoms (fadama, wadi, mbuga, vlei etc.)
• wet and dry watercourses
• rainstreams (dividing and braiding, etc.)
• dry river beds (nallahs, wadis, luggas etc.)
• drainage lines
• alluvial pans
• artificial terraces
• silt trap fields (depositional fields, gully fields etc.)
• raised fields and ditches or ponds (especially in wetlands)
• water harvesting in its many forms
• hedges and windbreaks
• clumps, groves or lines of trees or bushes
• pockets of fertile soil (termitaria, former livestock pens etc.)2
• sheltered corners or strips, by aspect of slope, configuration etc.
• plots protected from livestock
• flood recession zones
• small flood plains
• springs and patches of high groundwater and seepage strips and pockets of
impeded drainage
• lake basins
• ponds, including fishponds
• animal wallows (e.g. for buffalos).

Apart from personal observation, the main sources for this listing are Richards,
1985; Pacey and Cullis, 1986; Altieri, 1989; Harrison, 1987; Wilken, 1987; and
IIED, 1989.
There are many reasons why professionals have neglected MEs such as these.
They include:
54 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

1 Smallness and dispersal

MEs are often half-hidden. They are usually small and dispersed, and many are
low-lying. The small or intermediate scale of MEs combines with topography
and with the way in which water and soil collect in low places to hide many of
them in dips, depressions, valleys, gullies and watercourses where they are easily
overlooked by a casual visitor. Professional attention focuses on other scales.
Gene Wilken has noted (1987, p240) that ‘most research has been limited at the
technical level to horizontal plant spacing and at the aggregate level to optimum
farm size and economies of scale.’ Normal soils’ maps also miss much. In India
their scale is 1:500,000. In both Kenya and Zambia, it is said that soils’ maps,
because of their scale, have omitted the crucial MEs of riverine strips and areas
of seasonal standing water and moisture (known as dambos in Zambia and
Zimbabwe).

2 Research station conditions

Most research is conducted on research stations where undulations and irregu-
larities tend to be eliminated and their ME potential ignored. Some ME types
created by farmers may not be feasible or found at all on research stations – for
example silt deposition fields. And where MEs are created on research stations,
as with the watershed work at ICRISAT, it is difficult to avoid creating special
conditions quite different from those of farmers.

3 Sequential creation
Most professionals have shorter time horizons than most farmers. Soil and water
conservation staff with targets seek to complete works within the financial year.
But many farmers’ MEs take years to develop. Some silt deposition fields in
gullies are built up sequentially over years, with rock walls raised annually. Home
gardens, and areas near homesteads, where farmyard manure and household
organic wastes are used, gain in fertility over time. Runoff watercourse training
may be developed gradually over many years, as may many forms of water
harvesting which require physical works. Making raised fields and ditch ponds in
wetlands in Indonesia leads to sequential cropping in which tree crops gradually
come to dominate after 10 to 15 years (Watson, 1988).

4 Gender
Some MEs, especially home gardens, are mainly the concern of women, and
women’s concerns are normally neglected by male professionals who are still in
the overwhelming majority.

5 ‘Unimportant’ crops
MEs often grow crops (vegetables, multipurpose trees, less common root crops
etc.) other than the staple foodgrains, root crops and non-food cash crops
which are the priorities of research and extension, which are marketed in bulk,
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 55

and which are estimated and enumerated in official statistics. In Indonesia, the
products of home gardens are mostly consumed locally and rarely appear in the
statistical record (Soemarwoto and Conway, 1989, p5).

6 Misfit with normal research

Normal research simplifies in order to measure. But the complexity, diversity
and ‘untidiness’ of many MEs, their non-linear shapes and irregular surfaces,
do not lend themselves to standard agronomic trials or measurement, or to
mechanisation or high capital inputs. Many MEs use organic, not the preferred
inorganic, manures. Many are based on subsoil conditions and rooting patterns
which would be costly and tedious to examine and observe. And many develop
and exploit diverse complications such as linkages between earth shaping with soil
and rocks, the channelling, harvesting and retention of water, a variety of crops
and vegetables, livestock including fish, multiple canopies including bushes and
trees, and mulches and manures.
Many illustrations of the above could be given. Paul Richards comments on
the significance of the niche of run-off (seep-zone) agriculture, in parts of West
Africa, on fields which trap moisture and silt from higher up a valley profile,
and notes its neglect by ‘formal sector’ researchers (Richards, 1985, pp81–84).
In an RRA in Ethiopia, only by walking a systematic transect was it revealed to
outsiders that in a semi-arid environment farmers had, over the years, developed
an intensive system for trapping and concentrating silt, water and nutrients
in gullies, and growing high value crops including coffee, papaya and chat (a
narcotic) in the MEs protected by the gully walls (ERCS, 1988). In India, RRAs
undertaken in 1989 by MYRADA in Gulbarga District in Karnataka, by Youth for
Action in Mahbubnagar District in Andhra Pradesh, and by the Aga Khan Rural
Support Programme in Bharuch District in Gujarat have variously identified
the creation of MEs to harvest water and soil as prevalent local technology
significant economically but in no case recognized or supported by the official
soil conservation programmes.
Home gardens are frequently overlooked or misinterpreted. In Bangladesh,
Anil Gupta found (1989, pp28–30) that scientists believed that households used
homestead space and other resources inefficiently, and that they planted most
trees, bushes and vegetables randomly or just let them grow where they came
up. But a survey by women scientists, and maps made of home gardens, revealed
great complexity and what appeared to be some order in what had been assumed
to be disorder.
MEs are thus largely unobserved. Spatially they are hidden by their dispersal.
Professionally they are hidden by their irregular untidiness and their misfit with
the mainstream priorities of the major disciplines. And temporally, they are
hidden by their use in only certain seasons.
Yet in aggregate, they are at present of major significance to sustainable live-
lihoods. Because of their generally better moisture and fertility conditions than
their surroundings, they provide the more reliable component of a farming house-
hold’s food supply. Moreover, in many environments, MEs have been developed
56 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

as a form of intensification linked with increasing population density. In future,

as rural populations in many places increase yet further, MEs will be developed
even more, and will become even more significant for the livelihoods of poor
farming households.

Properties of microenvironments
There are a number of important properties and functions of MEs.

Specialisation

Because MEs differ from their more uniform surroundings, their use also usually
differs. An example is paddy grown in silt deposition fields in nallahs in semi-arid
India. But specialisation, though general, is not universal. Some gully fields in
Ethiopia are used to grow the same crop – sorghum – as in neighbouring, more
extensive fields, though it can be expected with higher yields and lower risk.

Concentration

Farmers’ own soil and water ‘conservation’ is often soil, water and nutrient ‘con-
centration’. Soil concentration occurs when soil or silt is dug from common land
and carted to build up fields and fertility. Or erosion is exploited for the low cost
transport it provides for silt which is then trapped by rocks, brushwood, trash
lines, vegetative barriers or earth builds. Water concentration occurs when it is
channelled, captured and retained in water harvesting. Nutrient concentration
occurs through silt deposition, farmyard manure in and near homesteads and in
livestock pens, leaf litter under bushes and trees, and organic manures carted to
the ME site. And these forms of soil, water and nutrient concentration interact
synergistically (see e.g. Kolarkar et al, 1983).

Protection

For domestic and wild animals, many MEs present attractive islands of green
in dry expanses, and they are therefore vulnerable to grazing and browsing.
Protection is essential except where, as with some eucalypts, plants are unpalatable.
Fences, hedges and barriers are necessary and common. Difficulties in protection
against animals can deter the creation or exploitation of MEs, or determine what
is grown in them. As for climate, many MEs are protected to create their own
microclimates, often sheltered from excessive sun, wind and/or water.

Diversity and complexity

Diversity in species of plant and animal, and complexity in biological relation-

ships between them, are common. Multiple canopies, agroforestry combinations,
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 57

vining plants, variety of species, and plants at various stages of growth are com-
mon characteristics. The movement and arrangement of soil and stones often
make the land surface less even and more varied. The untidiness of some MEs
incorporates a large number of interactions.

Nutrition and health

Apart from the quantity and relative stability of the flows of food and income
to households from MEs, some, especially home gardens, provide two other
benefits: medicinal plants, and vegetables, fruits and other foods for diversified
diets which also include more vitamins. Recent findings of dramatic drops in
child (aged 6 months to 5 years) mortality with vitamin A supplementation (a
60 per cent reduction in a study near Madurai in South India, and a 45 per cent
reduction in a study in Indonesia (pers. comm. Saroj Pachauri)) point to the key
potential of home gardens as a source of literally life-saving vitamins.

Reserves and fallbacks

MEs frequently provide reserves to meet contingencies, and for lean seasons and
bad years. Trees to which people have clear rights increasingly serve as savings
banks which can be cashed to meet seasonal or sudden needs (Chambers and
Leach, 1989). A very poor family in Kakamega District in Kenya had, in 1988, a
line of Eucalyptus at the bottom of their half acre plot, which they cut and sold,
they said, in the lean times of February and March ‘to buy food and soap’. In
Sudan, wadi cultivation is especially significant in bad years (pers. comm. Ian
Scoones). In Zimbabwe, key resource habitat patches are important for cattle
in bad years (Scoones, 1988a). Leaf fodder from trees on private land was used
by some farmers in Gujarat as their last fallback for feeding their livestock dur-
ing the great drought of 1987–88. By accumulating reserves of value, and by
providing output which lasts longer, MEs thus contribute to the sustainability of
livelihoods.

Restraining migration

Following the analysis of Ester Boserup (1965), the technology used in agricul-
ture, in this case for MEs, is related to population pressure and labour availability.
MEs will then be more and more developed and exploited as population pressure
increases. In some environments there may be a critical phase when more labour
is needed to develop, protect, maintain and exploit them, and when paths diverge:
either people migrate, seasonally or permanently, and leave an unsustainable and
risky farming system; or they stay and invest in more sustainable intensification.
One illustration is water harvesting near Yatenga on the Mossi Plateau in Burkina
Faso, where investment of labour in laying out rock bunds and digging pockets
for crops has led to higher and more stable production, and reportedly less
58 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

out-migration. MEs’ greater productivity, stability and spread of production

period can thus locally support more livelihoods.

Innovation, experiment and adaptability

MEs play a vital part in innovations, experimentation and adaptation. Some wild
plants which are candidates for domestication are tried first in home gardens. Anil
Gupta reports that a survey by women scientists in Bangladesh identified a large
number of innovations in home gardens (Gupta, 1989, p29). Calestous Juma
notes that farmers place such plants first in environments similar to those where
they were found, for example in moist ground near a stream (Juma, 1987, p33),
and gradually move them out into harsher environments. Paul Richards observes
for West Africa that when farmers carry out experiments, they typically begin in
the neglected run-off zone (Richards, 1985, pp83–84). Indeed, the past failure
to observe farmers’ experiments may partly stem from the failure to notice the
MEs in which they are to be found. MEs thus contribute to the sustainability of
livelihoods by providing locations for experiment, enhancing the adaptability of
farmers and their ability to respond to changes and to exploit opportunities.

Whose knowledge and creativity counts?

MEs are a domain where villagers’ knowledge, creativity and Research and Dev-
elopment (R & D) have advantages compared with the knowledge and R & D
of scientists.
In terms of knowledge, scientists have an advantage in their knowledge of
and access to information and genetic material from elsewhere; but their capacity
for precise measurement is less useful faced with the complexity and diversity
of ME conditions than with the simplicities and uniformities of industrial and
Green Revolution agriculture. Villagers, on the other hand, know more about the
complex and diverse detail of their livelihoods and of local ecology, and of how
these mesh and are managed. Villagers also have advantages in local observations
over time.
In terms of creativity and R & D, many MEs have been made and exploited
by farmers over the ages without any formal scientific input. Home gardens,
silt deposition fields, and terraces are examples. MEs provide support for the
view that ‘. . . the farmers’ role in technology development becomes more critical
and increasingly cost-effective as the proposed technology becomes more
multi-faceted and complex’ (Sumberg and Okali, 1989, p112). With most MEs
scientists have serious disadvantages. Research station conditions are likely to
be radically different from those of most MEs: wetland patches in dry areas,
for example, cannot be replicated on research stations (IIED, 1989). With the
possible exception of some basic research, on-station research concerning MEs
is likely to mislead and generate recommendations that misfit rather than help.
In contrast, farmers have several comparative advantages. They are con-
strained neither by an inflexible experimental design nor by the simplifications
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 59

demanded by reductionist statistical methods. They do not suffer from scientists’

relatively short time horizons, but like the settlers in the wetlands of Java, can
embark on processes which will take 10 to 15 years to mature. They can manage
the complexities of simultaneous land shaping, concentration of soil, water
and nutrients, and sequential changes as trees and other plants grow. They can
adapt what they do to diverse and irregular topography, and climatic and social
conditions. They can plant complicated mixtures of plants, and can place plants
individually to exploit tiny pockets of fertility or protection. They can develop
MEs sequentially, maintaining and modifying them as they observe and learn.
Not surprisingly, then, there is much evidence of farmers doing better than
non-farming officials or scientists in developing MEs. In Singhbhum District in
Bihar, it has been found that soil conservation staff are not as good at selecting
water harvesting sites as villagers: those selected by the villagers capture
more water (Sinha, 1989, p6). In various parts of the world, government soil
conservation programmes using contour earth bunds have actually contributed
to erosion. As in Ethiopia, Mexico, and India silt deposition fields appear to
be entirely a farmer’s technology. In India, at least, they are far superior to the
standard gully checks of official soil programmes. It is only reasonable to conclude
that programmes for the creation, improvement and exploitation of MEs should
be largely determined and implemented by farmers

Action for the 1990s

The comparative advantage of farmers and disadvantage of scientists in the cre-
ation and use of MEs means that less has been lost from past neglect of MEs by
non-farming professionals than might at first appear. All the same, the potential
of MEs appears large, especially in the semi-arid tropics. And as populations in
many countries continue to increase, the need to develop and exploit MEs will
become greater. Already in water harvesting, soil conservation and agroforestry,
considerable programmes have been mounted by governments and also Non
Governmental Organisations (NGOs), but with only mixed results. The question
is what non-farming professionals can do to enable the potential of MEs to be
realised more rapidly, effectively and efficiently.
First, clear and secure rights and tenure are preconditions. Farmers
who sense their tenure is insecure are deterred from taking a long view and
from investing labour in land shaping or planting trees. This has been the tragic
situation in much of Ethiopia where the 1970s land reform perversely made
farmers insecure. In parts of India, too, tree planting and protection by farmers
is discouraged by restrictions on rights of harvest and transit (Chambers et al,
1989b). In contrast, land consolidation and the provision of secure land titles
to farmers in Kenya has had the opposite effect, supporting a soil conservation
programme and also resulting in much tree planting and protection, with research
showing the densities of planted trees to be higher the denser the population and
the smaller the holdings (Bradley et al, 1985; Peter Dewees, pers. comm.).
60 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Second, observation and awareness by professionals are imperative. These

can be achieved in many ways. The techniques of rapid and participatory rural
appraisal (Khon Kaen University, 1987; RRA Notes, 1988 [and Chapter 4]) and
especially of agroecosystem analysis (Conway, 1985; McCracken et al, 1988)
have much to offer. These include walking transects, mapping village resources,
mapping MEs, and the participatory use of aerial photographs to identify MEs
and soil patches and zones. The simple act of mapping a home garden or diagram-
ming a transect can have a dramatic effect on personal awareness, sometimes
provoking a ‘flip’ – a professionally and intellectually exciting deeper change in
what is seen and how it is seen.
Third, the appropriate paradigm is farmer first rather than Transfer of Tech-
nology (TOT). For non-farming agricultural professionals, farmer first entails
changes and reversals:

• of location – from on-station to on-farm

• of learning – from learning from literature and from other non-farmers to
learning from and with farmers
• of role – from teacher who transfers technology to consultant who searches
for technology and supports farmers’ trials and experiments
• of content – from the single simple package to the basket spread of diverse
choices
• of direction of transfer – from vertical to lateral with farmers’ workshops and
visits to each others’ MEs
• of process – from simplifying and standardising to complicating and
diversifying.

Farmers’ participation throughout is of paramount importance.

To observe and learn about microenvironments, and to help farm families
create and exploit them and improve and intensify their use, presents a challenge
to the agricultural and social sciences. Microenvironments demand quiet
professional revolutions. These will start not with the lecturer but with the farm
family, not just in the classroom but in the field too, not on the research station
but in the microenvironments themselves. They will entail not simplifying and
standardising but enabling farm families to complicate and diversify. The 1990s
will show whether non-farming professionals can make that revolution and
usefully meet that challenge, or whether it will be largely unassisted that farmers
continue to experiment, innovate, develop and manage on their own.

More observations (2008)

I am uneasy that I do not disagree now with what I wrote in 1990. However,
additions can be made, changes have occurred and points have been reinforced.
Microenvironments have become more visible and more seen.
In 1990 I did not consider the destruction or decay of microenvironments.
Destruction is widespread especially with agriculture which industrializes,
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 61

simplifies and goes to scale: destruction of forests as in the Amazon, the en-
largements of fields and removal of hedges in much Northern agriculture, and the
adverse effects of these on biological diversity and quality of life and experience
are too well known to deserve elaboration.3 Dilapidation and decay of MEs occur
especially when for whatever reasons labour becomes scarce, and labour-intensive
maintenance and management lose their logic.
Agricultural research and extension have evolved significantly. Farmer part-
icipation has become more widespread. Gender dimensions and the roles and
importance of women in agriculture have become much better recognized. It is
no longer unusual to talk of ‘The African farmer, she . . .’. Participation and gender
analysis have been promoted and explored within the Consultative Group for
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) by the active and extensive inter-
centre initiative Participatory Research and Gender Analysis launched in 1997.
The points about intensive and complex small-scale niches have been
reinforced. On Zimbabwean farms in Ngundu, Chivi ‘small patches – often
around the homestead, but also capitalising on relatively favourable soil and
water conditions in small niches (such as former cattle kraals or settlement
sites) – may be cultivated highly intensively . . . following the model of the mixed
farm (intensive tillage and cultivation, manuring etc.) contrasting with adjacent
extensive cultivation’ (Scoones and Wolmer, 2002, p25). As for home gardens,
their significance in both rural and urban contexts, with intensive and complex
cultivation near homesteads, using household wastes and animal manures,
has now been quite extensively researched and documented. They are now
better recognized as ‘high-intensity production niches’ (Goldman 1992; p260)
important for food and income. Six studies in Indonesia reported the proportions
of household income deriving from home gardens as variously 10–30, 20–30,
over 20, 22–33, 41–51 and 42–51 per cent. Another Indonesia study found
the proportion higher among the poor, providing 24 per cent of their income
compared with 9 per cent for the well-off (cited in Hoogerbrugge and Fresco,
1993, p12). A study in Ethiopia found a vegetable garden focus was common
for poorer groups (Ramisch et al, 2002, p206). The tendency not to notice poor
people and what matters to them is then likely to reinforce the other biases against
seeing and recognizing the significance of MEs.4
Despite this increased attention, the bias of observation away from compound
and home gardens is reinforced by gender, crop and spatial factors. Women not
only tend to cultivate home gardens and land close to the home, but they also
often manage domestic animals and their manure. Men tend to be more involved
with more distant field crops and extensive farming cultivation. As Ian Scoones
and his colleagues have shown from the research on soil fertility in Ethiopia,
Mali and Zimbabwe, organic materials are applied nearer the homestead, and
inorganic fertilizer on fields further away (Scoones and Wolmer, 2002). The
interests of agricultural scientists in inorganic fertilizers and field crops then
draw them away from home gardens, women and the household. There is too
a spatial bias in some areas with ridges and valleys. While much varies by local
topography, in undulating and dissected landscapes, roads tend to run along
ridges, with field crops cultivated on the adjacent relatively flat upland which
62 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

is visible and accessible from the road. Niche or garden farming on riverine
strips, valley bottoms or extended home gardens remains less visible. At the
same time, growing vegetables for sale from such microenvironments becomes
more significant in household economies where urban markets grow with a shift
from extensive outfield cultivation to intensive gardening and niche farming,
as noted in a case in Zimbabwe (Wolmer et al, 2002, p180), which may then
become more visible for reasons of scale and economic significance, marketing
rather than subsistence, and men becoming more involved. The development
and intensification of home gardens with a market orientation has also been ‘a
backdoor into the gender discussion’. In Brazil, partners of ActionAid Brazil have
worked with women on developing their ‘invisible’ home gardens with a size of the
order of 15×15 metres, changing the term from ‘quintal’ to ‘quintal productivo’.
As the women generated incomes, men’s views of women changed.5
Permaculture is a celebration of microenvironments. Bill Mollison’s Perma-
culture: A Designers’ Manual (1990) is a fabulous work of practical vision and love,
a treasury of ideas, insights, patterns and relationships. It presents innumerable
examples of deliberately created microenvironments. These are more than just
complex and diverse. They are expressions of a philosophy, ethics and values.
Urban agriculture is another example.6 The claim that it is responsible for
15–20 per cent of the world’s food production seems high, but that may simply
reflect the extent to which it is not seen or recognized. It is not seen, in part
because it is often tucked away in corners and in the poorer quarters of an urban
area; and the expanding practice of rooftop vegetable gardening is invisible from
street level. Yet so widespread has rooftop gardening become that in Germany
in 2001 alone 13.5 million square metres (13.5 square km) of roof garden were
reported installed. Alec Thornton (pers. comm.), researching urban agriculture
in Grahamstown, South Africa, was told by a professional colleague that there
was none in densely settled areas, and even those living there said ‘There is no
farming here in town.’ In part this was because it was not a modern thing to do,
and in part because the cultivation which took place was not considered farming
or agriculture. Yet it was there.
Minilivestock too have been better recognized. Livestock scientists work more
on larger animals – cattle especially, and if not cattle, then sheep and goats. But the
range of minilivestock used for food is impressive. In a labour of love, Maurizio
Paoletti of the University of Padua has edited a book Ecological Implications of
Minilivestock: Role of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails for Sustainable Development
(2005) which to this reader at least is an eye-opener. Twenty-nine contributions
from at least 14 countries in all continents except Antarctica show that human
diets include not only all six orders of insects, but also spiders and earthworms.
Minilivestock that are ‘farmed’ include house crickets as well as the better known
guinea pigs and rabbits. A common sight in Nairobi in season, and easily passed
by without really ‘seeing’ it for what it is, has been women under street lights
collecting fallen insects for food. The current contribution and future potential
of minilivestock for meeting food needs have been little appraised. They are low
status, small, ‘looked down on’, ‘out of sight’ and more important to poorer people
than to others.
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 63

There are also environments which we prefer to avoid, not mention, or only
visit with disgust and shame. Areas of open defecation around Asian villages are
a case where participatory mapping can identify their location, and transect walks
confront residents with unhygienic nastiness as part of a process leading to action
to achieve community-led total sanitation (Kar, 2005; Kar and Pasteur, 2005).
Observation, and for that matter smelling, are here a key element in triggering
changes in behaviour.
Strict, narrow, conventional and convenient professionalism can also blind.
We notice what we are taught to notice and what fits our frames of disciplinary
relevance and ease of analysis. Soil science provides examples. In a district in
Gujarat, farmers were digging up soil on common land on a huge scale and
transporting it to their fields. The scars of bare soil were there for everyone to
see. Yet the Head of Soil Science at the Agricultural University was unaware of
the practice, even though challenged three times. Nor could this, one imagined,
be of any interest to him, being no part of his professional paradigm of pedology
and his laboratory-centred life of analysing soil samples. But then, none of us
are without blinkers: selective perception saves us from the sensory flooding that
afflicts some schizophrenics.
Soil science is dominated by soil physics and soil chemistry, both controllable
and amenable to standardized reductionist measurements. Soil biology in contrast
is a poor cousin. It is out of sight, ever changing, extremely complex, and involves
innumerable micro-organisms. Soil physics and soil chemistry overcome these
problems by eliminating the biota and studying soil which behaves well, for their
purposes, because it is dead. The microenvironments are not just unperceived;
they are eliminated to make subject convenient for study.7
More generally, transect walks remain a key tool in rapid appraisal, not only
systematically exploring an environment and identifying microenvironments,
but also training participants in observation. A transect is normally a walk, but
can also be a horse or camel8 ride, or drive in a vehicle. Patterns vary. Walks are
often downhill, through agroecological zones. An effort is made to combine
representativeness, diversity and outliers and exceptions. Members of a team take
responsibility for different aspects – soils, crops, livestock and so on. A transect
diagram is then drawn showing the zones and their characteristics. Abilities to
notice, ask about and remember are vital.
Anil Gupta in India twice a year spends a week or so on a shodhyatra or walk
to find knowledge.9 This actively seeks out innovators and sources of local wis-
dom. Like a good transect, this is driven by curiosity and much more than just
observing. People bring things to the notice of those on the walk and they study
and learn from them.
A final microenvironment to be observed is that of the single plant, as two
examples illustrate.
First, rice cultivation presents an astonishing case of past failure to observe
and follow up on the implications. In this case farmers are involved as well as
scientists. Farmers must have seen that though rice can grow in low flooded
conditions it can do better on more aerated higher ground, but they have been
locked into flooding not least because it saves labour by inhibiting weeds. In
64 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Norman Uphoff’s words: ‘Millions of people must have walked past fields like
that for thousands . . . of years and not put two and two together’ (pers. comm.
2007). For their part, scientists know about ‘edge effects’, that plants on the
very edge of densely planted fields grow better than those in the centre; but for
purposes of measuring yield, and working to increase yields, they avoid the edges
precisely because of their higher yields, and concentrate on the lower-yielding
more representative inner areas of fields. Yet these edge effects, had they been
investigated, could have provided clues that might have led to the System of
Rice Intensification (SRI),10 in which the very young rice plant is transplanted
wide apart to give it space and air allowed into its roots. The microenvironment
here is that of the individual plant. SRI, evolved in Madagascar by Father Henri
de Laulanié, a French priest, sharply raises yields per unit land, water and even
labour, and has by the end of 2007 spread to at least BBB countries, especially
China and India, and may now cover several million hectares. But some in the
scientific establishment, notably in the International Rice Research Institute in
the Philippines, have been in a state of denial, unwilling to observe or accept a
phenomenon outside their dominant paradigm and professional priorities and
belief system. As too in other contexts, believing is not seeing.
The second example comes from the experiential learning of being, living
and working with people and noticing and understanding the microdetail of what
they do. Koy Thompson (2007), during an immersion with a family in a village
in Ghana, took part in his host’s farming:

Uhuru’s farm was about one hour’s cycle ride into the forest.Without cattle for
ploughing, his fields have literally been cut by hand from the bush. We spent
the day weeding – although for Uhuru it was a minute by minute risk assess-
ment and management: what plant is not doing well (pull up and replace),
what bit of ground might be too wet or dry (interplant either corn or rice – if
one fails because the moisture is wrong the other will do well), how much are
the partridges going to take (dig new furrows), which mounds are doing well
(shove beans or okra in).

The intensity of this micro-management of microenvironments was to minimize

risks in a tight three-month growing season where so much was as stake, for on
this farm there was ‘a very real possibility that the damage caused by the partridges
could set off a chain of events that results in the death of a child’(Thompson,
2007).
Alert observation is a key. Scientists missed the significance of edge effects.
Koy Thompson noticed critical details. I have been struck by how acutely
bird-watchers and naturalists notice and remember what they see, sometimes
only for a fleeting second, retaining and able to recall the visual image without
first translating it into words. Perhaps for many of us, habits of watching and
half watching television have weakened our powers of observation, retention
and reflection. To the San of Botswana, and many others who have to observe,
remember and analyse in order to survive, many of us would appear disabled. In
their past environment the disability would probably have been fatal.
 Microenvironments: Observing the Unobserved 65

Questions and challenges remain. How seriously do we, development pro-

fessionals, fall short in our skills of observation and retention of visual images?
Do our bookish education and our casual attention to the transient trivia of
television diminish our ability to observe and remember what we have seen? Do
we lack visual curiosity? Do we still fail adequately to notice microenvironments
and appreciate their significance, especially to women and poorer farmers?
Could those whose livelihoods and food security are marginal be better served if
microenvironments were better recognized and supported? What would need to
change in professional values, priorities, skills and practices for this to happen?
Is it time for educational systems to do more to teach and train students to be
curious about what they see, to notice and to remember? Is participatory experi-
ential learning one way forward?

Notes
1 The paper ‘Microenvironments Unobserved’ which is the core of this chap-
ter appeared as ‘Gatekeeper Series No 22’, IIED, and was edited by Jules
Pretty. It is a shorter version of a paper of the same title that appeared in
R. P. Singh (ed) Proceedings of the International Symposium on Natural Re-
sources Management in a Sustainable Agriculture, 6–10 February 1990, New
Delhi, vol 2, Indian Society of Agronomy, New Delhi.
2 And sometimes where people have lived. The Sands River archeological trail
near Gairloch in Wester Ross in Scotland visits scattered sites of prehistoric
human settlements on a hillside. The round dwelling sites are conspicuous
islands of rich green grass in the heather and bracken. For millennia, it would
seem, these must have been maintained by sheep sheltering, manuring and
grazing.
3 In the UK a contrary tendency occurs with the return of wild plants and
animals to the fringes of main roads and motorways. Even here, though,
mindless destruction of microenvironments can occur. For 20 years cycling
home from work in the autumn I used to harvest beautiful, big, succulent wild
blackberries, the best I have ever found, from a large patch on the edge of the
main A27 road. Then every year some authority had them cut down. Readers
may likewise have lost special places and common properties like this. It hurts.
And how much more for those who depend on them for livelihoods.
4 It is a pleasant indulgence of place dropping, and posing as an observant
person, to note another microenvironment. In April 2006, enjoying what
must be one of the finest walks in the world, down the Wadi Dana in Jordan,
we could see on the opposite side of the valley a cave walled up for keeping
animals at night. Immediately below this a rock cleft had been blocked with
stones, and was capturing and storing dung, presumably to be carried by
donkey to fertilize fields lower down the valley. So dung trap can be added to
the list.
5 Pers. comm. Marta and Alberto, staff of ActionAid Brazil, Rio de Janeiro,
August 2005.
66 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

6 For this paragraph, see www.cityfarmer.org Another source for urban

agriculture is www.urbanagriculture-news.com
7 For the background on which this paragraph is based I am grateful to
Norman Uphoff.
8 Including camel ride is a bit naughty. I know of no case, and camels are quite
limited in the range of conditions they can walk through, especially stones.
9 The source is Peter Day http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_
own_correspondent/6279929.stm
10 The System of Rice Intensification has spread internationally largely through
the efforts of Norman Uphoff of Cornell University and nationally through
those of many scientists. See www.ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/
 4

Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins,

Rationale and Repertoire

Revolution ... 3 a far-reaching and drastic change, esp in ideas, methods etc.
4 a movement in or as if in a circle. (Collins English Dictionary, 2005)

Abstract
In the early 1970s, through errors and opportunism, I stumbled into unconventional
approaches to rural research. It then gradually emerged that practical researchers were
innovating and using methods which worked for them but which, since they were not
respectable in the mainstreams of their disciplines, they rarely wrote about. An IDS
workshop (1978) and conference (1979) on rapid rural appraisal (RRA) brought some
of them together. The rationale for RRA was that decision-makers needed the right
information at the right time but in rural development much information generated was
inappropriate or misleading and was slow to become available. Methods of gathering
information were often inefficient. RRA at the time was revolutionary. It sought to avoid
the traps of large questionnaire surveys (Chapter 1) and rural development tourism
(Chapter 2). The need was for information that was relevant, timely, accurate and
usable. RRA flowered especially in Thailand. A wide range of experience and methods,
including agroecosystem analysis, was brought together in the 1985 international
conference at the University of Khon Kaen.
The methods of RRA seek a rigour of cost-effectiveness through exploratory iteration
and trade-offs between relevance, accuracy, and timeliness, ignoring inappropriate
professional standards.They apply the principles of optimal ignorance and proportionate
accuracy (or appropriate imprecision). A repertoire of ten methods illustrates experience
and scope.They are cost-effective through their relatively sparing demands on time and
resources. Methods of RRA such as transects and semi-structured interviewing are of
enduring value and have their own rigour. RRA survived and spread relabelled as
Rapid Assessment Process (RAP).Whatever label is used, the principles and practices
of RRA remain underused and undervalued, and deserve another revolution, a turning
of the wheel, a renaissance.
68 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Errors and opportunism:

One person’s stumbling (2008)
Rapid rural appraisal (RRA) was a methodological frontier for inquiry in the
latter 1970s and the 1980s. Then it faded away. But its contributions remain valid
and vital. It is time for a renaissance, for a revolution of the wheel.
RRA came out of a convergence of many personal journeys, of which mine
was only one. In the research in India and Sri Lanka in 1973–74 I was spared
survey slavery. As a free-rider on the efforts of colleagues, I had opportunities
rare in field research. There I was, in Sri Lanka first, and later in Tamil Nadu,
with months and months for fieldwork and no fixed agenda. Far from having a
straitjacket of formal hypotheses and a research design, or being tramlined by a
logframe, I was free to be flexible, to wander, to explore, to choose what leads to
follow. No one breathed down my neck. Benny Farmer, our benign project dir-
ector, was busy thousands of miles away in Cambridge. My colleagues were far
more competent than me in their own fields and got on with what they wanted
and needed to do. I was in no way a supervisor. All I could do was try and fail to
persuade Barbara and John Harriss to take the holiday I thought they needed. My
freedom was an extraordinary privilege.
Later I reflected on what I had done and learnt,1 trying

...to make some sense out of and see some pattern in my own activities during
the field stage of the project. For I have been doing something during this
period, yet it has certainly been neither case study nor extensive survey ... I
have, it seems, been a research opportunist, if not exploiter, taking advantage of
the survey and of my colleagues to try to conduct research quickly and perhaps
somewhat unconventionally ...
There was a sense in which research opportunism was forced on me. A social
anthropological approach was out of the question for reasons of training,
inclination, family and language.The extensive survey was already (mercifully)
being competently handled by the Madras and Colombo teams.With not much
more than a year for fieldwork, divided between two countries with neither of
which I was familiar, I had to work out the best way to use my time. Being a
rather mediocre linguist, it made no sense to try to learn either Sinhala or Tamil
well enough to be able to carry out interviews; and I decided it was better to
know very little of either language than to spend time learning enough to be
able to misunderstand and be misunderstood. An obvious decision would have
been to concentrate on work which could be conducted entirely in English.This
did apply to seed-breeding and agricultural research ... More interesting from
the methodological point of view are three other areas of concern requiring field
work in rural areas which we tried to explore.These were agricultural extension,
water management and inter-village comparisons. (Chambers, 1974b)

My worst errors were in the work on agricultural extension. I had had to decide
about a year in advance what I would work on. Agricultural extension was one
of the aspects of the green revolution which we intended to examine and it
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 69

became primarily my responsibility. But it turned out to be both less interesting

and harder to research than I had expected. In tune with the preoccupations
of the time, the main questions were to what extent differences in agricultural
extension could account for differences in adoption of high-yielding varieties. The
method had two main components: questions in the main questionnaire survey,
and interviews with extension staff.
Now, in 2008, I am shocked by the arrogance and ignorance of my ‘research’.
I composed the survey questions in Cambridge and without prior knowledge of
the extension programmes in the research areas. At the time of pilot testing of the
questionnaire I was still in Africa. Responses to some questions were polluted by
others asked earlier in the interview. The precoding of responses was inadequate.
In the event about half the results were rejected as unusable, and some doubt
remained about the value of the remainder. The lessons are obvious, and I should
not have had to learn them.
Interviews with extension staff were also unsatisfactory. While outwardly co-
operative, they were suspicious, especially when I wanted to see their (no doubt
falsified) diaries. Only after repeated efforts was it possible to discover some
details of the extension programme for paddy. The obvious lesson, which again
I should not have had to learn, was that research by a foreigner on the lives and
work of junior government field staff requires time, patience and rapport, and
may have to be carried out by others. So it was that my colleague ‘Wicks’ was
more successful and in spite of my errors we managed to write a joint paper
(Chambers and Wickremanayake, 1977).
Water management was so different. At the start of the project we did not see
it as a major interest. It coalesced as a focus, as topics do, from many sources,
in this case observations in the field, discussions with farmers and among our-
selves, an international Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) seminar,
and the guidance of officials in Sri Lanka for whom it was a priority. Unlike
agricultural extension, it did not have a large literature or a school of research
which had at all adequately examined it. (This was over a decade before the
International Irrigation Management Institute was set up.) Consequently, what
was required was not so much the research-intensive work needed to push
understanding of agricultural extension any further, but less exacting and far
more exciting reconnaissance research to open up a new subject. Madduma
Bandara as a geographer-hydrologist, John Harriss as a social anthropologist,
B. W. E.Wickremanayake in his capacity as fieldworker in charge of the survey,
and I all engaged in the exploration. It was thrilling, with happy days paddling
through paddy fields and stumbling on ahhas! like the multiple re-use of water
‘wasted’ in drains. We kept on learning new things, and uncovering new puzzles.
It was indeed a ‘new’ subject, with low-hanging fruit which we eagerly spotted
and picked.
Village comparisons were another subject that intrigued and enticed John
Harriss and myself. In India we had a stratified sample of 12 villages, aston-
ishingly different from each other, presenting a wonderful research and intel-
lectual challenge, raising questions about dimensions that might be significant
in accounting for differences, and inviting a taxonomy. We both visited all the
70 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

villages. John’s insights were deeper and broader than mine. We brainstormed
and shared ideas. It was a great stimulation. Significant dimensions emerged of
seasonality, livelihoods and irrigation systems, among others. It is to my discredit
that we were only co-authors (and of course there is ambiguity because my initial
comes earlier than John’s in the alphabet) of the resulting Chambers and Harriss
1977 paper, when he should have been the senior author.
Reviewing these experiences it seemed that

The ways we have tackled these three topics ... differ in detail but they have
in common:

• a research-sparing character: in general they have not been research-

intensive, but have required relatively low research inputs
• ad hoc collaboration: collaboration has developed as we have gone along,
and has not been pre-planned
• eclectic pluralism in the choice of methods.

and

The main lessons here are, first, the value of having sufficient spare capacity in
a research team to be able to respond to an unforeseen priority or opportunity,
and second, the usefulness of an eclectic use of several low-input research
techniques, combined with free discussion and exchanges between researchers, as
a system for opening up and exploring a subject. (Chambers, 1974b)

I might have added the stimulation and even competitiveness of working in a team
of ambitious young researchers!

The emergence of RRA

Now, in the latter 2000s, with an exploding variety of participatory approaches
and methods, it is difficult to remember and realize again the pervasive tyranny
of methodological rigidities and resistances in the 1970s. Social anthropologists
believed that only their approach could yield in-depth understandings.
Economists and statisticians believed that only questionnaires could generate
the numbers needed in rigorous research. The researchers and practitioners who
improvised and innovated outside these traditions were a heretical fringe and their
methods disparagingly dismissed as ‘quick-and-dirty’. They were trying to avoid
the long-drawn-out, costly, and often irrelevant, misleading or confusing findings
of anthropology or surveys. Their approach and methods came to be known as
RRA (rapid rural appraisal).
However cost-effective, relevant and useful the methods of these heretics
were, and however reliable their findings, they could feel impelled to make their
obeisances to orthodoxy. In the evolution and acceptance of a methodology
there is often an experience that is seminal and iconic, and spreads as a trans-
formative and legitimizing story. With RRA, this was Michael Collinson’s
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 71

fieldwork in East Africa. In a week he would find out enough about the farm-
ing systems of an area to identify priorities for agricultural research. But for the
sake of credibility he felt obliged to conduct a conventional questionnaire survey,
taking some three months to carry out and even longer to analyse. The findings
from the survey never contradicted his earlier conclusions but were necessary in
order to convince the establishment (Collinson, 1979, 1981).
In the latter 1970s it became clear that other practically oriented researchers
had like Collinson innovated and were using methods which they found good
but which were not respectable in the mainstreams of their disciplines. Through
networking, more and more were identified. A workshop in 1978 and a larger
conference in 1979 were convened at the Institute of Development Studies
(IDS) to bring such people together. There was a buzz of mutual recognition and
support. The papers were widely distributed but never formally published.2 The
paper that follows, ‘Rapid Rural Appraisal: Rationale and repertoire’ (Chambers,
1981), was written and published as a poor substitute:

Rapid Rural Appraisal: Rationale and

repertoire (1980)
The problem

Decision makers need information that is relevant, timely, accurate and usable. In
rural development, a great deal of the information that is generated is, in various
combinations, irrelevant, late, wrong and/or unusable anyway. It also often costs a
lot to obtain, process, analyse and digest. Although many professionals have given
thought to improving information gathering it remains a remarkably inefficient
activity. Criteria of cost-effectiveness do not appear often to have been applied,
and manifest inefficiency is sometimes met by demanding not better information,
or less, but simply more.
The challenge is to find ways for outsiders to learn about rural conditions
which are more cost-effective – which lead to information and understanding,
which are closer to the optimal in trade-offs between cost of collection and
learning, and relevance, timeliness, accuracy and actual beneficial use. A recent
workshop and conference on Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)3 have set out to
examine this problem, paying particular attention to timeliness and economizing
in data demands (Belshaw, 1981a, 1981b). This paper draws on the papers and
discussions of those two occasions.
In the context of rural development projects, RRA appears especially relevant
for identification and appraisal. Information is needed quickly; decisions are
pre-empted by the passage of time. Commitment to projects and to details of
projects sometimes becomes irreversible early on, setting a premium on timely
information. But RRA is also relevant to implementation, monitoring and
evaluation. Its relevance is enhanced by the view that rural development projects
are not like construction works, with engineering blueprints which precisely
72 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

predetermine what will be done, but rather like voyages into uncharted seas where
direction and steering will change with new soundings and sightings. Techniques
of RRA are hardly a new radar to prevent shipwreck; but they may at least reduce
the dangers by showing more clearly and more quickly what is happening.
In practice, however, we seem to be trapped by two sets of inappropriate
methods. These can be described as the ‘quick-and-dirty’ and the ‘long-and-
dirty’, where ‘dirty’ means not cost-effective.

Quick-and-dirty

The most common form of quick-and-dirty appraisal is rural development

tourism – the brief rural visit by the urban-based professional. This can be very
cost-effective with the outstanding individual; one example is Wolf Ladejinsky
(1969a and b) who in two remarkable short field trips in India saw what was
happening in the green revolution and reported it years before plodding social
scientists came to the same conclusion to two (spurious) points of decimals. But
more commonly, rural tourism exerts biases [see Chapter 2] against perceiving
rural poverty, reinforcing, in my view, underestimates of its prevalence and fail-
ures to understand its nature.
Many of the other defects of quick-and-dirty investigations are well known,
but a list can serve as a warning:

• misleading replies (deferential, prudent, hoping to avoid penalties or to gain

benefits)
• failure to listen (thinking the mouth is an organ of hearing)
• reinforced misperception and prejudice (those old hands who ‘know-it-all’
but who are projecting and selecting their own meanings)
• visible as against invisible: things and activities are seen, but not relationships
– indebtedness, interest rates, low wages, patron–client relations, intra-family
relations, etc.
• snapshot, not trend: a moment in time is seen, and trends, which may be much
more significant for rural development purposes, are not seen.

The list could be lengthened, but the point is made: quick appraisal can be
seriously misleading, especially when there is a concern with the poorer people.
Rapid is often wrong.

Long-and-dirty

The solutions preferred by many well-trained professionals are longer and more
costly. Social anthropologists perpetuate their ritual immersions in alien cultures;
sociologists and agricultural economists plan and perpetrate huge questionnaire
surveys; and scientists map soils, vegetation, land use and rainfall. All have their
uses but most of them do not generate much information in their early stages.4
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 73

Some are academically excellent but useless: the social anthropologist’s field-
work published ten years later; the detailed soils map which sits on the shelf; the
social survey which asked questions which were ‘interesting’ but of no use to a
planner. . . . Rural surveys must be one of the most inefficient industries in the
world. Benchmark surveys are often criticised (Chambers, 1974b; Clay, 1978;
Conlin, 1979), and yet these huge operations persist, often in the name of the
science of evaluation, pre-empting scarce national research resources, and gen-
erating mounds of data and papers which are likely to be an embarrassment to
all until white ants or paper-shredders clean things up.
Some investigations are long and clean. The point here, though, is that long,
however respectable professionally, is often inefficient. Moreover, the longer
research takes, the longer and less usable the report tends to be and the greater
the time available for sweeping the dirt under the carpet. Often the useful informa-
tion from social anthropologists and from extensive questionnaire surveys comes
coincidentally and informally during fieldwork, and not through the formal
process at all.

Fairly-quick-and-fairly-clean

The question is, then, whether there is a middle zone between quick-and-dirty
and long-and-dirty, a zone of greater cost-effectiveness. People in many discip-
lines and professions have been converging on this question, but may have been
deterred from writing it up because the activities are not quite proper. They
have a sense of responsibility to their professional training or more crudely they
have been brainwashed by their professional conditioning and reward systems.
And yet in natural resources and environmental appraisal (Abel and Stocking,
1979; Richards, 1978; Stocking and Abel, 1979), health and nutrition (Chen
et al, 1978; Gordon, 1979; Pacey, 1979; Payne, 1979; Walker, 1979), appraisal
for agricultural research (Biggs, 1979; Byerlee et al, 1979; Carruthers, 1979a;
Collinson, 1979; Hildebrand, 1979a, 1979b) and the field of socio-economic
stratification (Honadle, 1979; Howes, 1979b; Longhurst, 1979) – in these
fields and others there is an active search for shortcuts with trade-offs between
timeliness, accuracy, relevance and actual use of information.
Formidable obstacles impede this process and this convergence. In the words
of one participant at the RRA conference: ‘By the time people leave university
the damage has been done.’ Inappropriate professional standards have been
imparted and internalized. Perhaps the biggest single blockage is the hegemony of
statisticians (Carruthers, 1979b; Fallon, 1979; Ellman, 1979; Moore, 1979b) and
the failure to treat statistics as servant rather than master. In addition, professional
values and reward systems deter improvisation in learning about rural conditions
which though cost-effective may not seem pure. Better, it is thought, to be long
and legitimate than short and suspect.
But cost-effective has its own rigour and should generate its own values. Two
linked principles can be suggested:
74 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

1 Optimal ignorance. This refers to the importance of knowing what it is not

worth knowing. It requires great courage to implement. It is far, far easier to
demand more and more information than it is to abstain from demanding it.
Yet in information gathering there is often a monstrous overkill.
2 Proportionate accuracy. Especially in surveys, much of the data collected
has a degree of accuracy which is unnecessary. Orders of magnitude, and
directions of change, are often all that is needed or that will be used.

With these two principles in mind, it is easier to see that less rigid, less exhaustive,
and more rapid methods of rural appraisal may often be more rigorous in relation
to cost and use. The following emerging repertoire of approaches and techniques
is only part of a beginning. If much of this is common sense or common practice,
I hope the reader will not feel insulted but rather will be provoked into criticism,
comment and constructive suggestions for additions and improvement.

A start with a repertoire for RRA

What methods are best depends on purpose and circumstances. Some general
principles can, however, be suggested:

• Taking time. RRA will avoid the tyranny of strict sampling, of the formal ques-
tionnaire, of the massive survey – in vain if time saved is dissipated in rushing.
Many of rural tourism’s defects come from haste.
• Offsetting biases. Taking thought about biases (urban, tarmac, roadside,
project, elite, male, user, dry season, etc.), and deliberately offsetting them.
• Being unimportant. Avoiding the limousine-best-village-garlands-speeches
syndrome.
• Listening and learning. Treating rural people as teachers and being their
pupil. Assuming that they have much valid knowledge that outsiders do not
have. Trying to get inside their skins and see the world as they do. Being open
to unexpected information.
• Multiple approaches. Investigating the same questions with different methods,
both to cross-check and to fill out the picture.

From the papers and discussions so far, ten disparate techniques for RRA
stand out. This list is far from complete, but it illustrates some of the range and
possibilities.

1 Existing information
There is often a wealth of information in archives, annual reports, reports of
surveys, academic papers, government statistics, and the like. There is also a
recurrent tendency to ignore them and to start de novo. Time spent searching for
such information, even when it is not known to exist, is often well repaid; and it
may save unnecessary demands for much new data collection.
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 75

2 Learning ITK (indigenous technical knowledge)5

Development disasters often follow from failing to learn from rural people. The
Groundnut Scheme might have been prevented by more time on the ground
(instead of in the air) asking local inhabitants why they did not cultivate in
the proposed project area. More radically, rural people often have a wealth of
knowledge, and a validity of insight, which the outsider lacks. The Hanunoo in
the Philippines are said to have had, on average, a knowledge of 1600 names for
plants, 430 more than those in a botanical survey (Howes, 1979a, citing Conklin,
1957). The !Kung San of Botswana have a knowledge of animal behaviour often
superior to that of scientists (Blurton Jones and Konner, 1976). Examples could
be multiplied. Knowledge of soils, seasons, plants, domestic and wild animals,
farming practices, diet, cooking practices, and child care, not to mention social
customs and relations, are often rich and likely often to be superior in some or
all respects to those of the outsider. The scope for soils mapping using ITK
appears largely unexplored. The scope, on the social side, for asking rural people
themselves to identify who are the poorer people, has been far from adequately
used. Heavy survey expenditures could sometimes be reduced dramatically
through using ITK instead of inappropriate ‘sophisticated’ approaches.

3 Using key indicators

Some indicators integrate several variables. Investigating, calibrating, observing
and counting such indicators may then provide a shortcut avoiding more expens-
ive, direct and time-consuming investigations.
Some examples are:

• Soil colour as a predictor of particle size distribution, fertility, some import-

ant engineering properties such as plasticity and volumetric activity (Stocking
and Abel, 1979), and vegetation associations.
• Plant indicators, subject to local knowledge, can be ‘an extremely reliable,
efficient and rapid indicator of natural resources information’ (Stocking and
Abel, 1979).
• Birth weight of children reflects the health and nutritional status of mothers
especially in the last trimester of pregnancy and is a predictor of chances of
survival and (though less well established) of the future growth trajectory
(Philip Payne, personal communication).
• Housing as an indicator of poverty or prosperity. There are no doubt qual-
ifications and exceptions, yet this is found again and again (see e.g. Richards,
1978; Honadle, 1979; Longhurst, 1979; Howes, 1979b; Moore, 1979a) and
may be useful (not least because so visible and easy to count) as a proxy for
relative poverty or prosperity between villages and for the same village over
time.
• Transfers and turnover in organizations may be a proxy for organizational
capability.
76 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

While these and other indicators require local validation, they may provide
shortcuts to insights; some may also provide simple measures for baselines if
before–after evaluation is required, avoiding massive data collection.

4 Adaptations of Hildebrand’s ‘sondeo’

Peter Hildebrand, working with ICTA,6 has developed an ingenious method
for multi-disciplinary work in preparation for on-farm agricultural research
(Hildebrand, 1978; 1979a and 1979b). A homogeneous cropping system among
many farmers in an area has first been identified. Hildebrand then takes a team
of five agricultural scientists and five social scientists to the area for a week. The
team works in pairs, one agricultural scientist and one social scientist. They go
out each day and learn what they can from farmers and others, returning in the
evening to share experiences, take stock, and decide on further priorities. Each
day the pairs change so that each agricultural scientist works for one day with
each social scientist and vice versa. A report is written over the weekend. This
is ‘not a benchmark study with quantifiable data that can be used in the future
for project evaluation; rather it is a working document to orient the research
program . . .’ (Hildebrand, 1979a).
Hildebrand’s method has been used to familiarize staff with an area in which
they are to work, and to identify innovations which might be tried out directly
with farmers. It is easy to see that it might be adapted for other purposes. For
project identification and appraisal, visiting teams might pair with themselves or
with local officials. For monitoring and evaluation, it might be used to identify
what changes have taken place and their causality. In principle, it might be
applied in many fields, including natural resources appraisal (including rural
people as sondeo team members), health and nutrition, and social and economic
dimensions. It provides a structure for mutual learning between disciplines, and
its time-bound form and the mutual checking in the evening sessions provide a
stimulus for speed and accuracy.

5 Local researchers
Information can be gathered by rural residents. The use of cultivators and past-
oralists (Swift, 1978) for investigating and recording is underdeveloped. School
teachers, traders and the rural staff of government departments are a major,
but often underused, source for information, including time series data and ad
hoc enquiries. The value of research carried out by national university students
also deserves to be emphasized. In a matter of a few weeks, a Murundi refugee
student in Zaire investigated fishing among Barundi refugees and produced an
excellent and practical report. A student who has links with a rural area can be
not only key informant but can also very quickly and efficiently find out what
needs to be known.

6 Direct observation
A major danger with RRA is being misled by myth. Rural people (like others)
often have beliefs about their values and activities which do not correspond
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 77

with the reality. It is common to be told about a custom, but probing for the last
occasion when it was practised reveals that it has either lapsed or perhaps was
never practised at all. Conlin records (1979) how he worked as a social anthro-
pologist in an area in Peru where a sociologist carried out a survey. According
to the sociologist’s results, people invariably worked together on each others’
individually held plots of land. This is what people told him. The belief was
important to their understanding of themselves as a certain sort of people. Yet
in one year’s residence in the village, Conlin only observed this practice once.
With RRA, direct observation may often not be possible; in that case, multiple
checks on information about customs and practices are desirable. The importance
of walking, seeing and asking questions is a commonplace. One of the most
effective, though time-consuming, ways of learning is by doing. John Hatch hired
himself out as a labourer to farmers and found the labour requirement of maize
cultivation to be 50 per cent higher than that recorded in surveys (Hatch, 1976)
besides learning much else from his farmer teachers.

7 Key informants
While there are well-known dangers, and cross-checking is necessary, key in-
formants are a major tool for RRA. Some of the most useful are social anthro-
pologists who are in the field. They often do not know what they know; they often
give precious insights and raise unexpected questions. Key local informants tend
to be the better off, the better educated, and the more powerful. The biases this
introduces can be consciously offset; and school teachers, in particular, can be
a source of somewhat independent-minded views. In organizational appraisal,
Honadle (1979) asked staff a question on the lines: ‘In all organizations there
is at least one pain-in-the-neck, there is always someone who disagrees with all
decisions and promotes trouble. Can you tell the names of those people in your
association?’ Answers were immediate and enthusiastic; individual interviews
with those named provided valuable cross-checks and revealed useful additional
information. More generally, for any subject of interest, it is worthwhile spending
time asking who, or which group of people, are most knowledgeable, and then
working with them.

8 Group interviews
Group interviews have several advantages, including access to a larger body of
knowledge, and mutual checking. They can also be seriously misleading when the
questioner is believed to have power to control benefits or sanctions. They are
especially useful for natural resources information, when a wider geographical
area and subject matter can be covered than with one respondent. I have used this
method for very rapid mapping of soil/vegetation associations in the North-East
Province of Kenya. Group interviews may also be good for certain sensitive types
of information. To ask, for example, about land quality may arouse suspicion in
an individual that his land may be subject to some penalty if he replies truthfully,
whereas a group gathered together as people knowledgeable about farming will
not feel so threatened (Jackson et al, 1978). Ladejinsky (1969b) records of a
78 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

landlord in Bihar: ‘He first informed us that he owned 16 acres of land but cor-
rected himself under the good humoured prodding of a crowd of farmers that he
had failed to mention another 484 acres.’ The lapse of memory might have had
something to do with the ceiling on land-holdings.
Group interviews have also been used to gather information rapidly on
changes in infant feeding practices. Small clusters of 5–6 women of 2–3 genera-
tions were assembled, and past, present and expected future patterns of infant
feeding discussed. ‘There was a self-correcting mechanism within the group
because if one person put across an over-favourable picture of her own or her
group’s behaviour, a peer would give a more realistic observation. In cross-
checking with other groups a high degree of uniformity of information was found’
(Gordon, 1979).

9 The guided interview7

The guided interview is probably a quite widespread but largely unreported
activity. There is no formal questionnaire but a checklist of questions which the
interviewer uses as a flexible guide. Ellman’s (1979) two-page checklist devised
for appraisal of a rural refugee situation in Africa, and Carruthers’ (1979a)
critical review procedure for on-farm interviews are examples of procedures
for interviews without pre-set questionnaires, but with an agenda to be covered.
Collinson (1979) has developed this approach with guidelines for discussion
with farmers, in which not all points are raised with all farmers, but in which a
composite picture is built up so that a scenario can be written. This is evidently
an effective tool for diagnosing farming problems and opportunities in a matter
of weeks, and can be used by investigators with a professional training but who
lack extensive field experience.

10 Aerial inspection and surveys

Jokes about experts in aeroplanes should not detract from the selective value of
aerial inspection and surveys. Animals are most rapidly counted from the air
(Swift, 1978). For certain types of natural resource surveys, there are advantages
(Abel and Stocking, 1979), including offsetting urban and dry season biases. The
danger is that aerial surveys become substitutes for other approaches, especially
understanding and using indigenous technical knowledge. Ground control should
usually, if not always, include learning from rural people.
Other points could be added to the repertoire: the use of informal transects
(such as walking away from the road at right angles); rural innovators’ surveys
in which new practices are sought out; methods of establishing rapport, in which
liquor so frequently figures8 in non-Muslim societies; one-day censuses of users
of services (Walker, 1979); and linking RRA in with on-going ‘long-and-clean’
investigations or research, making use of what is already known. But, hopefully
enough has been said to show that RRA has a battery of techniques, and to
suggest that using combinations with care may be much more cost-effective for
some purposes than either quicker or longer alternatives.
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 79

Conclusions

This illustrative list of techniques shows that RRA is no panacea. Much of it

is merely organized common sense, freed from the chains of inappropriate
professionalism. But because it is often cost-effective compared with more con-
ventional alternatives, it deserves to be accorded more attention, more prestige,
and more coverage in professional writing.
For project preparation it may provide a battery of methods for improving
the chances of being right, and of having information when it is needed. For
monitoring and evaluation, it may provide ways into the difficult questions about
impacts, trends and causality which are, or should be, the core of evaluation.
That there are dangers of superficiality and error needs no emphasis. The key
to successful RRA is not avoiding superficiality and error, but controlling them,
trying to achieve cost-effectiveness through optimal ignorance and proportionate
accuracy.
Finally, the most critical factor remains time. RRA, by its sparing demands for
information, should release time which can be used for checking, for identifying
unasked questions, and for noting and pursuing serendipity. Above all, it should
release time for more contact with, and learning from, the poorer rural people. In
most investigations, whether quick or long, they are the residual category, the last
in line, those who are not consulted, those whose problems are not articulated.
Shortage of time compounds the interlocking biases which shut them out. More
time can be used to let them in. If RRA, whatever its defects, were to enable rural
appraisers to spend more time learning about and understanding rural poverty,
then the choice, design and implementation of rural projects might shift over time
so that the poor gained more. That may be the naive hope of an optimist; but at
least it seems worth pursuing.

Postscript (2008)
RRA came of age in the 1980s. The landmark event was the international con-
ference on RRA convened in 1985 at the University of Khon Kaen in Thailand,
at that time the leading pioneering institution in the world for RRA. The volume
of proceedings (Khan Kaen University, 1987) is an authoritative and inspiring
source on RRA, and much of it remains as relevant today as it was in the 1980s.
The conference brought together many practitioners, and many methods
and approaches. Among the most significant were agroecosystem analysis
(Gypmantasiri et al, 1980; Conway, 1985), evolved by Gordon Conway and his
colleagues at the University of Chiang Mai and spread throughout South-east Asia,
and semi-structured interviewing which had come to be regarded as at the core of
good RRA (Grandstaff and Grandstaff, 1987a, b). Elucidating the paradigmatic
significance of RRA, Neil Jamieson (1987) provided theory to support and inter-
pret practice, drawing on cybernetics and emphasizing interaction, relationships,
feedback, local knowledge and context, and the need for ‘greater epistemological
humility and flexibility’ (Khan Kaen University, 1987, p100).
80 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

After the conference, the core principles of RRA were summarized (Khan
Kaen University, 1987, pp9–13):

• Triangulation: approaching information from several intentionally different

points of view, informants, sources, methods, places . . . ‘normally involving
conscious non-random sampling in a number of different dimensions’ usually
at least for team composition, units of observation, and research methods
(p10).
• Exploratory and highly iterative research: ‘The sooner inappropriate hypoth-
eses can be abandoned or reformulated on the basis of new information,
the faster one learns . . . semi-structured interviewing is normally one of the
principal methods because it enables researchers to rapidly change questions,
interviews and directions as new information appears . . . RRA researchers
must particularly be on the lookout for the unexpected’ (p10).
• Rapid and progressive learning: ‘RRA’s emphasis on rapid and progressive
learning is one of the most distinguishing traits of the methodology. This
contrasts sharply with survey research and its predesigned and fixed ques-
tionnaires where there is a general absence of progressive learning during the
majority of field activities’ (p11).
• Substantial use of indigenous knowledge: ‘. . . an understanding of indigenous
knowledge and practices is extremely valuable for viable and appropriate
rural development, and many of the methods, tools and techniques of RRA
have been selected for their abilities to elicit, evaluate, understand, and avoid
misunderstanding indigenous knowledge’ (p11).
• Interdisciplinary approach and teamwork: ‘A small team of researchers
representing different disciplines is normally used in RRA to obtain the range
of expertise needed to better understand rural situations . . . Team members
acquire valuable additional learning from each other when they interact
closely in the field . . . Methods and techniques are employed that facilitate
this . . .’ (pp11–12).
• Flexibility and use of conscious judgement: ‘. . . an important principle of
RRA is not just to “plan the work”, but also to “work the plan” in a flexible
manner that allows for creativity and modification . . . the RRA team must be
prepared to revise their time schedules and travel and interviewing plans in
the same manner that they are prepared to revise hypotheses . . . Two of the
most important and basic types of decisions the team has to make, at the
start of and during the course of an RRA, are what types of information are
needed and what degrees of precision are required or possible” applying the
principles of appropriate impression and optimal ignorance’ (p12).

These are striking as precursors of participatory rural appraisal (PRA). A major

shift in the transition to PRA was that the intense interactions within multi-
disciplinary teams that characterize classical RRA became intense interactions
among local people, often in small groups. Another is who does the appraisal
and analysis – outsiders with RRA, local people with PRA. But that said, the
commonalities are strong and RRA passed on many of its genes to PRA.
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 81

Using this form of words makes RRA sound passé. Tragically, many of the
practices and principles of RRA have been forgotten. It is as though their shelf
life has expired. It is a sad reflection on the short memories and fickle fashions of
development practice that when PRA came along in the early 1990s, many came
to regard RRA as old hat and many of its good practices were lost. It became
unusual to find the label used.9 It was easy to denigrate RRA as outsider-driven
and extractive, whereas PRA was participatory and empowering. But in practice
PRA methods were often used in an extractive RRA mode! And the visual
methods of PRA were so attractive, and effective, that the old wonderful practices
of just talking, of having a good conversation, and even of a flexible semi-
structured interview with an informal checklist, were downgraded, rushed or
entirely overlooked. But RRA approaches and methods will always be important
and valuable. They complement those of PRA. They deserve a revolution, a
turning of the wheel, a renaissance.

Appendix: Some sources, approaches and methods

Sources include three collections of articles on RRA from the 1980s:

1 Longhurst, Richard (ed) (1981) ‘Rapid Rural Appraisal: Social structure

and rural economy’, IDS Bulletin, vol 12, no 4, October, with an editorial and
articles by Geof D.Wood, Paul Richards, Deryke Belshaw, Richard Longhurst,
Ingrid Palmer, Mick Howes, Mick Moore and ODA Food Strategy Team,
together with a list of papers to the IDS 1978 workshop and 1979 conference
on RRA.
2 Carruthers, Ian and Robert Chambers (eds) (1981) Special Issue on Rapid
Rural Appraisal. Agricultural Administration, vol 8, no 6, with articles by
the editors, Peter Hildebrand, Michael Collinson, C. D. S. Bartlett and J.
E. Ikeorgu, Antony Ellman, Michael Stocking and Nick Abel, and Jeremy
Swift.
3 Khon Kaen University (1987) Proceedings of the Conference on Rapid Rural
Appraisal, Khon Kaen University, Thailand, 2–5 September 1985, contains
Summary Report; the need for RRA, its evolution and underlying concepts
(four papers); the range of methodology: important methods, tools and
techniques of RRA (five papers); contexts and types of RRA application (six
papers); and an extensive bibliography.

The best documented continuation and development of RRA (apart from PRA,
for which see Chapter 5) has been named RAP, standing for Rapid Assessment
Procedures (Scrimshaw and Gleason, 1992) or Rapid Assessment Process.
James Beebe’s (2001) book Rapid Assessment Process: An Introduction is the most
substantial, authoritative and useful recent source of which I know. It includes
practical advice and a good list of sources.
82 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Approaches are many and have many labels (Beebe, 2001, pp152–153, lists 55).
They make use of many methods including:10

• existing information/secondary data

• indigenous technical knowledge
• key indicators
• teamwork, and team contracts and interactions (Hildebrand, 1981; Beebe,
2001)
• local researchers
• direct observation – see for yourself
• key informants – seek out the experts
• group interviews
• semi-structured (or guided) interviews
• aerial inspection and surveys
• offsetting the biases of rural development tourism (see Chapters 2 and 8)
• transect walks (see Chapter 3)
• sketch mapping (see Chapter 7)
• Kipling’s Six Servants:
I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who
(from ‘The Elephant’s Child’ in The Just So Stories)
• progressive sequences of sources and analysis
• key probes (key exploratory questions to open up topics and areas)
• non-directive probes (Beebe, 2001, p38)
• time lines
• diagramming (seasonal, trend, histograms . . .).

Practitioners of RRA and RAP have tended not to facilitate participatory map-
ping and diagramming, but in the spirit of eclectic pluralism (Chapter 9) these
can and do strengthen RRA-type practices and processes.

Notes
1 In two papers: ‘Practices in Social Science Research: Some heresies’ presented
in Colombo and ‘Opportunism in Rural Research’ presented in Cambridge,
UK in December 1974 and from which the quotations in this section were
taken.
2 The IDS Conference on Rapid Rural Appraisal was funded by the Ford
Foundation, but the budget did not include dissemination. Despite having an
experienced and enthusiastic editor, Arnold Pacey, able and willing to edit the
papers, the needed $10,000 could not be raised. I have often wondered how
much faster the evolution of RRA, and perhaps even of PRA, would have
 Rapid Rural Appraisal: Origins, Rationale and Repertoire 83

been if that small sum had been found and an authoritative book published.
Excellent material was there. But then in those days dissemination had a
much lower priority than it (correctly) does now.
3 The Workshop on Rapid Rural Appraisal, 26–27 October 1978 (Barnett,
1979), and the Conference on Rapid Rural Appraisal, 4–7 December 1979,
both at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. Appraisal
is used here in its general sense and not just that of project appraisal.
4 There are exceptions, especially in natural resources surveys.
5 For six articles on this, see IDS (1979). In this paper, I am treating ITK
simply as a resource to be tapped. This ignores its capacity for development
and growth, and its importance as a dynamic entity enabling people to
control their environment and enhance their quality of life.
6 Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnologia Agricolas, Guatemala.
It might complement very nicely the Benor Training and Visit System of
Agricultural Extension. [I lament the way this footnote shows that at the
time I approved of the Training and Visit System, which now I consider to
be fundamentally flawed.]
7 The guided interview is better known now as the semi-structured interview
(Grandstaff and Grandstaff, 1987a; Beebe, 2001, pp35–40).
8 Thus Paul Richards, on failing to identify unasked questions ‘Luck,
persistence, a sixth sense and palm wine are potential antidotes, but palm
wine is probably the best’ (1978), and Marie Therese Feuerstein on rapport
‘Good informal rapport can be established by moderate drinking, smoking,
singing, and particularly dancing or the playing of a musical instrument’
(1979).
9 Notable exceptions were RRAs to inform policies on land tenure in Tanzania
(Johansson and Hoben, 1992), and Madagascar and Guinea (Freudenberger,
1998). These led officials who took part to change their views of land tenure
quite radically.
10 Sources for this listing are this chapter and ‘Notes for Participants in Whose
Reality Counts? Very short (1–2 day) PRA/PLA-related Familiarisation
Workshops in 2008’, available at www.ids.ac.uk/ppsc
 5

PRA: Pathways, Practice and

Principles

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. (Wordsworth, The Prelude)

Abstract
RRA, agroecosystem analysis and other approaches and methods converged in the late
1980s. Ahha! experiences, like discovering that local people could map and diagram,
and do these better than outsiders, led to the explosion of innovation known as PRA
(participatory rural appraisal) which spread into many countries and organizations,
with many applications. PRA and the more inclusive PLA (participatory learning
and action) are families of participatory methodologies. During the 1990s and 2000s
PRA/PLA has spread and been applied in most countries in the world. Among the
multifarious domains of application, some of the more common have been natural
resource management and agriculture, programmes for equity, empowerment, rights
and security, and community-level planning and action. Related participatory
methodologies, which have co-evolved and spread widely as movements, include farmer
participatory research, integrated pest management, Reflect, Stepping Stones and
Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) (Chapter 7). Ideologically and
epistemologically, PRA/PLA seeks and embodies participatory ways to empower local
and subordinate people, enabling them to express and enhance their knowledge and
take action. It can be understood as having three main components that feed into and
reinforce current creative diversity: first, facilitators’ behaviours, attitudes and mindsets
linked with precepts for action; second, methods which combine visuals, tangibles and
groups, and understandings of group-visual synergy and the democracy of the ground;
and third, sharing without boundaries. These raise questions around power, roles,
realities and whose reality counts? As different methodologies, approaches and methods
have multiplied and merged, it has become less clear what PRA/PLA is or should mean.
The future lies not in branding and boundaries but in eclectic pluralism, a theme taken
up in Chapter 9.
86 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Practice: What has happened?

Participatory rural appraisal

Since the mid-1970s there has been an accelerating evolution of participatory

methodologies in development practice. One part of this has been a sequence
known by its acronyms – rapid rural appraisal (RRA) (Chapter 4), participatory
rural appraisal (PRA), and participatory learning and action (PLA). These can
be described as sets of approaches, methods, behaviours and relationships for
finding out about local context and life. All three continue to be practised and
are in various ways complementary. In the late 1980s and early 1990s PRA
evolved out of RRA. In PRA outsiders convene and facilitate. Local people,
especially those who are poorer and marginalized, are the main actors. It is they,
typically in small groups, who map, diagram, observe, analyse and act. The term
‘participatory learning and action’, introduced in 1995, is sometimes used to
describe PRA but is broader and includes other similar or related approaches and
methods. Because of the continuities and overlaps this methodological cluster or
family is sometimes referred to as PRA/PLA or even RRA/PRA/PLA. Some, as
in Pakistan, have sought to accommodate the shifts in practice by taking PRA
to mean participatory reflection and action.1 But increasingly practitioners in
this tradition have moved beyond these labels and created new and specialized
adaptations, some of these with other names. While continuing to use and
evolve PRA methods and principles, many practitioners have become eclectic
methodological pluralists.
In the early 1990s the main features of PRA emerged, with three principal
components. These were shown as three connected circles: methods; behaviour
and attitudes; and sharing.
PRA methods, as they are often called, are visual and tangible and usually
performed by small groups. These are the most visible and obviously distinctive

BEHAVIOUR
ATTITUDES

METHODS SHARING

Figure 5.1 Three principal components of PRA (Mascarenhas et al, 1991, p35A)
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 87

feature of PRA. Maps and diagrams are made by local people, often on the
ground using local materials, but sometimes on paper (Chapter 7). Many sorts of
map are made – most commonly social or census maps showing people and their
characteristics, resource maps showing land, trees, water and so on, and mobility
maps showing where people travel for services. Using earth, sand, stones, seeds,
twigs, chalk, charcoal, paper, pens and other materials, and objects as symbols,
women, men and children make diagrams to represent many aspects of their
communities, lives and environments. The methods include time lines, trend and
change diagrams, wealth and well-being ranking, seasonal diagramming, Venn
diagrams, causal linkage diagrams, and proportional piling. Matrix ranking and
scoring are used for complex and detailed comparisons. And there are many
variants and combinations of these and other methods or tools.2
Behaviour and attitudes, later construed as mindsets, behaviour and atti-
tudes, were from early on regarded by many of the pioneers as more important
than the methods. They were the focus of a South–South international workshop
which led to the publication of the ABC of PRA (Kumar, 1996), where ABC
stands for attitude and behaviour change. Some behaviours and attitudes were
expressed as precepts (see Box 5.1, p98) like ‘Hand over the stick’, ‘Don’t rush’,
‘Sit down, listen and learn’ and ‘Use your own best judgement at all times’.
Sharing initially referred to villagers sharing their knowledge, all sharing
food, and the sharing of training, ideas, insights, methods and materials between
organizations, mainly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and govern-
ment. By the mid-2000s the sharing circle had come to include relationships.
The key phrase ‘sharing without boundaries’ (Absalom et al, 1995) came out of
an international workshop of PRA practitioners and sought to make doubly clear
the principle of openness and sharing between methodologies. It was also a pre-
emptive strike against the claims of branding and exclusive ownership which go
with some methodologies.

The evolution of PRA and PLA

In the evolution of PRA there was much intermingling and innovation (Chambers,
1994, 1997). Among other sources were the approaches and methods of action
science (Argyris et al, 1985), reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983, 1987), popular
education (Freire, 1970) and participatory research and participatory action
research (BRAC, 1983; Rahman, 1984; Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991). From
farming systems research came recognition of local diversity and complexity
(Norman, 1975), and from social anthropology the richness and detail of indig-
enous technical knowledge (e.g. Brokensha, et al, 1980; Richards, 1985). The work
of the Highlander Research and Education Centre in Rural Appalachia (Gaventa
and Horton, 1981; Gaventa and Lewis, 1991; Gaventa, 1993), contributed the
seminal insight that local people with little education were much more capable of
doing their own appraisal and analysis than professionals believed.
In the origins of PRA, the largest stream, though, was the confluence of agro-
ecosystem analysis (Gypmantasiri et al, 1980; Conway, 1985) with RRA (Khon
88 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Kaen University, 1987 and Chapter 4). RRA had semi-structured interviewing
at its core (Grandstaff and Grandstaff, 1987a). Agroecosystem analysis crucially
contributed sketch mapping, diagramming, transects and observation. The big
breakthroughs were then the discoveries (or rediscoveries, for there are almost
always antecedents) that with light and sensitive facilitation local people could
themselves make the maps and diagrams, and that, especially when they worked
in small groups, what they presented demonstrated a complexity, diversity,
accuracy and for many purposes relevance far superior to anything that could
be elicited or expressed using earlier extractive or observational methodologies.
This led to the practical principle that ‘They can do it’ applied to activity after
activity, recognizing that local people had far greater abilities for analysis,
action, experimentation, research and monitoring and evaluation than had been
supposed by outside professionals or by themselves.
The stream flowed from RRA to PRA to PLA. PRA was most clearly
identifiable in the first half of the 1990s. In 1995 the core publication for PRA
experiences, still known as RRA Notes, was renamed Participatory Learning and
Action (PLA) Notes.3
For both RRA and the PRA/PLA that grew out of it there was a multiplicity
of parallel and simultaneous innovations which co-evolved, spread and inspired.
The Sustainable Agriculture Programme at the International Institute for
Environment and Development, in London, played a key part in the RRA–
PRA–PLA evolutions, transitions and spread. In what was labelled PRA, several
traditions developed. An early form in Kenya was evolved by Clark University
and the National Environment Secretariat, adopted by Egerton University, and
embodied in handbooks (e.g. PID and NES, c.1989) which supported stand-
ardized training for a sequence of activities leading to Community Action Plans.
This approach was then applied in parts of East and West Africa, for example
in The Gambia (Holmes 2001; Brown et al, 2002). In India, a few staff in two
NGOs – the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) (India) in Gujarat
and MYRADA in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu – were major contributors to an
epicentre of PRA innovation which generated the more open-ended approaches
that then spread much more widely in India and the world.4 These approaches
in turn took different forms (Pratt, 2001): some stressed methods more; others
were more reflective and more concerned with quality of facilitation, attitudes and
behaviours. In the early 1990s a proliferation of acronym labels marked an early
stage of enthusiastic innovation and claims of ownership. Like the phyla of the
Cambrian explosion or the steam engines of the early industrial revolution, many
of these labels soon died out. What persisted were the practices and the acronyms
PRA and PLA, the latter adopted, though sometimes used synonymously with
PRA, in order to be more inclusive of other participatory methodologies in the
spirit of sharing without boundaries.
In the 2000s PRA and PLA have diffused, borrowed and interpenetrated
with other approaches. They have evolved and merged into a new creative
pluralism (Cornwall and Guijt, 2004) in which earlier traditions survive but in
which many methods have been evolved and adapted. Many of the early PRA
practitioners have become more reflective and self-critical (Cornwall and Pratt,
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 89

2003). Others continue in earlier, sometimes routinized, traditions. In the latter

2000s it is not clear what the term PRA can or should now usefully describe.
For many it remains associated with group-visual activities, and with behaviour,
attitudes and relationships of facilitation which empower participants. In parallel
with the persistence of traditional PRA, and of other established participatory
methodologies, more and more practitioner/facilitators have become creative
pluralists, borrowing, improvising and inventing for particular contexts, sectors
and needs.
Reflecting critically on the evolution of PRA, theory has been implicit in
and has co-evolved with practice. As with RRA earlier (Jamieson, 1987), theory
was induced from and fed back into practice. Practice itself was driven and
drawn not by academic analysis, nor by a reflective analytical book like Pedagogy
of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), but by the excitement of innovation, discovery
and informal networking. The main pioneers were not academic intellectuals
but workers and staff in NGOs in the South, especially India, and a few from
research institutes in the North, all of them learning through engagement in the
field. And the detail of the methods came from the creativity and inventiveness
of local people, once they had the idea of what they could do, as well as from the
outside facilitators.

Ahhas! Excitement

This dry history gives no idea of what the experience was like. Since I have had
the time and opportunity to write about RRA and PRA, my own part in their
development has been exaggerated. All the same, I had the luck and privilege to be
part of the process, and especially to have two years in India in 1989–91, funded5
and free to spend time with the Indian innovators who were so rapidly co-evolving
with villagers the main methods and approaches of PRA.
We could hardly believe what was unfolding. We kept on saying to one another
– ‘This is amazing’. There were so many ahhas! and wows! Jenny McCracken
(1989) and Meera Kaul Shah (2003, p189) have written about an early one
– the seminal experience at Lathodara in Gujarat in 1988 when in an RRA mode
the outsiders drew maps and diagrams and then asked the villagers to present
them. The villagers had difficulty: the headman eventually turned the sketch map
upside down in order to see it his way. And some others could not understand
the seasonality and transect diagrams, and so presented the information in their
own manner.
My own pathway had a sequence of ahha!s parallel to that of others. The most
striking were:

• In Ethiopia, in 1988 when two Ethiopian interviewers asked three farmers

questions comparing labour demand by month and then drew a histogram.
When they asked the farmers if they could understand the diagram, they
looked and replied: ‘Yes, you have drawn what we said.’6
• In the Sudan in February 1989, how embarrassed we and the villagers were in
an RRA training when we checked out a village map we had spent two days
90 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

drawing, and the villagers said: ‘You have shown only one bakery, but we have
three.’
• In West Bengal, later in 1989, when tribal men and women drew on the
ground their own histograms of agricultural labour by month, and then the
women capped it by adding a big block for all their other tasks.
• In the first PRAs in late 1989 in India, the discovery that villagers could map
and model so much better than we could.
• In Karnataka in August 1990, seeing the first (for me) matrix scoring,
different from the ranking we had been doing, of five varieties of millet,
facilitated by Vidya Ramachandran.
• In Gujarat, the first (for me) causal linkage diagramming by a farmer, for
flows and effects of an irrigation system, facilitated by Anil Shah.

In 1989–91, in India, many began to innovate. To name some and not others risks
unfairness, but prominent innovators included Jimmy Mascarenhas, Sam Joseph,
Anil Shah, Parmesh Shah, Meera Kaul Shah, Sheelu Francis, John Devavaram,
Somesh Kumar, Prem Kumar, Kamal Kar, Ravi Jayakaran and Neela Mukherjee,
many of whom went on in the 1990s to introduce and spread PRA around the
world. And the wonder and elation did not die away as the pioneers travelled to
other countries. Here are extracts from a letter from Jimmy Mascarenhas dated
13 May 1993:

I just got back from Zimbabwe/South Africa after a thoroughly rewarding and
I think extremely fruitful trip.
...Every time, I am amazed at the miracle of transformation that takes place
in terms of the ‘participant flip’! The other miracle that takes place every
time is the one of villager participation.You know, we’ve done so many of these
PRA field exercises – and in varied locations and conditions too. Every time
I undertake one, there is a small voice in the back of my head asking ‘Are the
villagers going to participate? Is it going to work this time? Am I going to be
able to demonstrate the methods to these guys?’ And every time the same miracle
takes place. Not only do the villagers participate, but they actually take over. In
my last PRA in Zimbabwe, I had the rare spectacle of the interviewers (Forestry
Commission Staff) reading newspapers and baby sitting for the interviewees,
who were a group of farm women, while the women did resource mapping,
matrix ranking and seasonality exercises in connection with a forestry plan!
They knew what they wanted and told us so. One of the Forestry Commission
staff who was with us made a remark saying that in 30 years of extension he
had never ever experienced anything like this!

Spread and applications

From 1990, the spread of PRA was rapid throughout much of the world (Singh,
2001; Holmes, 2002; Cornwall and Pratt, 2003). By 2000 practices described as
PRA were probably to be found in well over 100 countries, of the North as well
as of the South. They were being used by all or almost all prominent international
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 91

non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and many of their partners, by many

donor and lender supported projects, and by a number of government depart-
ments, for example in India, Kenya and Vietnam.
With rapid spread, bad practice became rampant. The methods were so
attractive, often photogenic, and so amenable to being taught in a normal didactic
manner that they gained priority over behaviour, attitudes and relationships,
especially in training institutes. Manuals proliferated and were mechanically
taught and applied. Donors and lenders demanded PRA. Behaviour and attitudes
were neglected or totally ignored in much training. PRA was routinized, local
people’s time was taken and their expectations raised without any outcome,
methods were used to extract information not to empower, and consultants who
had no experience claimed to be trainers. Communities were ‘PRA’d’. Some in
Malawi were said to have been ‘carpet-bombed with PRA’. Just as academics
began to wake up to what had been happening, there was much to criticize. The
looseness of the one sentence principle ‘Use your own best judgement at all times’
could be liberating, giving freedom to improvise and invent; and it supported
much brilliant performance and innovation. But equally, it could combine with
an exclusive fixation on methods to allow sloppy and abusive practice.
Academic critics of PRA were not always able to draw on personal experience,
or sometimes drew on their own defective practice. In consequence, some of the
criticisms, for example in Participation: The New Tyranny? (Cooke and Kothari,
2001), were not well informed. Much was made of the well-known shortcomings
of community public meetings, overlooking the value and widespread use of
smaller groups. And criticisms that should have been made were overlooked, for
example the common bias against women’s participation inherent in PRA visual
analysis since this tends to require undisturbed blocks of time usually harder for
women to find than for men. Many practitioners, keenly aware of this problem,
took determined steps to offset it. And from the mid-1990s, articulate practitioners
were increasingly self-critical and reflective in a rich range of publications.7
In parallel, the applications of PRA approaches and methods, not alone but
often combined and adapted with others, have been and continue to be aston-
ishingly varied. They are constantly evolving and being invented. To at least some
degree, all entail an element of participatory research. Most have never been
recorded or published. The incomplete but illustrative list in Table 5.1, for natural
resource management and agriculture, and for programmes for empowerment,
equity, rights and security gives some sense of the range.
In addition there have been innumerable applications in other rural and
urban domains, not least in community and local planning (Swantz et al,
2001; PLA Notes 44, 2002 and 49, 2004; Swantz, 2008), market analysis (PLA
Notes 33, 1998), health (RRA Notes 16, 1992), food security assessment (e.g.
Levy, 2003), water, sanitation (Kar references), organizational analysis, and
participatory spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems (Chapter
7). PRA approaches and methods have been used for policy analysis. There
have been many applications in participatory monitoring, evaluation and impact
assessment (e.g. Guijt, 1998; Estrella et al, 2000; Mayoux and Chambers, 2005).
There has been increasing methodological pluralism and inventiveness that
 Table 5.1 Some applications of PRA approaches and methods

Natural resource management and agriculture Programmes for empowerment, equity, rights and security
(Pimbert, 2004; Borrini-Feyerabend et al, 2004; Gonsalves Participatory Poverty Assessments (Norton et al, 2001; Robb, 2002) and understandings of
et al, 2005) including agriculture, crops and animal poverty and well-being (White and Pettit, 2004)
husbandry (Catley and Mariner, 2002; PLA Notes 45, 2002;
PRGA, c. 2002 ) Consultations with the Poor, in 23 countries (Narayan et al, 2000), as a preliminary for the
World Development Report 2000/2001 (World Bank, 2000) on poverty and development
Forestry, especially Joint Forest Management, and
agroforestry (Forests Trees and People Newsletter) Women’s empowerment and gender awareness (Guijt and Shah, 1998; Akerkar, 2001;
Cornwall, 2003; Kanji, 2004)
Participatory irrigation management (Gosselink and
Strosser, 1995) Applications with and by children (PLA Notes 25, 1996; Johnson et al, 1998; Cox and
Robinson-Pant, 2003; Chawla and Johnson, 2004) including action research by primary
Participatory watershed management and soil and water schoolchildren on decision-making in their own classrooms (Cox et al, 2006)
conservation (Kolavalli and Kerr, 2002a and b)
Work with those who are powerless and vulnerable, besides children including the
Conservation and use of plant genetic resources (Friis- homeless (AAA, 2002), the disabled, older people (Heslop, 2002), minorities, refugees, the
Hansen and Sthapit, 2000) mentally distressed, prisoners and others who are marginalized

Biodiversity, conservation, and protected area Identifying, selecting and deselecting people for poverty-oriented programmes
management (Pimbert and Pretty,1997; Gujja et al, 1998;
Roe et al, 2000) Participatory analysis of livelihoods leading to livelihood action plans

Integrated pest management (Dilts and Hate, 1996; Dilts, Emergency assessment and management, including participation by communities and their
2001; Fakih et al, 2003) members in complex political emergencies

Plant breeding (Stirling and Witcombe, 2004) Participatory human rights assessments and monitoring (Blackburn et al, 2004)

Animal husbandry and veterinary epidemiology (RRA Violence, abuses and physical insecurity (e.g. Moser and McIlwaine, 2004)
Notes 20, 1994; Catley, 2007; Abebe et al, 2007)
Sexual and reproductive behaviour and rights (Cornwall and Welbourn, 2002; Gordon and
Fishing (PLA Notes 30, 1997) Cornwall, 2004) and HIV/AIDS (International HIV/AIDS Alliance, 2006a and b)
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 93

goes far beyond PRA, with an emphasis on surprises, learning and adaptation
(Guijt, 2008) and negotiated learning and collaborative monitoring in resource
management (Guijt, 2007b).

Co-evolving streams of participatory methodologies

Beyond this bald illustrative listing, more of a sense of what has happened can
be given through seven8 examples of parallel and intermingling participatory re-
search and action which have gone or are going to scale. Approaches, methods,
ideas and experiences have over the past two decades flowed freely in all directions
between these and RRA, PRA and PLA. The first four – farmer participatory re-
search, integrated pest management (IPM), Reflect and Stepping Stones – are
already widespread movements and are practised in many countries. The last
three – the Internal Learning System (ILS), Participatory Action Learning
System (PALS) and Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) – are promising
approaches which are to varying degrees going to scale, and which illustrate the
potentials of sensitive and inventive pluralism:

1 Farmer participatory research

Farmer participatory research (Farrington and Martin, 1988; Okali et al, 1994)
and Participatory Technology Development (PTD) (Haverkort et al, 1991)
preceded and paralleled the evolution of PRA. They have been a strong trend
that has gained widespread acceptance. Important distinctions were made by
Biggs (1988) indicating degrees of farmer participation, from researcher design
and control to farmer design and control. From the late 1980s there has been
a progressive shift towards the latter, as indicated by the many activities and
publications of the system-wide Participatory Research and Gender Analysis
(PRGA) programme of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR).9 As with streams of PRA and PLA, the capacities of local
people, in this case farmers, were found to exceed by far what professionals had
thought they were capable of. One example was the successive involvement of
farmers in seed-breeding with scientists, pioneered by D. M. Maurya (Maurya
et al, 1988) in the 1980s. Then it was radical to involve them in any part of the
breeding and selection process; but later innovating scientists (Witcombe et al,
1996, 2005) went further and found that outcomes were substantially improved
by farmers’ involvement in the whole process, including selection of the original
crosses. Worldwide, farmers’ research and participation in research have been
spread through the International Agricultural Research Centres, National
Agricultural Research Institutes, and INGOs such as World Neighbours.

2 Integrated pest management (IPM)

IPM has been a parallel movement, sharing characteristics with PRA and PLA.
IPM in Indonesia started in the late 1980s, with the first training of trainers in
1989. Behaviour and attitudes of facilitators are considered critical (Pontius et
94 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

al, 2002). IPM enables farmers to control pests in rice with sharply reduced
applications of pesticide. By the early 2000s there were some one million farmer
participants in Indonesia alone, and several millions worldwide. In IPM farmers
are brought together in farmer field schools for in situ learning through their own
action research. They observe, map, experiment and analyse, set up and study
their own ‘zoo’ for insects and pests, and come to their own conclusions about
how to manage and control them. In the words of Russ Dilts (2001):

A people-centred IPM movement has grown in Asia over the last ten years,
and is now spreading to parts of Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
During this period, many variants have evolved and continue to evolve ...

Even in a repressive and authoritarian social order, the farmer-centred approach

of the farmer field schools provided ‘a safe space for social learning and action’
(Fakih et al, 2003, p95). In Indonesia, IPM groups came together and formed
the IPM Farmers Association, in effect a national movement. The Association has
engaged in advocacy to promote farmers’ rights and discuss farmers’ problems
at local and district levels, and then nationally with a National Congress attended
by the responsible minister (Fakih et al, 2003, p111).

3 Reflect
Reflect10 is a participatory methodology (PM) which combines Paulo Freire’s
theoretical framework on the politics of literacy with PRA approaches and
user-generated materials from PRA visualizations (Education Action, 1994
– continuing; PLA Notes, 1998; Archer and Newman, 2003; Archer and Goreth,
2004). Piloted through action research projects in El Salvador, Uganda and
Bangladesh between 1993 and 1995, it has spread through the work of at least
350 organizations including NGOs, community-based organizations, govern-
ments and social movements, in more than 60 countries. A standard manual
was soon abandoned as too rigid (Phnuyal, 1999; Archer, 2007, pp20–21).
Local differentiation and ownership have become marked features. Reflect has
taken many different forms with ‘immense diversity’ (Archer and Goreth, 2004,
p40).
At the core of Reflect are facilitated groups known as Reflect circles. These
meet regularly, usually for about two years, and sometimes continuing indefinitely.
The balance between literacy and empowerment has varied. Analysis by circles,
combined with networking, has confronted power and abuses and asserted human
rights. Reflect’s core principles include these: starting from existing experience;
using participatory tools; power analysis; creating democratic spaces; reflection–
action–reflection; self-organization; and recognition that Reflect is a political
process for social change and greater social justice. These principles are manifest
in Communication and Power: Reflect Practical Resource Materials (compilers David
Archer and Kate Newman), the outcome of a widespread participatory process.
First put together in 2003 in a loose-leaf form, its sections include Written word,
Numbers, Spoken word, Images, and Reflect in action, with a strong emphasis
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 95

on empowerment to enable people to do their own appraisal and analysis, leading

to their own awareness and action.

4 Stepping Stones (SS)

Stepping Stones (Welbourn, 1995, 2002, 2007) is an approach and methods to
facilitate experiential learning concerned with social awareness, communication
and relationships. It was evolved by Alice Welbourn and first tried in Uganda
in 1994. Groups of people in communities meet for a sequence of interactions
and reflections especially on the inequalities that govern gender and other social
relations in the context of HIV/AIDS. A review of evaluations by Tina Wallace
(2006, p20) reported that SS had been adapted and used in over 100 countries.
Most countries had no estimates of coverage but a World Bank estimate was that
in Mozambique alone half a million people had been reached over four years.
Wallace’s review found ‘almost universal support for, and appreciation of, SS
as a change process from those with first hand experience of using it or seeing it
used’ including ‘better inter-generational communication, more openness about
discussing sex, less stigma and more care for those with HIV and AIDS, and a
willingness of PLWHA [People Living With HIV/AIDS] to be open.’ (Wallace,
2006, p10). Another evaluation summarized as follows:

The response of communities across the globe has been overwhelmingly positive
and the results extremely encouraging. Reductions in gender violence, increased
self-esteem and confidence among women and girls, improved sex lives between
married couples, radical reconfiguration of gender relations and the gender
division of labour in the household, relinquishing harmful cultural practices,
such as wife sharing and widow inheritance ... are but a few examples of the
reported impact.’ (Hadjipateras et al, 2006, p8)

5 The Internal Learning System

The ILS, pioneered in India by Helzi Noponen, was conceived as a participatory
impact assessment and planning system. The pictorial diaries and workbooks
which are its most conspicuous feature were developed independently of PRA.
Poor, often illiterate participants use them to keep their own records of changes
over time.The intention is to reverse normal power relationships: poor participants
‘are the first to learn about programme impact and performance, and alter plans
as a result . . . [they] are not only data gatherers, but they are also analysts, planners
and advocates for change’ (Noponen, 2007). The ILS has evolved for different
conditions including the work of the NESA (New Entity for Social Action) and
its partners in South India for the empowerment of Dalit and Adivasi women
and children (Nagasundari, 2007); and of Pradan (Professional Assistance for
Development Action) and its partners in North India with self-help groups for
the generation of sustainable livelihoods for poor rural people (Narendranath,
2007). Among other outcomes have been action on social and gender issues
previously too sensitive for discussion, and many micro-level manifestations of
social change especially awareness and empowerment of women and others who
are marginalized.
96 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

6 Participatory Action Learning System

PALS, pioneered by Linda Mayoux, is ‘an eclectic and constantly evolving
methodology which enables people to collect and analyse the information they
themselves need on an ongoing basis to improve their lives in ways they decide’
(Mayoux, 2007). Core features are the inventive use of diagram tools (Mayoux,
2003a), their integration with participatory principles and processes, linking
individual and group learning, and the adoption and adaptation of approaches
and methods from many traditions. Typically, diagram tools are designed and
piloted, and incorporated in a manual for each context (e.g. Mayoux, 2003b).
Applications and developments of PALS have included women’s empowerment
with ANANDI, an NGO in Gujarat (Mayoux and ANANDI, 2005), participatory
monitoring and evaluation with the Kabarole Research and Resource Centre in
Uganda, and impact assessment of micro-finance in several countries.

7 Community-Led Total Sanitation

CLTS (Kar, 2003, 2005; Kar and Pasteur, 2005; Kar and Bongartz, 2006),
pioneered by Kamal Kar in Bangladesh, is a remarkable initiative using PRA
approaches and methods in which small communities are facilitated to conduct
their own research and analysis into their practices of defecation and their
consequences. This is done through mapping, transects, observation, calculations
of quantities produced and ingested, and reflections on pathways from faeces to
the mouth. This quite often leads to community decisions to dig holes, construct
latrines and introduce total sanitation to become open-defecation free. The
approach has been introduced and is reported to have been adopted by thousands
of communities spread over Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan
and other countries in South and South-east Asia, and has been introduced into
East and Southern Africa, South America, and Yemen in the Middle East.
These seven examples are original and distinct methodologies which to
varying degrees draw on, share and have contributed to PRA/PLA approaches,
methods, behaviours and mindsets and which have creatively invented and
evolved their own diverse and varied practices. All can be seen as forms of, or
closely related to, participatory action research. All frame and facilitate sequences
of activities which empower participants to undertake their own appraisal or
research and analysis, and come to their own conclusions.

Principles:Theory from practice11

Practices, principles and theory intertwine and co-evolve. Theory can exist as
an intellectual abstraction without practice, but practice cannot exist without im-
plicit theory. When theory and practice co-evolve, one or the other may exercise
more influence. If theory and reflective practice have led more in action research
(Reason and Bradbury, 2001), practice and experiential learning have led more
in the RRA–PRA–PLA sequence. At times, as in the 1989–91 explosion of PRA,
not all the implicit theory was immediately made explicit. But critical reflection
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 97

followed practice, and principles were induced and articulated on the run drawing
on experience. And this continues: among practitioners, researchers and activists
engaged in the rapid spread of participatory GIS (Chapter 7), for example, it is
generally agreed that PGIS practice is more advanced than the theory behind the
applications (Rambaldi et al, 2006).
PRA/PLA practical theory appears robust.12 It can be described at two levels.
The first, as expressed by Jethro Pettit (pers. comm.), is more overarching: that
most practitioners would share an epistemological or ideological perspective,
articulated in the PRA literature, that expert and professional knowledge and
ways of knowing need to be humble and to appreciate people’s own knowledge
and ways of knowing. Professionals, and people who are dominant in contexts
and relationships (‘uppers’), habitually underestimate the capabilities and the
value of the knowledge of those who are subordinate in contexts and relationships
(‘lowers’).13 A role of the professional is to transform these relations by
facilitating, enabling people to express and enhance their own contextual and
specific knowledge. PRA behaviours, methods and orientations are a means
towards this. The core is that uppers facilitate, support and protect processes
through which lowers and local people empower themselves and power relations
are transformed.
The second level supports the first. It is more detailed and can be induced
from practice, from what has been found to work. Methods, approaches and
methodologies have evolved through borrowing, inventing and experiential
learning driven by the discipline, pressures and opportunities of engagement in the
field. Innovation has taken place through improvisations forced by the challenge
of immediate social situations. There will be, and should be, a range of views
about this second level of theory. What is presented here is only my interpretation.
Focusing on PRA experience and also drawing on the seven examples above,
together with PGIS, three clusters of principles can be distinguished. These
are evolutions of the original three principal components of PRA (Figure 5.1)
becoming: behaviours, attitudes and mindsets – precepts for action; methods
– visuals, tangibles and groups; and sharing – pluralism and diversity.

Behaviours, attitudes and mindsets: Precepts for action

Empowering processes require changes of behaviours, attitudes and mindsets,

and typically changes of role from teacher to facilitator and from controller to
coach. To promote and sustain the spread of good PRA the practical theory
has been expressed as short and simple precepts with the idea that these will
embed and spread as expressions and behaviours; and that the experiences these
bring will transform attitudes, predispositions and mindsets among uppers and
transform relationships with lowers.
One basic reversal is through asking ‘who?’ and ‘whose?’ and answering with
‘theirs’, referring commonly to lowers, in practice often local people and most
of all to those who are poor, weak and marginalized. These questions vary by
context, but a decade ago (Chambers, 1997, p101) were summarized as:
98 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

• Whose knowledge counts?14

• Whose values?
• Whose criteria and preferences?
• Whose appraisal, analysis and planning?
• Whose action?
• Whose monitoring and evaluation?
• Whose learning?
• Whose empowerment?
• Whose reality counts?
• ‘Ours’ or ‘Theirs’?

The overarching question ‘Whose reality counts?’ forces reflection on how power-
ful outsiders tend to impose their realities on local people, especially when they
are bringing ‘superior’ knowledge or technology. The wide span of ‘who?’ and
‘whose?’ questions can be illustrated by the listing generated by practitioners re-
flecting critically on the ethics of PGIS.
Some of the main behavioural precepts of PRA15 are:

Box 5.1 Behavioural precepts of PRA

Precept indicating
Introduce yourself be honest, transparent, relate as a person
They can do it have confidence in people’s abilities
Unlearn critically reflect on how you see things
Ask them ask people their realities, priorities, advice ...
Don’t rush be patient, take time
Sit down, listen and learn don’t dominate
Facilitate don’t lecture, criticize or teach
Embrace error learn from what goes wrong or does not
work
Hand over the stick or chalk or pen, anything that empowers
Use your own best judgement take responsibility for what you do
at all times
Shut up! keep quiet. Welcome and tolerate silence

Methods: Visuals, tangibles and groups

Many PRA methods involve visual and tangible expression and analysis, for
example mapping, modelling, diagramming, pile sorting, or scoring with seeds,
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 99

stones or other counters. These are usually but not always small group activities.
What is expressed can be seen, touched or moved and stays in place.16 These
visible, tangible, alterable and yet lasting aspects contrast with the invisible, un-
alterable and transient nature of verbal communication. Symbols, objects and
diagrams can represent realities that are cumbersome or impossible to express
verbally.
These visual and tangible approaches and methods reverse power relations
and empower lowers in five ways.
The first is group-visual synergy. As in Figure 5.2, group motivation, cross-
checking, adding detail, discussing and cumulative representation generate a
positive-sum synergy through which all can contribute and learn. A facilitator can
observe and assess the process for its rigour of trustworthiness and relevance.17
The outcomes are then empowering through collective analysis and learning,
and because they are at once credible and an output created and owned by the
group.

Analysts

Cumulative
Group
process

Visual/
Motivation
tangible

Cross-
checking

Convene Keep quiet

initiate observe
facilitate assess

Facilitators Facilitators

Source: Chambers, 1997, p160

Figure 5.2 Group-visual synergy

100 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The second is democracy of the ground (Chambers, 2002, pp94–95, 186–

187). Much PRA mapping and diagramming levels or reverses power relations
by taking place on the ground. Those taking part have less eye contact, talk less
and can dominate less easily, than in normal upright positions face to face. Hands
are freer to move tangibles than mouths are to speak words. Those who are more
powerful, sometimes older men, may stand on their dignity and not get down on
the ground at all, whereas those who are younger and women may.
The third is the representation of complex realities and relationships. Visual
and tangible approaches and methods enable local people and lowers generally
to express and analyse complex patterns of categories, comparisons, estimates,
valuations, relationships and causality, across an astonishing range of topics,
from social and census maps of communities to causal and linkage diagrams of
causes and effects of poverty, from scored matrices for varieties of crops and
domestic animals to different forms of violence, from characteristics of different
sorts of sexual partners to seasonal analyses of work, income, debt, expenditures,
sickness and other aspects of life, from on-farm nutrient flows to priorities for
local development, and much, much else.
The fourth is using visuals as instruments of empowerment. Over the past
decade rapid developments have generated a new repertoire for subordinate
and marginalized people. The visual diaries of ILS in South India empower
low-caste women, arming them with visual representations of their realities and
experiences, enabling them to track and discuss changes in their lives over time,
and to take action when patterns of marginalization (such as caste or gender
discrimination) persist (Nagasundari, 2007). With PGIS, the geo-referenced
maps of forest dwellers and other peripheral people give them credible and
potent aids for asserting and securing their rights and boundaries. Making
three-dimensional PGIS models has enabled local communities to express and
display their knowledge and realities, and to plan, whether for land management,
conservation, or cropping patterns. Large PGIS models can hardly fail to belong
to communities and be retained by them. And they provide a natural and efficient
locus for dialogue and decision-making (Rambaldi and Callosa-Tarr, 2000,
2002).
The fifth is participatory numbers. A diverse and versatile family of innova-
tions has been evolved to generate numbers and statistics from participatory
appraisal and analysis and are discussed in Chapter 6. To a striking degree, the
numbers generated through participatory methods and processes have been
found to combine accuracy, authority and utility, and to empower those whose
appraisal and analysis have produced them.
These five ways in which visuals, tangibles and numbers empower often
combine and reinforce each other. Their force is then more than the sum of
their parts. Together they can be potent means for transforming power relations,
strengthening the power of lowers and local people not just to understand their
realities but to take action, and to negotiate with uppers and outside powers-
that-be.
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 101

Sharing, pluralism and diversity

Sharing without boundaries was a principle that emerged from a workshop of

PRA practitioners in 1994 (Absalom et al, 1995). To be sure, there have been
a few practitioners who might be described as PRA fundamentalists, who have
sought or claimed some sort of exclusive expertise and ownership. But sharing
was one of the three principal components of PRA enunciated in 1990, and a
corollary of sharing and of ‘use your own best judgement at all times’ is to endorse
and celebrate pluralism.
It is striking how PRA, PLA, IPM, Reflect, PGIS and most of the other PMs
have been open and porous, and how they have diversified creatively as they have
spread. Methodological diversity is an enabling condition for creativity (van Mele
et al, 2005). Those with standard manuals and detailed instructions have been
less successful or have run into problems: Reflect’s Mother Manual was quickly
abandoned when found to inhibit more than help (Box 9.1, p175). A key to good
spread, and to becoming a movement, has often been holding firm to minimum
principles, and then allowing and encouraging practices and behaviours which
empower, through local creativity and ownership. An indicator of this is in the
labels used: Reflect in Nepal, for example, is not known by its English name but
has 16 different Nepalese names and identities (pers. comm. Bimal Phnuyal).
Creativity, diversity and local ownership and responsibility have been at the core
of the successful spread of these participatory methodologies.
This inclusiveness of sharing and borrowing raises questions about how the
three components – of behaviours, attitudes and mindsets, of methods using
visuals, tangibles and groups, and of sharing, pluralism and diversity – can relate
to other theories and theoretical frameworks.18 In PRA/PLA terms, an answer
can be given by ‘Use your own best judgement at all times’. For some, who
want a bounded and labelled methodology, this will look and feel too loose, both
personally and because it can appear to open the door to bad practice. For others
it will turn responsibility back from an external authority or a predetermined
process to personal reflective judgement, liberating through freedom to decide
and choose what to learn from, borrow and adapt. It can then encourage eclectic
opportunism and creativity to enhance local relevance and fit to contribute to the
empowerment of others, especially lowers.

Beyond PRA, brands and boundaries

The PRA label has been a problem, spreading often without PRA principles
and practices. In the 1990s, by claiming some sort of ownership of PRA, a few
consultants negated its spirit of sharing but in the 2000s this has become less
evident. Another problem has been how some have misunderstood PRA.19
Sadly, too, some working in other traditions, have regarded PRA as competitor
rather than colleague. This may have contributed to some action research
practitioners’ surprising lack of interest in the added value of PRA approaches
and methods, and to their seeing PRA as extractive research conducted on local
102 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

and poor people, not research conducted by and with them as in the movements,
methodologies and applications described above. In these movements, as amply
documented, practice and theory have been oriented towards empowering those
who are marginalized and weak, using new approaches and methods to enable
them to do their own appraisals and analysis, and to gain voice and take their
own action.
Much of the discourse and practice has now moved beyond PRA. At one
level, the use of some PRA methods is quite stable and practical: wealth ranking
(also known as well-being grouping), for example, is extensively used by INGOs
and their partners as a means of enabling people in communities to identify those
who are worse off using their own criteria. At another level, good participatory
practice is improvised and invented as performance in ever changing conditions,
leading to a multiplicity of expressions which are unique and ever new.
The more inclusive usage of the term PLA has helped here, as for example
by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance (2006b) for whom PLA is

A growing family of approaches, tools, attitudes and behaviours to enable

and empower people to present, share, analyse and enhance their knowledge
of life and conditions, and to plan, act, monitor, evaluate, reflect and scale up
community action.

and

a way to help people to participate together in learning, and then to act on that
learning.

The agenda has, then, moved beyond branding and boundaries. These can inhibit
and limit more than help. It has become less clear what PRA is or should usefully
mean. The priority is not the spread of PRA but inclusively of participatory
approaches, attitudes, behaviours, methods and mindsets. A key element in this
is personal, the capacity to adapt, improvise and innovate; and that is something
in which practitioners from all traditions can share. Paradigmatically, this is part
of the shift from things to people, from top–down to bottom–up, from standard
to diverse, from control to empowerment. Brands, boundaries, exclusiveness and
claims of ownership dissolve to be replaced by openness, generosity, inclusiveness
and sharing. The future lies not in branding and boundaries but in creative and
eclectic pluralism, the theme of Chapter 9. And this opens up the potentials of
a new world.

Notes
1 ‘Participatory reflection and action’ has the sequence of words wrong. It
would be better putting action first, as ‘participatory action and reflection’,
but the acronym PAR was already in use for participatory action research.
However, an advantage has been that more practitioners have abandoned
 PRA: Pathways, Practice and Principles 103

their use of brand labels and become explicit about their pluralism (see e.g.
Shah, 2003).
2 For what are known as PRA methods, typically including visuals and/or
tangibles, see Jones, 1996a, b; Chambers, 1997; Shah et al, 1999a, b; Kumar,
2002; Mukherjee, 2002; Jayakaran, 2003; International HIV/AIDS Alliance,
2006b. See also www.ids.ac.uk/ppsc for more.
3 RRA Notes Issues 1–21 (1988–94) was published by the International In-
stitute for Environment and Development, whose Sustainable Agriculture
Programme had much to do with the evolution and spread of PRA and
which was documented in the Notes. Issue 22 in 1995 was renamed PLA
Notes with the explanation: ‘Participatory Learning and Action (PLA)
has been adopted . . . as a collective term to describe the growing body of
participatory approaches and methodologies.’
4 The first major accessible publication was RRA Notes 13 Participatory
Rural Appraisal: Proceedings of the February 1991 Bangalore PRA trainers
workshop, which shows how rapid the evolution and spread of PRA had
been in India in its first year or two.
5 I was co-funded by the Ford Foundation, the Overseas Development Admin-
istration of the British Government, and the Aga Khan Foundation.
6 Photographs of this interview and events from the early years of PRA can
be found in Chambers, 2004.
7 For a selection of critical reflections by practitioners of PRA/PLA see PRA
Notes 24 (1995); the 32 individual contributions to Pathways to Participa-
tion: Reflections on PRA (Cornwall and Pratt, 2003); Participation: From
Tyranny to Transformation (Hickey and Mohan, 2004); and the 50th issue of
Participation Learning and Action (2004), entitled Critical Reflections, Future
Directions.
8 In an earlier draft, an eighth example was Participatory Geographic Informa-
tion Systems (PGIS). I have removed it here to avoid duplicating Chapter 7.
The PGIS experience reinforces the points made on the basis of comparing
the seven methodologies analysed here.
9 See www.prgaprogram.org
10 Reflect originally stood for Regenerated Freirian Literacy with Empowering
Community Techniques but this usage has been dropped and it is now
referred to simply as Reflect.
11 For an earlier and fuller statement of PRA theory from practice see
Chambers, 1997, chapter 7, ‘What Works and Why’.
12 The word ‘robust’ is a response to reactions of colleagues to an earlier
more modest draft of this chapter. They have argued against an apologetic
stance which might imply that the RRA/PRA/PLA sequence was somehow
a theoretical second-best because of the degree to which it was driven by
experiential learning. The contrary is the case.
13 For elaboration and qualification of the concepts of upper and lower see
Chambers, 1997, pp58–60, 207–10, 221–228.
14 The phrase ‘Whose knowledge counts?’ originates with Zoe Mars who as
editor of IDS Bulletin thought of it as the title for vol 10, no 2, in 1979.
104 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

15 Fuller listings of PRA-related precepts and behaviours can be found in

Participatory Workshops (Chambers, 2002, pp7–9).
16 Visuals and tangibles can, though, be vulnerable – on the ground to wind,
rain, dust storms, trampling by people or animals or consumption by hungry
hens whose alternative view of the value of matrix scoring can dramatically
diminish scores. Paper is vulnerable to crumpling, smudging, fire, decay and,
most of all, retention or removal by NGO staff who so often take maps away
from the communities which have made them.
17 The rigour of trustworthiness and relevance is explored in more detail in
Chambers, 1997, pp158–161.
18 This sets down a challenge to theoreticians to show how their theories and
categories could enhance the quality of field practice. Some of these theories
are expounded in Reason and Bradbury (eds) (2008) Handbook of Action
Research, 2nd edition. See also Chandler and Torbert, 2003.
19 PRA has for example been taken to stand for Participatory Research Appraisal
or Participatory Rapid Appraisal. In Participation:The New Tyranny? (Cooke
and Kothari, 2001, p88 and index) PLA is misrepresented as participatory
learning analysis instead of participatory learning and action, despite the
latter having been the meaning of the periodical PLA Notes.
 6

Who Counts?
Participation and Numbers1

Numbers are the masters of the weak, but the slaves of the strong.
(Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 1864)

We opted ... for participatory approaches, both because we wanted to give

communities a voice and because we wanted to gather information that is too
complex to be handled by questionnaires. The challenge for us was to generate
reliable statistics from research using participatory methods. (Barahona and
Levy, 2003, p1)

Abstract
Participatory approaches and methods can generate quantitative as well as qualitative
data. Mainly since the early 1990s, a quiet tide of innovation has developed a rich
range of participatory ways, many of them visual and tangible, by which local people
themselves produce and can own numbers.The approaches and methods have variously
entailed counting, mapping, measuring, estimating, valuing and scoring, together with
comparing and combinations of these, and have had many applications.
The methodological pioneers in going to scale in the 1990s rarely recognized
the significance of what they had been doing. The pioneers of the 2000s have shown
ingenuity, skill, patience and courage, sometimes in the face of opposition driven by
conventional reflexes. Participatory numbers have been taken to scale most notably
through participatory surveys with visuals and tangibles, through aggregation
from focus groups and through wealth and well-being ranking. There have been
breakthroughs in producing national statistics, and also on subjects and with insights
inaccessible through questionnaires.
Statistical principles can be applied to participatory numbers.2 Ways have been
found of overcoming the vexing problem of commensurability between communities.
As with all ways of finding out, there are trade-offs, in this context notably between
participatory open-endedness and standardization for comparability.
The question ‘Who counts?’ raises issues of ownership and power. Participatory
monitoring and evaluation (PM and E) has taken many forms, with varied degrees
of ownership and empowerment.Whether participatory statistics empower local people
is sensitive to official attitudes and acceptance, and whether these lead to changes
106 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

in policy and practice that make a real difference. Questions are raised of how the
quiet revolution of participatory numbers can be win–win, with learning by outsider
facilitator/researchers and empowerment of insider analysts, and with the best of both
qualitative and quantitative worlds.

Introduction
This chapter is about participatory approaches and methods which generate
numbers, participatory numbers for short. It challenges the normal reflex that
for numbers we must have questionnaires. It presents evidence which I believe
should excite and inspire researchers and those who fund and sponsor research.
Participatory numbers with their burgeoning repertoire are part of a quiet
revolution, unrecognized in professional mainstreams, which has taken place in
the past decade and a half. There is a parallel with rapid rural appraisal (RRA)
(Chapter 4) in the 1970s. During that decade more and more professionals
were innovating with ways of finding out about rural life and conditions which
were quicker, better and more cost-effective than either traditional questionnaire
surveys or in-depth social anthropology. Similarly, participatory numbers were
marginal in the 1990s but are now increasingly facilitated, used and recognized,
as RRA came to be, not as a second best but more and more often as a best. Even
so, it is still little recognized how much participatory numbers can substitute for
conventional methods like questionnaires.
In writing I have tried to be balanced. Nevertheless, the reader should be
warned. My bad experiences with large questionnaires have tended to predispose
me against all questionnaires and to support alternatives. I have caught myself
being misled by this. So it was that for this I seized gleefully on a diagram compar-
ing proportions by month in 2001/02 and 2002/03 of those who were extremely
food insecure in Malawi. Ahha! Here was another case to demonstrate the
superiority of participatory numbers over questionnaires. On checking, though, I
was chastened. The source was a questionnaire: it was short and simple, not long
and complex, but nevertheless a questionnaire (Barahona, 2005, pp80–81). And I
was once again driven by the evidence to modify my view and to embrace a more
eclectic methodological pluralism, albeit one in which participatory numbers
usually remain the first and best option, especially, but by no means only, for
topics which are sensitive or complex or both.
The question ‘Who counts?’ can have two meanings: who is the active agent
in generating numbers?; and who matters and whose reality matters? These
two threads weave through this chapter. Let me invite the reader when thinking
about the examples that follow to imagine the processes and relationships that
were central to them, with sequences of activities, and with outsiders (‘us’) as
facilitators not enumerators and local people (‘them’) as analysts not respondents;
and to reflect on how much more often than in common practice the answer to
the question ‘Who counts?’ can and should be ‘They do’.
Debates about ways of finding out often concern the contrasts and comple-
mentarities between qualitative and quantitative approaches. This was the focus
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 107

of a conference convened by Ravi Kanbur at Cornell in March 2001 which led

to the book Q-Squared: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Poverty Appraisal
(Kanbur, 2003). A Methodological Framework for Combining Quantitative and
Qualitative Survey Methods (Marsland et al, 2000) is of interest as the work of
statisticians. It identifies three types of combination:

1 swapping tools and attitudes: merging (e.g. participatory mapping to provide

a sampling frame)
2 sequencing (e.g. informal before formal, or formal before informal)
3 concurrent use of tools (e.g. questionnaire and RRA in parallel, then
compared).

Valid and valuable as mixed methods have been and will continue to be, they have
not much engaged with or gained from the quiet revolution in which local people
themselves generate numbers.

Gains from quantitative approaches

Quantitative approaches usually means research using standard sampling tech-

niques, questionnaires and statistical analysis. They are so widely used because
of the many potential benefits from statistics and numbers. It is as well to start by
recognizing some of those that are more common and better known:

• time series comparisons to identify trends in whatever dimensions are

measured
• cross-section comparisons between different individuals, households, groups
and communities, and across regions, countries and continents
• correlations which identify associations which raise questions of causality and
covariant changes
• estimates of prevalence and distributions within populations and areas
• triangulations and linkages with qualitative data (Booth et al, 1998; Booth,
2003)
• the credibility of numbers in influencing policy-makers
• the utility to policy-makers and policy-influencers of being able to put
numbers on trends and other comparisons.

The case argued from the evidence in this chapter is that frequently these and other
gains can come better from participatory numbers than from questionnaires.

Beyond conventional qual–quant complementarities

Qualitative research too has its well-recognized advantages, not least of depth of
insight and of being open to the unexpected. The value of qualitative ‘precision
in meaning’ tends to be contrasted with the value of quantitative ‘accuracy in
108 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

measurement’.3 In recent years increasing attention has been paid to mixed meth-
ods that combine qualitative and quantitative methods in research (e.g. Booth et
al, 1998; Marsland et al, 2000; Kanbur, c. 2003; Kanbur and Shaffer, 2006) to
gain the best of both worlds.
Complementarities have been recognized between depth and detail from
qualitative research and representativeness and statistical robustness from
quantitative research. The two also inform, correct and augment each other. Qual-
itative studies can contribute to the content of questionnaires, their interpretation
and correction. Questionnaires can raise issues for probing and explanation. To
give just one example, in a study of destitution in Ethiopia, qualitative inquiry
showed how a questionnaire was likely to underestimate the impacts of death
of an able-bodied adult because it would not recognize the break-up of the
household itself that commonly resulted (Sharp, 2005, p19). The many benefits
of these ‘qual–quant’ or Q-squared interactions are not now seriously in dispute.
They can be seen as combinations of the SW (conventional qualitative) and SE
(conventional quantitative) quadrants in Figure 6.1.
However, qualitative and quantitative have in common that whether separ-
ately or together their dominant mode is extractive, that is, they are used to
gather and take away data for analysis. Valid and valuable as they can be, either
separately or as mixed methods, they have not much engaged with or gained
from the revolution in which it is local people themselves who conduct their own
appraisals, investigations and research. Linda Mayoux (2005) has asked whether
quantitative, qualitative and participatory are three different worlds of research
and has laid out their contrasts and complementarities, and issues of relevance,
reliability and ethics, arguing for optimizing combinations for context and
purpose. This now is about that major part of the participatory world where local
people generate and to varying degrees are empowered by their own numbers.
A minimalist view could be that participatory numbers can be complements or
checks to conventional and established methods. The evidence below shows that
in many contexts participatory numbers are often much more than checks; they
are often better alternatives, with their own rigour and range.
Who counts? questions and experiences take us, then, beyond conventional
complementarities. Two common linked assumptions are shown to be false:
first, that participatory approaches only generate qualitative insights – the NW
quadrant in Figure 6.1; and second, that quantitative data can only be produced
by questionnaire surveys or scientific measurement – the SE quadrant.
Numerous experiences now confound and contradict these two assump-
tions. Largely unrecognized in academic and official government and aid agency
mainstreams, a whole new field has opened up. This is represented by the NE
quadrant. This takes us beyond conventional complementarities. Especially since
the early 1990s, a tide of innovation has developed a rich range of participatory
ways by which local people can themselves produce numbers. The methodological
pioneers have rarely recognized the full significance of what they have been doing.
For brevity, the generation of numbers using participatory approaches and
methods will be referred to here as participatory numbers.
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 109

Participatory
new Participatory
numbers

Group and
visual analysis

NW NE

Qual Quant

Participant Questionnaire
observation interviews

SW SE

Embedded
= Primary mode traditional
of interaction

Figure 6.1 Dimensions of methodology and outcome

Modes of participatory number-generating4

Participatory activities can generate numbers in different ways and for different
purposes. Four categories of activities and ownership of the numbers can be
described.
First, groups of people can be facilitated to put numbers on their character-
istics as individuals. This can occur in both local and community contexts, and
often through public raising of hands. It can also be private and confidential with
voting behind a screen or marking on anonymous slips. As ever, the validity of
the numbers depends on context and sensitivity, with public and visible cross-
checking in some cases, and anonymity in others. These methods are common
in school classes and in participatory workshops (Chambers, 2002, p23). In the
latter, standing in groups or clusters is often effective, and can quickly identify
(and celebrate) characteristics, for example the number of mother tongues in an
international group.5
In this mode the numbers are either publicly visible to all, or can be shared by
whoever counts the numbers which are individually confidential.
110 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Second, there are numbers generated by local people which they retain and
use or do not need or bother to keep. These may or may not be shared or needed
by others. Examples can be found in participatory monitoring and evaluation
(M and E) (pp120–122).
In this mode, the numbers are more ‘theirs’, that is, they belong to and are
used by local people.
Third, in a comparative research mode, there is the analysis of secondary data
which have been generated in a participatory manner without pre-standardization.
Deciding categories and allocating to them can be difficult but the results can
be significant and persuasive. Karen Brock (1999) gathered findings from part-
icipatory research on poverty, and analysed what had come from 58 groups and
individuals in 12 countries who had been asked to identify key criteria for poverty,
ill-being or vulnerability. She then used the NUDIST programme to classify and
count these by criteria, separated into urban and rural, and men and women,
and presented the results diagrammatically to show frequency of mention as per-
centages. One striking finding was that water came out as a higher priority for
poor people in urban than in rural areas.
In this mode, the numbers are ‘ours’, that is, they are derived and used by the
outside analyst.
Fourth, the main focus here, is the generation of numbers from several or
many sources using participatory approaches, methods, and behaviours which
are usually to some degree standardized. These practices have evolved and spread
quietly, almost unnoticed. Often the methods are visual and tangible (see e.g.
Mukherjee, 1995, 2002; Jones, 1996a, b; Shah et al, 1999a, b; Jayakaran, 2002,
2003, 2007; Moser and McIlwaine, 2004; Kagugube et al, 2007). The activ-
ities can be by individuals, but most often they take place in groups: different
groups of people do similar things which provide numbers which can be added,
averaged, compared, or used as a basis for various calculations. Local people
can do calculations themselves at their own level, but in practice it is usually the
outside researchers or facilitators who aggregate and calculate beyond the level
of the group.
In this mode, ownership and use depend on context and facilitation. Many
modes, combinations and processes are possible. Kay Sharp (2007, p275),
for instance, included proportional piling in the sequence of a household ques-
tionnaire survey in Ethiopia. Her account of the participatory visual and tangible
part of the interviews gives a sense of process:

The exact number of 100 beans (pre-counted by the interviewer)6 was used to
facilitate the checking and recording of numbers in the field, and subsequent
data entry ... a few people counted the beans, but most estimated the income
proportions first roughly allocating smaller or larger handfuls to each circle,
then visually comparing the size of the piles, and moving beans around
according to discussion and spontaneous pair-wise comparison (e.g. ‘didn’t we
get more from firewood than from eggs?’). (Sharp, 2007, p275)
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 111

Participatory methods, applications and activities

Methods7 often used to generate numbers include:

• participatory mapping (ActionAid-Nepal, 1992; Chambers, 1997; Barahona

and Levy, 2003)
• participatory modelling (Rambaldi and Callosa-Tarr, 2000, 2002)
• proportional piling (Watson, 1994; Jayakaran, 2002, 2003, 2007; Sharp, 2005,
pp20–24)
• card writing, marking, sorting, ordering and positioning (Kagugube et al,
2007)
• matrix ranking and scoring (Abeyasekera, 2001; Abebe et al, 2007)
• pair-wise ranking (Mukherjee, 2002)
• linkage diagramming (Burn, 2000; Galpin et al, 2000)
• pocket voting (van Wijk-Sijbesma, 2001).

Often in practice there are combinations of visuals and tangibles – maps, models,
diagrams and counters of various sorts (stones, seeds etc.).
These have many common applications including social and census
mapping, household listing and scoring, well-being ranking, trend and change
analysis, seasonal diagramming, preference ranking, causal-linkage analysis and
problem trees.
The participatory activities which generate numbers are counting, calcu-
lating, measuring, estimating, ranking, valuing and scoring. In practice, these
are not always distinct and may be combined in the same activity. Comparing
things is often involved, giving numbers or scores or positioning cards, to indicate
relative degrees, sizes or values.
Examples of counting are social and census maps. These tend to be very
accurate for identifying and listing households, for headcounts and for household
characteristics which are common knowledge. Participants can ‘see what is being
said’ and correct and add detail. For community census purposes, the outcomes
have proven very accurate indeed, and where there have been discrepancies,
community analysts have wanted to check until they reach agreement (Chambers,
1997, pp143–145).
An example of calculating comes from the triggering process of
Community-Led Total Sanitation. Evolved in Bangladesh, CLTS has been spread
to numerous other countries in Asia and Africa. As part of a facilitated appraisal
local people calculate the quantities (e.g. cartloads for the whole community) of
shit (the crude word is used) produced by their households in a day, multiply out
for longer periods, and add up for the whole community, concluding sometimes
with community cartloads per annum (Kar, 2005; Kar and Pasteur, 2005).
Examples of participatory measuring can be found with timber stocks, water
flows, crop yields, arm circumferences, and land-use areas from participatory
GIS mapping and modelling (Chapter 7).
112 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Examples of estimating are often associated with comparing and relative

proportions, as in historical matrices (e.g. Freudenberger, 1995; PRAXIS, 2001)
which indicate trends and changes; seasonal food calendars which show seasonal
variations in things like amount and type of food consumed (e.g. Mukherjee
and Jena, 2001) and health problems (Shah et al, 1999a, 1999b); and as in
proportional piling for income and food sources (e.g. Watson, 1994; Eldridge,
2001; and Stephen Devereux and Henry Lucas pers. comms). There are many
applications with variants of methods such as the ‘ten seed technique’ (Jayakaran,
2002) in which ten seeds are allocated between two or more options, or the
allocation of 100 seeds, stones or other counters to give percentages (see Box
7.1, pp144–145).
Examples of valuing and scoring are preference ranking, matrix ranking
and matrix scoring (Jones, 1996b). Things compared range from crop varieties in
Zambia (Drinkwater, 1993) and India (Manoharan et al, 1993) to contraceptive
methods, from markets in Bangladesh (Kar and Datta, 1998) to political parties,
from girls’ preferences for sex-partners in Zambia (Shah et al, 1999a, 1999b) to
wild plants collected for winter feeding of goats in Afghanistan (Leyland, 1994).
The allocation of ten as with the ten seed technique has been used in China with
aggregation from household self-monitoring booklets for problems managing
a water supply, the ten seeds being allocated between three columns – happy,
middle and unhappy respectively (Vernooy et al, 2003). Another example is the
Pachod Paise Scale from Maharashtra in India (Kapadia-Kundu and Dyalchand,
2007). Participants are asked to say how many paise (100 paise to the rupee) they
would give to something, as with ‘How many paise in a rupee do you feel that a
woman should be given more food during pregnancy?’ It has proved versatile and
has been used to measure, for example, attitudes, emotions, intention and client
satisfaction. In the UK uses of scoring include comparing health providers in an
estate in London and assessing candidates interviewed for a university post.8
Comparing is a common feature in these methods and applications. Com-
parisons are made in many ways, often directly through the numbers. The
numbers or scores can also be generated as a second stage of a physical activity
of grouping or positioning, often of cards representing households. The best
known and most widespread is wealth or well-being ranking, where analysts
group household cards according to their judgements of personal or household
conditions (see below). Placing on a scale is another. In Uganda small groups
have placed household cards on a rope symbolizing climbing out of poverty, with
the best condition at one end, and the worst at the other, leading to scores between
0 and 10 (Kagugube et al, 2007) (see pp119).
Analysis by local people can generate numbers in all the above ways. In
practice, this is usually with facilitation by one or more outsiders. Those who
take part can be individuals but are more usually groups. Local people can also
themselves be facilitators, but outsiders’ skills have so far usually been needed
where participatory activities occur on a scale which requires later aggregation,
with or without statistical analysis. In these situations, some degree of standard-
ization of process is common to assure comparability and enhance the validity
of aggregation.
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 113

Going to scale with participatory numbers

There is a prehistory of social anthropological approaches and methods which
generate numbers (Pelto and Pelto, 1978). However, serious innovation in going
to scale with such numbers appears to have begun only in the early 1990s. Three
parallel and overlapping methodological streams stand out: participatory surveys;
aggregation from focus groups; and wealth ranking.

Participatory surveys

The earliest case of a large-scale survey with participatory visual analysis and
no questionnaire may9 have been the 1992 use by ActionAid of participatory
rural appraisal (PRA) methods, mainly mapping, in over 130 villages in Nepal
(ActionAid-Nepal, 1992). This was a survey of utilization of services and assets.
It covered the whole population in the villages and generated 13 tables. These
covered, for example, literacy, children going to school, income-generating
activities, and health activities (Table 6.1) tabulated variously by area and by
ethnic group. The population summed to 35,414.

Table 6.1 Household use of health activities

Goan Bikas Total Drinking Health care Pit Family

Samiti households water facility services latrine planning
Bhotechaur 872 654 785 93 135
Thakani 625 398 273 91 48
Haibung 504 368 109 97 77
Sindhukot 602 331 539 158 74
Bansbari 822 389 NA 185 161
Melamchi 691 472 151 122 80
Ichowk 965 329 389 103 55
Mahankal 860 238 74 89 5
Talamarang 603 419 310 172 34
Total 6544 3598 2630 1110 689
Percentage 100 55 40.1 17 10.2
Source: ActionAid-Nepal, 1992, p29

Another remarkable example was a study conducted by Save the Children Fund
(SCF) (UK) in 20 districts in three countries – Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
After pilot testing, it was decided to standardize on 60 rather than 100 for pile
sorting. This was then used, together with rankings and other participatory meth-
ods for a retrospective study on how individual poor farmers coped with the 1992
drought (Eldridge, 1995, 1998, 2001).
More recently, aggregation from maps has taken place on a wide scale in
Rwanda where some 16,000 rural communities have made their own permanent
114 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

social maps on cloth. These show all households in the communities, their levels
of poverty or wealth, and other data (Ubudehe seminar, 2007; Shah, 2008).

Aggregation from focus groups

Aggregation of numbers from focus groups appears to have begun, at least in

poverty studies, in the mid-1990s.
Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPAs) (Norton et al, 2001; Robb, 2002)
in Kenya and Tanzania led by Deepa Narayan produced statistics by using
standardized picture cards in an approach which combined RRA, PRA and
SARAR (Srinivasan, 1990; Rietbergen-McCracken and Narayan, 1996).10 In
the Tanzania PPA, a team of 36 Tanzanian researchers covered 85 villages and
interacted with 6000 men and women, using participatory mapping as an entry
activity. Statistical outcomes were derived not least to influence policy-makers,
and expressed as percentages, for example for the preferred attributes of savings
institutions (which came out as interest 27.8 per cent, safety 20.4 per cent, and
so on) (Narayan, c.1996).
In a Bangladesh PPA (UNDP, 1996) led by Dee Jupp and Neela Mukherjee,
focus groups of poor urban and rural women and men were convened and
facilitated to analyse their priorities for ‘doables’, practical measures that would
make a difference to their lives. These were aggregated by sex and location to
produce cumulative Prioritized Problem Indices of Poor (cPPIPs) which gave
them comparative numerical values. These were then presented in histograms.
Among the findings were, for example, that the top priority for rural women was
work, and for urban women water (UNDP, 1996, p68).
In the later 1990s aggregation from focus groups was applied in remarkable
studies of urban violence. Participatory research by Caroline Moser, Cathy
McIlwaine and others in Jamaica, Guatemala and Colombia identified different
types of violence, their seriousness, and the importance, positive or negative, of
different institutions (Moser and Holland, 1997; Moser and McIlwaine, 2000a,
2000b, 2004; Moser, 2003). In the Guatemala study this led, for example, to
a table derived from 176 focus group listings which showed the frequency
of mention of 22 different strategies for coping with violence (Moser and
McIlwaine, 2000b).
Other smaller-scale applications were developed in the course of the research,
coordinated by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), on
the poverty impacts of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR) (Adato and Meinzen-Dick, 2007). Various participatory
techniques were devised to generate numbers. In Western Kenya, for example,
24 focus groups evaluated agroforestry dissemination practices by pile sorting to
score with 100 beans or grains of maize, applying this to seven external providers
of information, and ten media used (Adato and Nyasimi, 2002).
In contrast, the study known as Voices of the Poor (Narayan et al, 2000) is
probably the largest to have used aggregation from groups to date. This was
undertaken to inform and influence the World Development Report 2000/2001,
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 115

Attacking Poverty (World Bank, 2000). After field-testing various combinations

of methods in Bolivia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, a Process Guide of partially
standardized, partially open-ended, methods was evolved by Meera K. Shah and
others (World Bank, 1999), teams were trained, and focus groups of over 20,000
poor women and men were convened and facilitated in over 200 communities
in 23 countries. Classification of outcomes and their aggregation generated
proportions and percentages for directions of change in violence against women,
differentiated by region. These were presented in pie diagrams. For perceived
importance and effectiveness of institutions in poor urban and rural people’s lives
they were presented in histograms (Narayan et al, 2000, pp125, 201–202).
As is well known, the representativeness of focus groups can be an issue.
With groups that convene casually, this can be a problem. How serious this is
depends on context and purpose. Some common characteristics in a focus group
like gender or age are easy to know and often relatively easy to assure. For social
or census mapping of a village on the ground, what is shown may be common
knowledge: what matters then may be diversity and breadth of participation to
assure coverage and cross-checking. For other topics, purposive selection may
be appropriate.11

Participatory wealth ranking and well-being grouping

An early form of wealth ranking (Grandin, 1988) involved separate individuals

or groups sorting cards of households into piles according to their wealth. When
this was done by several individuals or groups, an averaged score was calculated
for each household, leading to a scored rank order by attributed wealth. This
method was used initially with pastoralists for whom wealth and livestock were
close to synonymous.12
A pioneering effort in Kenya went to scale using wealth ranking to enable
Borana pastoralists to separate out three groups – rich, middle and poor; 24 rich,
17 middle and 27 poor groups were convened separately and facilitated to play
a ranking game for the relative importance of problems. The results were then
averaged and revealed sharp differences. As problems, livestock management
scored 87 for the rich, for example, but only 7 for the poor (Swift and Umar,
1991).
Early in the 1990s wealth was more and more often replaced by well-being
(RRA Notes, 1992), which better expressed the criteria used especially by non-
pastoralist people, and grouping replaced ranking. However, the term wealth
ranking continued to be used, as it will be here, for what would more accurately
be described as well-being grouping. In its most common form this starts with
social mapping on the ground to identify households. These are then written on
individual cards. Small groups sort the cards into piles according to whatever cat-
egories of well-being or in most cases of a related concept represented by a local
term, they decide upon.
In the early 1990s, ActionAid in Pakistan went to scale, and used wealth
ranking for over 12,000 households. Since then other INGOs such as Plan
116 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

International have used it on a very large scale indeed as a standard practice for
programme purposes in many countries, serving as an entry and exploratory act-
ivity to identify those who are considered to be worse off in communities.

Poverty:The challenge of comparisons

and commensurability

Comparisons of poverty levels between communities surfaced as a problem

in the Kenya PPA in the mid-1990s. There was no equivalent of a poverty line
based on a questionnaire survey which notionally at least would have the same
cut-off point wherever it was applied. Classical wealth ranking as articulated by
Barbara Grandin (1988) produced intra-community scores for each household
but these were not valid between communities. With well-being grouping, the
numbers of groupings (often three, four or five) were liable to differ, and the
cut-off points between the groupings were most unlikely to be identical. But now
(2007) ingenious participatory solutions have been found. There may well be
others besides those that follow.

Poverty lines from participatory wealth ranking in South Africa

Participatory wealth ranking (Simanowitz and Nkuna, 1998) has been evolved
and applied to almost 10,000 households to assess the number of poor households
and their level of poverty (Hargreaves et al, 2007). This combines qualitative and
quantitative data to increase comparability across contexts, with local perceptions
of poverty used to generate a wealth index of asset indicators. The information
generated from a large number of rankings was used to determine indicators that
were consistent between rankings. These were then used to classify households
into socio-economic welfare rankings. Because many of the indicators were econ-
omic or assets, it was possible to benchmark to national poverty statistics and to
assign poverty lines.

Food security in Malawi

Identifying the food insecure with conventional surveys is slow, expensive and
inefficient. The Directors-General of IFPRI and the International Crops Re-
search Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics (ICRISAT) wrote in 1997 that ‘Most
indicators traditionally used to identify food-insecure and undernourished
households and individuals are based on the time-consuming process of assessing
household consumption (by measuring total expenditures, for example) or the
nutritional status of individuals’ and pointed to the need of project managers
for new more cost-effective indicators, which mixed qualitative and quantitative
research had sought to identify (Chung et al, 1997). As with the evolution of
RRA, inventiveness has been driven by practical need.
In Malawi, the Targeted Inputs Programme (TIP) sought to provide agri-
cultural inputs to those who were poorer. To answer the question ‘Did the
intervention succeed in targeting the poor?’ three categories of households were
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 117

identified by participatory processes in communities: those who were food secure

– having enough to eat throughout the year from harvest to harvest; those who
were food insecure – having enough food to last from harvest to Christmas but
not between Christmas and the next harvest (in April/May); and those who were
extremely food insecure – having a longer period of not having enough to eat.
Each household in the villages visited by the study was classified into one of these
categories. The study also recorded whether or not households had received the
input package. The comparison between food security category and receipt or
non-receipt of inputs is shown in Table 6.2

Table 6.2 Correlation between receipt of TIP and food security status

Food security status TIP recipients Non-recipients Total

Food secure 21.2 33.5 28.9
Food insecure 38.5 39.7 39.3
Extremely food insecure 40.3 26.8 31.8
Totals 100.0 100.0 100.0
Source: Levy, 2003, p22

Besides generating these numbers, the study was able to shed light on the criteria
used by communities to select beneficiaries, inclusion errors related to village
power structures, perceived unfairness, and inter-regional and local variations
(Barahona and Levy, 2007, p336).

Destitution in Ethiopia
A study of destitution in Wollo in Ethiopia used self-assessment of household live-
lihood viability (Sharp, 2005, p10).13 Destitution was defined in terms of ability to
meet subsistence needs, access to livelihood resources and dependency. Qualitative
village studies contributed to the content and analysis of a questionnaire designed
for household members in a group situation. This concluded with discussion of
a carefully phrased self-assessment question. Other data from the questionnaire
were combined using weights derived from principal components analysis to
derive a 15-indicator ‘objective destitution index’. The correlation in identifying
destitute households was close between the self-assessment and the objective
destitution index.

The Participatory Poverty Index in China14

In China, a clever participatory system was devised in 2000/01 for commensur-
able comparisons within and between communities. The Participatory Poverty
Index (PPI) relies on self-assessment. After preparatory investigations and
iterative pilot testing, a team identified eight common indicators representing
people’s perceptions of how poverty is manifest, in priority order, in their
118 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

community. In the methodology, each household ranks its priorities and its degree
of deprivation. Discussions lead to a consensus relevant to the community as a
whole and weights are assigned to each indicator. To ensure comparability across
communities, the weights are summed to unity. A composite PPI is calculated for
each community, allowing a comparison of relative perceived deprivation between
communities (Li et al, 2003; Remenyi, 2007; Li and Remenyi, forthcoming).
The higher the PPI the greater is the incidence of poverty in the village and
the deeper the experience of poverty. The methodology was tested and proved
robust. Local poverty alleviation offices in China were quick to see the value of
the eight poverty indicators, which were widely used as a basis for village poverty
reduction planning. However, the PPI has not been adopted on a similar national
scale, reflecting institutional commitments and political implications that would
follow from the generation of a ‘participatory’ map of the incidence of poverty
across rural China that would be in open competition with extant income-based
measures (Remenyi, 2007).

The stages of progress method

The ‘stages of progress’ method evolved by Anirudh Krishna (2004, 2005, 2006)
stands out as a remarkable achievement. To develop the method took Krishna six
months of field research ‘including four months experiencing nothing but fail-
ure, before a potentially workable methodology started taking shape’ (Krishna,
2006, p2). Evolved and invented in Rajasthan, it has now been applied in five
contexts – in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in India, and in Kenya, Uganda and
Peru. Representative groups in communities are asked to define stages of progress
that poor households typically follow on their pathways out of poverty. These
are defined in terms of the sequence of what they spend on, food always coming
first. Participatory classification of households according to the stages they are
at, and where they were 25 years earlier, combined with household histories, give
insights into why some progress and others fall back. Numbers are generated for
those that have risen and fallen, and unlike conventional panel data, the reasons
for rising or falling are identified. ‘. . . because Stages is easy to apply, enjoyable
in practice, and its logic is intuitively clear, it can help community groups
undertake analyses by themselves’ (Krishna, 2006, p9). The findings have policy
implications. The most striking has been that in all but one context, poor health
and health-related expenses have been the most common reason associated with
falling into poverty, having been identified as a factor in from 60 to 88 per cent
of cases in the five contexts (Krishna, 2006, p16).
Inventiveness has been manifest in the evolution of all these methods. Typ-
ically, they have not been taken off the shelf but developed iteratively with piloting
and trial and error, puzzling with problems of finding out, experimenting with
processes, and taking weeks or months to evolve. Because they are new, there is
much to be learnt from critical evaluation. At the same time, their lack of any
methodological fundamentalism, instead relying on eclectic pluralism and an
ingenious use of sequences, suggests a huge potential for future innovation.
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 119

Producing national statistics

The most remarkable breakthrough in recent years has perhaps been the use for
the first time of participatory (PRA) approaches and methods to produce national
statistics (Levy, 2007; Barahona and Levy, 2007). Much of this has been the work
of researchers and consultants at, or associated with, the Statistical Services
Centre at Reading University (www.ssc.rdg.ac.uk) and their collaborating
colleagues in Malawi and Uganda. They have applied statistical principles with
participatory (PRA) methods. Following the study of food security in Malawi,
described above, two further developments have been with the Malawi National
Census and the Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS).
In Malawi, the national census 1998 gave a total rural population of 8.5 mil-
lion people, in 1.95 million households, while a national programme for supplying
starter packs for agriculture was working on the basis of 2.89 million households.
To attempt to resolve this discrepancy, statistical principles and PRA methods
were combined. Participatory community censuses were facilitated in 54 villages
selected using probability methods. Participatory mapping was used to identify
households (Barahona and Levy, 2003, pp4–9). The findings indicated a rural
population of the order of 11.5 million, some 35 per cent higher than the official
census figure.
More recently, a further breakthrough has been achieved in Uganda, apply-
ing a participatory module to a subsample of the UNHS (Kagugube et al,
2007). The Ugandan team included government staff with years of experience
of participatory approaches and methods in the Uganda Participatory Poverty
Assessment Process (UPPAP). They spent much time and effort devising a
‘qualitative module’ known as the Rope Technique. In this module, community
participants placed household cards on a rope. The top and bottom of the
rope represented extreme conditions for seven dimensions – having assets
for production, food security, sending children to school, access to medical
services, having enough money, having many dependents with few resources,
and powerlessness. The top and bottom extremes were described verbally. The
rope was then divided equally into ten, and scores from one to ten allocated. The
rope scores for each dimension could then be integrated across sites. Questions
have been raised, for example concerning major differences between income
findings from the UNHS questionnaire and ‘having enough money’ in the
qualitative module. The discrepancies are little short of spectacular and cry out
for investigation. This method, and possible future variants of it, open up scope
for calibrating and cross-checking national questionnaire surveys, and for time
series trend data on dimensions like powerlessness previously considered purely
qualitative and not comparable between communities.
In sum, the potential is not just producing national statistics; it is producing
national statistics that are more accurate, that illuminate domains hitherto
inaccessible, and that measure dimensions that have previously been seen as only
qualitative. A whole new professional field has been opened up for exploration,
innovation and application.
120 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Who counts?
Participatory Impact Assessment (PIA) to inform policy

PIA to inform policy has been successfully pioneered in Ethiopia in two livestock-
related studies (Abebe et al, 2007). Participatory methods were standardized.
The first study, repeated with ten groups, assessed the impact of Community-
based Animal Health Workers (CAHWs) on animal diseases. Standard statistical
methods found significant reductions for camels, cattle and sheep and goats for
a range of diseases. The second study, with 114 households, assessed the impact
of a commercial destocking intervention in drought and compared its benefits
with other interventions. These studies included locally defined impact indicators,
local community priorities, the use of a wide range of PRA tools, testing of tools
for measurement, choice of sample size, triangulation, assessment of multiple
causality, and feedback to communities. The findings were used to influence
policy, contributing for example to the official recognition of CAHWs in national
legislation and guidelines (Catley, 2007).

Participatory M and E and empowerment

The processes of participation in these examples have tended to be more ex-

tractive than empowering, in the sense of outsiders obtaining information rather
than local people gaining and using it. Extractive–empowering is not, however, a
simple dichotomy but a continuum with nuances, mixes and sequences. Spread
out across the range of this continuum are the processes labelled participatory
monitoring and evaluation (PM and E), and only quite rarely treated separately
as participatory monitoring on its own, or participatory evaluation on its own.
Practices of PM and E have proliferated, a thousand flowers in a thousand
places, and much has been written about them15 (e.g. Estrella and Gaventa, 1997;
MacGillivray et al, 1998; Guijt, 1998, 2000; Estrella et al, 2000). In PM and E
processes, the usual questions about power and ownership are raised:

• Whose monitoring and evaluation?

• Whose indicators and numbers, for whose purpose?
• Analysed and used by whom?
• Who learns, and who is empowered?
• Who gains?

Numbers could be expected to be a common part of PM and E. A drive for

participatory numbers often comes from outside the local context. Even so,
participants can still gain: insights and numbers can often be of interest and use
to community members. To an extent easily overlooked, people enjoy and learn
from the processes of analysis and sharing of knowledge, values and priorities,
and feel good at discovering what they can show and express, and having their
views heard. A typical observation has been that, ‘People participating in the
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 121

groups seemed to enjoy the discussions and exercises and most stayed for the
entire duration’ (Adato and Nyasimi, 2002).
In principle, the more participatory a process, the more local people will
identify their own indicators and then monitor them. The Nepal Utilization study
(ActionAid-Nepal, 1992) stated that ‘the monitoring should be a participatory
process which involves the community in deciding information to be collected,
in collecting and in analysing . . . and finally using the information for programme
improvements’. The indicators can be numbers that are counted, qualities that
are scored, quantities that are measured or estimated, and so on.
However, the literature I have reviewed that is directly on PM and E is striking
for how rarely it records cases of local people actually using numbers for mon-
itoring of change over any length of time. This is excepting practices of keeping
financial accounts in self-help and savings groups, and other local organizations,
all of which entail numerical monitoring but which are not considered part of
PM and E. One reason for the few cases may be that some of the literature is
describing ideas that seem good but have not been implemented. Another may
be that periods of observation that get written up in accessible papers tend to be
short. Yet another, and perhaps more common, may be low relevance and utility
to the people concerned given the time and cost of collection and assessment.
There are anecdotes of local people keeping numerical records for a time simply
to please or pacify a visitor or official but stopping as soon as they feel they can.16
Overall, the paucity of examples may reflect rational assessments of the costs
and benefits of counting or measuring compared with less formal assessments.
Numbers may be sought and needed much more by outside agencies and by
professionals with trained mathematical backgrounds than by local people who
have many other modes of assessment, monitoring and evaluating. Indeed, the
more numbers are stressed by outsiders in PM and E, the less participatory the
processes may often become.
The most common cases of PM and E with numbers that I have been able
to trace are of four types:

1 Retrospective assessments indicating how present conditions differ from

those of the past. These are one-off activities often of high interest to part-
icipants. They may be evaluative, but they are not ongoing and so not strictly
monitoring. For example, in Somaliland, herders most impressively evaluated
wells by scoring them before and after improvement according to their own
45 criteria (Sanaag CBO, 1999; Joseph et al, 1994).
2 Short-term intense monitoring for a short period of acute relevance, as
by a farmer or a farmer field school during a crop season, or by a community
during a campaign like CLTS (see pp96–97).
3 Gathering empowering data, especially statistics that a group or commun-
ity can use as part of their armoury to gain or improve a service, assert their
rights, or obtain a better deal.
4 Monitoring natural resource management, for example fisheries
(CBCRM, 2003a, 2003b) where the indicators may be catches, sizes of fish
and so on. In a river in Laos, the number and size of bubbles were taken as
indicators of the number and size of fish stocks (pers. comm. Mark Dubois)
122 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

An increasingly widespread use of numbers in PM and E is with CLTS (Kar,

2005; Kar and Pasteur, 2005; Kar and Bongartz, 2006; Kar with Chambers,
2008). Communities that engage with the process of making themselves totally
open-defecation free often make and display maps showing all households, those
that have access to latrines, and those that do not, and use these to monitor their
own progress, sometimes with symbols or colours to represent different weeks
of completion or gaining access. During CLTS campaigns in some sub-districts
of North-west Bangladesh, these figures were regularly reported upwards
from hamlet to ward to union to sub-district headquarters, and aggregated
for monitoring at those higher levels. In Hatibandha sub-district, figures were
reported for the numbers of latrines of three categories so that improving
standards could also be monitored.
Three-way tensions can arise between the desire of agencies for numbers,
the objectives of empowerment and the time of facilitating staff. One example
from India is the ILS (Internal Learning System) developed by Helzi Noponen
(Noponen, 2007) and with her involvement adopted and adapted by two large
NGOs – NESA (the New Entity for Social Action) and Pradan (Professional
Assistance for Development Action), and their partners. Its most striking element
is visual diaries which poor people keep and use for their own analysis and for
recording change. NESA with its partners has introduced these diaries into some
2000 villages in South India: women enter scores from one to five, every six
months, for aspects of life like degree of satisfaction with equal treatment of their
girl and boy children, physical violence against them, how much their husbands
share in domestic tasks, and so on (Nagasundari, 2007). Pradan has evolved an
application with self-help groups and for livelihood planning (Narendranath,
2007). With both NESA and Pradan, there have been issues of optimizing
combinations and trade-offs between complexity or simplicity, the time of
facilitating staff, standardization, and the remarkable learning and empowerment
that can be achieved.
Similar issues have arisen with another family of PM and E approaches, PALS
(Participatory Action Learning System) pioneered and propagated by Linda
Mayoux (2004, 2007). This is an eclectic and constantly evolving methodology
using a set of diagram tools and participatory processes which enable people,
including very poor non-literate women, men and children, to collect and analyse
the information which they themselves need on an ongoing basis to improve their
lives in ways they decide. Though the diagrams are simple and quickly learnt,
there are balances to be struck between people gaining confidence and learning
on the one hand, and standardization and making a difference with higher-level
decision-makers on the other.

Participatory statistics, empowerment and policy influence

Participatory statistics can reverse the quotation at the head of this chapter.
Their numbers can be servants of the weak to master the strong. How they can
empower local people and groups is an emergent field. CIRAC, the International
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 123

Reflect Circle, has included an excellent short guide ‘Alternative Statistics’ –

how PRA techniques can be used to produce local statistics – as part of its prac-
tical resource materials (Archer and Newman, 2003). These are designed for use
by Reflect facilitators and groups. The authors point out that ‘Because many of
the graphics [produced by Reflect groups] are about recording local reality they
are the perfect starting point to produce statistics’, and cite maps, calendars and
matrices as examples. The resulting numbers can be used for policy influence.
A group in Mozambique used various graphics to collect a diverse range of
statistics, including some concerning schooling. In Bangladesh, a Reflect circle
used a matrix to track daily wages for different jobs, and different people (men,
women and children). They used this as evidence that the national minimum
wage was not being met.
Participatory statistics have also supported decentralized and democratic
governance. In the Philippines (Nierras, 2002) grass-roots health workers made
their own classifications and disease maps, conducted their own analyses, and
produced village figures at variance with official statistics, but which officials
came to accept. Remarkably, they identified priority actions which led in a matter
of months to a sharp decrease in mortality. Or again, participatory investigation
of land holdings in the Philippines led to revisions of figures which doubled
local government takings from the land tax, the principal source of revenue.
These compelling examples open one’s eyes to what appears to be a widespread
potential.
Participatory statistics can be persuasive and more credible than those from
questionnaire investigations. But they may be discounted when they challenge
official statistics and threaten professional reputations. Malawi has one of the
poorest and most vulnerable rural populations in the world, demanding special
interventions. The professional and statistically rigorous participatory mixed
– methods study of 54 carefully selected villages reported by Barahona and Levy
(2003) indicated a rural population of 11.5 million, 35 per cent higher than the
1998 census figure of 8.5 million!17 The implications were not trivial. But the
study findings:

. . . have not been taken seriously by the NSO [National Statistical Office
of Malawi], Malawi government policy-makers or donors, who continue to
uphold the 1998 census. When questions are raised about official population
figures, stakeholders should demand further exploration of the data and, if
necessary, commission further ground truth studies. If the 1998 census did
seriously underestimate the rural population, as our work suggests, this has
important consequences for government and donor-funded interventions as well
as official figures such as GDP per capita.’ (Barahona and Levy, 2003, p8)

And they conclude that ‘We should not ask communities (or groups within them)
to spend time on research if we do not believe the policy-makers will take the
findings seriously’ (Barahona and Levy, 2003, p43).
These experiences are both sobering and inspiring: sobering in the Malawi
case, because even though rigorously professional, the participatory statistics
124 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

were in some quarters not taken seriously; inspiring in the Philippines because
they were accepted as superior and made significant differences. For the future,
there is much to be learnt: about why responses such as these can be so different;
and about the how, what, when, where and in what form to generate and present
participatory statistics so that they empower poor and local people, credibly
present truth to power, and make a real difference for the better.
Enough is already known, though, to move forward. Sarah Levy (2007) has
presented ‘a vision for the 21st century’ with locally owned information systems.
She writes of:

. . . the need to rebuild the information systems that exist in developing

countries, incorporating new indicators and new methods of data collection
and management which better respond to the needs of development in the 21st
century. The current system and approaches are based on methods that were
seen as modern 60 years ago, but are no longer in tune with our information
requirements ...’ (Levy, 2007, p145)

She argues that for decentralization, empowerment at the local level, policy
influence, and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),
information should be collected and analysed at the level of a village, a set of
villages and their urban and semi-urban equivalents. To inform and influence
both local and higher-level action the information would include, for example,
indicators of poverty and hunger; enrolments in primary and secondary education
(by gender); data on child mortality and maternal and other aspects of health.
She concludes that locally owned and managed information systems, feeding into
higher level statistics:

...gives us an opportunity to reform out-of-date over-centralized information

collection systems. The development challenges of the 21st century – among
them meeting the MDGs – require new approaches to the production and
ownership of information. If we want to empower poor people to take part in
reducing poverty and promoting development, we must end the monopoly of
information by central governments.The development of participatory methods
capable of producing local as well as national statistics means that the potential
now exists, even in remote and marginalized communities, for people to produce
their own information. The results have the potential to be more reliable than
those produced by outsiders.To governments and donors I would say: this is an
opportunity that should not be missed ... (Levy, 2007, p149)

The best of all worlds?

Apart from vested interests tied to professional conservatism and inertia, the
potentials from participatory numbers appear to be win–win, with promise of the
best of all worlds. They can combine qualitative contextual relevance (with local
knowledge, categories etc.) with quantitative significance. Beyond this, in assess-
ing potentials, even erring on the side of caution, other strengths of participatory
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 125

numbers are striking. Not only are there dimensions of empowerment, but
four other overlapping strengths stand out: validity and reliability; insights into
sensitive subjects; unexpected findings with policy implications; and power and
learning.

Validity and reliability

Dimensions of validity and reliability have been repeatedly illustrated and con-
firmed. Group-visual synergy (see p99) has proved a powerful source of cross-
checking, successive approximation, and bringing out additional information
and insights. Its trustworthiness and rigour are confirmable by observation of
the group process and by the relevance to participants of the analysis which
assures their commitment and engagement. The extreme accuracy of most social
mapping in a census mode has been repeatedly confirmed (Chambers, 1997,
p144–147; Barahona and Levy, 2003, p6), especially when there is triangulation
between groups from the same community. In an Indian village four groups
met separately and came up with populations of 239, 239, 242 and 247. When
villagers checked, they found that 242 had three cases of double-counting, and
247, made by a small group on the edge of the village, included a family of eight
who were in dispute with the rest of the village (pers. comm. Jules Pretty). So
there was highly credible cross-checked consensus: a population of 239 without
the family of eight, or 247 with it.
Where there is standardization with participatory methods there are issues
of validity and sample size. Using a minimalist approach to sample size, the
Participatory Approaches to Veterinary Epidemiology project in East Africa
determined the minimum number of repetitions to shift results from qualitative
to quantitative using conventional statistical principles: for some methods such
as matrix scoring and seasonal calendars as few as eight repetitions allowed
quantitative estimates of reliability to be calculated (Catley, 2007).

Insights into sensitive subjects

Well thought out and facilitated participatory processes have shown a remark-
able capacity for opening up and giving numbers and proportions to subjects
so sensitive that they are usually hidden. The limitations of verbal responses
to sensitive subjects are well known. We now know that, contrary to some pro-
fessional belief, approaches which involve groups as well as individuals, and
elements which are visual and tangible, can encourage and enable people to
express and analyse aspects of life and conditions which they most likely would
not otherwise reveal. Here are some illustrations:

• In China, the balance of power between male and female in whether to use a
condom (Jayakaran, 2003, p132) using the ten seed technique. The outcome
was nine male, one female.18
126 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

• In Tamil Nadu, the identification and location within a village of abusive and
drunken husbands (pers. comm. John Devavaram and Sheelu Francis, 1991).
• In Orissa, a participatory study gave the caste-wise breakdown of the number
of families with addiction to alcohol, and a matrix by caste showing who
consumed alcohol, frequency, variety, expenditure, and domestic violence
(PRAXIS, 2001, p33).
• In Malawi (see pp116–117) the major divergences between those meant to
receive starter packs and those who did were revealed (Levy, 2003).
• In Zambia, an astonishing range of information was brought out about pre-
pubertal and adolescent sexual behaviour, including ranking and scoring
matrices for girls’ typologies of sex partners and preferences, and using an
anonymous slips method, for both girls and boys (in separate groups) the age
of first sex and number of sexual partners they had had (Shah et al, 1999a,
pp45–46, 63–64).

Unexpected and striking insights for policy

Participatory numbers throw up striking insights with policy implications, and

do this in a statistical form (for detailed reports of which the reader is referred to
the sources cited). The credibly established 35 per cent undercount in the Malawi
rural population census already mentioned (Barahona and Levy, 2003) is an
instance with huge implications for government policy and even for calculations
of per capita GDP. Other illustrations are:

• The SCF study of responses to drought, by putting numbers to them, showed

how remittances declined for the poor but were slightly up for the better-off,
how the poor spent more on food than the rich, and how income reductions
were greater among the poor because they were more dependent on natural
resources (Eldridge, 1995, 1998).
• Moser and McIlwaine’s work in nine urban communities in Colombia elicited
numerous types of violence, and produced the unexpected finding that 54
per cent of the types of violence identified were economic (related to drugs,
insecurity, robbery, gangs etc.) as against only 14 per cent political (related to
police abuse, war, paramilitaries, assassinations etc.) contrary to the common
belief that political violence was the bigger problem (Moser and McIlwaine,
2000a, p62).
• The Bangladesh PPA (UNDP, 1996) found that the second and third ‘doable’
priorities for poor urban women (their first was water) were a private place
for washing, and action on dowry.
• The Starter Pack study in Malawi used pair-wise ranking across villages to
generate scores for 15 indicators of sustainability that farmers themselves
had identified during piloting. These placed crop diversification and access to
seeds top, and remarkably (since this conflicted with professional views) put
agroforestry and fallow at the bottom, suggesting an over-riding short-term
priority given to adequate food (Cromwell et al, 2001, p6).
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 127

Power, reversals and learning

Power and learning are bottom lines, with the promise of win–win solutions which
combine local learning and local empowerment and at the same time supply
numbers useful to outsiders and their organizations, and for policy influence.
All then learn. It is not only, or even mainly, the outsiders who gain useful
knowledge. Chung et al, (1997, p60) reported that ‘Some villagers were aston-
ished by their own food charts; they had not imagined they ate so many kinds
of foods. Some spontaneously asked ‘Are we eating OK? What should we eat?’
Quantification is one of the channels through which local appraisal and analysis
can lead to local learning and action.
Participatory numbers can also reverse power relations. Most obviously this
is through the persuasiveness of statistics presented to policy-makers, as noted
above. The reversal can also be face to face, where the power relations and feed-
back are transformed through a participatory process (see Box 7.1).

Alternatives to questionnaires

The cumulative experience and evidence, some of it presented above, builds a

case for much more widespread use of participatory numbers in development
practice and research. In many contexts and for many purposes, processes
generating participatory numbers appear better than traditional questionnaires.
This has been becoming evident since the early 1990s. For entities which are
visible, known about and can be counted, like people, they can produce highly
cross-checked and accurate numbers, as with the Malawi census; they can put
numbers on qualitative dimensions; and they can provide ‘numerical data on
complex issues about which questionnaire surveys are not able to produce reliable
statistics, such as community poverty targeting’ (Barahona and Levy, 2007,
p338). Participatory epidemiology (PE) methods such as proportional piling to
assess livestock disease incidence and mortality, and matrix scoring, have been
found to be ‘more valid than conventional methods such as questionnaires . . . In
many cases, PE methods have proved to be far more useful than questionnaires
because many epidemiological questions are well-suited to the visualization and
scoring methods of PE, and PE uses local language’ (Catley, 2007). Conducted
well, participatory methods promise win–wins with more valid numbers, better
insights, and gains for local people in their own knowledge and understanding.
For special studies, participatory numbers can now be considered such a
strong option that they should be considered first. Again and again the verdict
of the 1991 Nepal survey conducted through participatory village mapping
has been confirmed: ‘The participatory method for information collection,
compared to the conventional one is proved to be more effective and convenient’
(ActionAid-Nepal, 1992, p23).
Comparisons of costs and accuracy of questionnaires and participatory
numbers have been decisively in favour of the latter (Chambers, 1997, pp122–
125). A reasonable rule of thumb is that conventional questionnaires should be
128 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

used only if no participatory alternative can be devised, or should be used only in

a light and quick manner for confirmation and triangulation with other methods.
There is a reversal here of mental set and reflex. When numbers are needed,
participatory approaches, methods and behaviours replace questionnaires as the
standard approach that first comes to mind.
The case for continuing long-term time series, like the National Sample
Survey in India and some Living Standards Measurement Surveys may appear
strong, at least in the short and medium term. Flawed though they may be, they
do provide materials for comparisons over time and between contexts. All the
same, the recent innovations by professional statisticians using PRA methods
to generate national statistics in Malawi (Barahona and Levy, 2007), together
with the participatory module in the UNHS (Kagugube et al, 2007), reinforce
the already strong case for exploring and piloting not just complements but
alternatives. At the very least, these innovations make further methodological
research a priority.
Because this field is so largely unexplored, its potential is difficult to assess.
The normal professional reflex from many economists, statisticians and others,
will be to reject this suggestion out of hand. But enough has now been learnt,
as evidenced above, to make the case for innovation and piloting to learn more
about what can be done. The unknown potential may be big. If so, it could be
professionally transformative and lead to better understanding of realities, better
numbers, and better policies and practices.
There will always remain issues for innovation and research. These include,
for different contexts and purposes, updating and analysing evidence and
experience, comparing different participatory and other approaches for their
relative costs and relative benefits. But enough has been known for over ten
years to justify decisive innovation and change. Many who are mentally and
physically cocooned in citadels of professional power may not want to know, but
the evidence and the signposts are clear. Much more of the future lies with the
inventiveness, relevance and creativity associated with participatory numbers
than they may be able or willing to recognize.

Methodological challenges
The methodological challenges are, however, not trivial. The pioneers of part-
icipatory numbers and statistics have had to show ingenuity, skill, patience and
courage in the face of conventional reflexes. Some of the issues concern applying
statistical principles. Others entail optimizing trade-offs; for example:

• Standardized, closed and commensurable versus open, diverse

and empowering: trade-offs between the rigidity of preset categories and
the diversity of categories likely to result from open-ended participatory
processes. David Booth has expressed concern that the exploratory, re-
sponsive, and reflexive nature of inquiries will be sacrificed through stand-
ardization to permit aggregation upwards (Booth, 2003). It is important to
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 129

confront this issue. The more standardized the process, the more extractive
and less empowering and accommodating of local priorities and realities
it is likely to be. The less standardized it is, the harder the outcomes are to
analyse. A partial solution can be found in progressive participatory pilot-
ing and evolution towards degrees of standardization as in the first Malawi
starter pack study (Cromwell et al, 2001). This can lead to standardizing some
categories, for example entities and criteria in matrix scoring, and leaving
others open, limiting statistical analysis to those which are standardized.
• Scale, quality, time, resources and ethics: the issues here are far from
simple. Smaller scale, more time, and more resources can allow for higher
quality and better ethics but loss of representativeness; and vice versa. And if
there are gains to local people through awareness and empowerment, wider
scale with lower gains may mean greater gains overall.
• Quality of facilitation versus speed, scale and cost of implementation:
in these approaches, the quality of facilitation is critical (Nandago, 2007).
To achieve good facilitation requires time and resources devoted to careful
selection of facilitators, their training and then their supervision in the field.
This may add to costs and slow implementation and limit its scale, even if
the outcomes are still highly cost-effective compared with alternatives. An
adequate number and availability of skilled facilitators may be the most
serious constraint on the widespread adoption of participatory numbers.
• Ease and spontaneity of convening groups versus representativeness:
where groups are involved, and as is well known with focus groups generally,
those who are most easily convened may be unrepresentative or dominated by
one or a few people, or by one sort of person (for example, men in a mixed
group of men and women). Care in selection, in judging size of group, and
observation and facilitation of process can offset these dangers but take time
and effort and can entail a loss of spontaneity. That said, for many purposes,
for example appraisal of animal diseases, it is not representativeness as much
as relevant knowledge that matters in a group.

The future
The evidence presented is only the tip of an iceberg. More and more cases and
examples of participatory numbers are coming to light. We have come a long way
from the time when rapid and participatory approaches were seen in discord with
statistics. The potentials of the NE quadrant – participatory numbers – in Figure
6.1 are gradually being recognized but with nothing like the attention or intensity
they deserve. The question now is how to establish spread and practices which
are good both methodologically and ethically.
Conditions can be compared with the early days of RRA in the late 1970s
(Chapter 4), and PRA in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Chapter 5), when it
was becoming clear that something was about to happen on a wide scale. Both
RRA and PRA challenged and presented alternatives to professionally embedded
methodologies. With both there was some excellent and inspiring good practice as
130 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

they spread. But there are dire warnings. Both RRA and PRA became fashionable
labels, demanded by donors and promised by consultants. With rapid spread and
heavy demand, many who claimed to be RRA or PRA trainers and practitioners
had top–down attitudes and behaviour, and lacked practical experience. Much
practice was abusive – imposed, routinized, insensitive, unimaginative, exploitative
and unethical. People were alienated, data were unusable and unused, and the
approaches misleadingly discredited.
Three differences from those early experiences with RRA and PRA give
grounds for hope.
The first is the serious professional and academic interest in qualitative–
quantitative issues and going to scale, including the application of group-visual
methods. This is evident in publications such as Participation and Combined
Methods in African Poverty Assessment: Renewing the Agenda (Booth et al, 1998),
publications of the Statistical Services Centre at Reading University, the Cornell
March 2001 Qualitative–Quantitative Workshop (Kanbur, 2003), and the
Swansea July 2002 Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in
Development Research. Since 2002, the International and Rural Development
Department and the Statistical Services Centre at the University of Reading
have convened workshops for participatory practitioners on ‘Dealing with data
from participatory studies: Bridging the gap between qualitative and quantitative
methods’, combining statistical professionalism with participatory practice and
ethics.
The second difference is that the application of participatory numbers ap-
proaches requires more serious preparation than PRA. Almost anyone can do
almost anything participatory and call it PRA. To generate numbers, however,
requires more thought, preparation, pilot testing and discipline. It has been the
repeated experience of pioneers like Carlos Barahona, Sarah Levy and their
colleagues at Reading, and Anirudh Krishna, who after four months of field
experimentation was on the verge of despair, that evolving a methodology can
take time, patience and creativity. This characteristic should to some degree
exercise a built-in discipline.
The third ground for hope is that much has been learnt from the RRA and
PRA experiences. We have been here before. RRA and more so PRA taught us
above all the crucial importance of the personal dimension, often summarized as
behaviour and attitudes, to which now can be added mindsets. What we are able
to learn, and its quality, depends not just on what methods we use, but on what
sort of people we are, how creative and inventive we are, how we relate to others,
and how open we are to learning.
The examples, experiences and evidence presented in this chapter point
to important potentials: for those in power to be better and more realistically
informed and more persuasively influenced; and for those who are marginalized
and misunderstood to express their realities in ways which are convincing:
through their counting to count more.
For these potentials to be realized, professionals, especially bureaucrats
and researchers, have to examine and challenge their conditioning, habits and
mindsets, and rethink. This should often lead to the adoption of participatory
 Who Counts? Participation and Numbers 131

processes in place of others of current convention, especially questionnaires.

The implications are radical: for university and college curricula, for textbooks,
for teachers, for statistical organizations, for research institutes, for professional
training, and for development professionals generally. The challenge is greatest in
those organizations – universities, funding agencies and governments – trapped
by inertia, repetition and tradition, and where power lies with senior people who
are out of touch and out of date. So far, progress has been scattered and sporadic,
at times ephemeral. An inspiring exception is veterinary epidemiology (Catley,
2007). In that discipline, statistics generated through participatory approaches
have been accepted as participatory epidemiology has been institutionalized,
at first in East Africa: in university teaching and research, peer-reviewed
international journals, a standard textbook (Thrusfield, 2005), and national and
international research organizations. Momentum is building in other disciplines
too but participatory numbers are not yet in the mainstreams of their professional
practice. Least of all, perhaps, are they recognized by the powerful economists
in the citadels of Washington DC. Why do so few recognize and enter this new
world, or make space for others to do so? Will future generations of development
professionals look back and wonder why we were so slow to see what had opened
up, and to change?

Notes
1 This chapter is a slightly shortened version of IDS Working Paper 296 Who
Counts? The quiet revolution of participation and numbers, December 2007.
Predecessors were presented to the March 2001 Cornell University workshop
on Qualitative and Quantitative Poverty Appraisal: Complementarities,
Tensions and the Way Forward; the July 2002 University of Swansea
conference on Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in
Development Research; and the November 2003 University of Manchester
conference on New Directions in Impact Assessment. For comments and
information I thank participants at those conferences. Others who have
contributed with criticism, advice and information are too many to name. I
am grateful to them all, and especially to those who took part during 2001–04
in the informal ‘Party Numbers’ group which met in the UK at the Centre for
Development Studies, Swansea, the Centre for Statistical Services, Reading,
the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, the International HIV/AIDS
Alliance, Brighton, the Overseas Development Institute, London, and the
International Institute for Environment and Development, London.
2 For a clear and authoritative statement of the application of statistical prin-
ciples to these processes see Barahona and Levy, 2003, pp23–41, and 2007.
Staff at the Statistical Services Centre at the University of Reading have been
outstanding in piloting, pioneering and disseminating statistical rigour and
ethical concerns in the generation of participatory numbers. Much can be
found on their website www.ssc.rdg.ac.uk
3 I have taken these terms from van der Riet n.d.
132 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

4 An increasing number of handbooks include participatory methods that

generate numbers, for example Mikkelsen, 1995, 2005.
5 The largest number of mother tongues in my experience to date has been
36, in a workshop with 70 graduate students at Reading University, UK,
equalled, but by a larger number of students, at IDS Sussex and the Uni-
versity of Sussex in October 2007.
6 If analysts themselves count out the number of beans, they tend to have a
greater sense of ownership of the process.
7 There are many methods and combinations and sequences of methods.
The multiplicity is illustrated by the title of Neela Mukherjee’s (2002) book
Participatory Learning and Action with 100 Field Methods.
8 I was a participant in an appointments board which considered five cand-
idates for a post. After interviewing them, we reviewed our criteria, drew a
matrix, and scored each box with beans out of five. The scores were easy to
debate and change. The process was fun and free of the tensions and conflict
which are so common. I think it was much more focused, fast and consensual
than it would otherwise have been. The candidate appointed went on to an
outstanding career.
9 I shall be grateful to anyone who can tell me of any earlier case.
10 SARAR stands for Self esteem, Associative strength, Resourcefulness,
Action planning and Responsibility.
11 For further discussion of these issues see Mayoux and Chambers, 2005,
pp282–285.
12 The same word mali in Swahili is used by Kenya pastoralists to mean both
wealth and livestock.
13 Sharp cites Bevan and Joireman (1997) for an earlier example, the insertion
of a personal wealth-ranking question in a questionnaire survey.
14 For reasons of space and balance, the account of the methodology given here
is compressed and cryptic. For fuller exposition and explanation the reader
is referred to the references.
15 For selected abstracts see www.ids.ac.uk/ids/particip
16 Polite and prudent maintenance of records for authority is so widespread
that it can be regarded as an embedded feature of the modern human
condition.
17 Reportedly the undercounts were most marked in those areas supporting
opposition parties.
18 For other applications to sensitive topics with similar methods see Jayakaran,
2007.
 7

Whose Space? Mapping, Power

and Ethics1

Mapping as an activity brings with it the power to name, to define, to locate

and to situate ... Maps can be made through presence, practice, words, paper,
or code, but always depend upon and facilitate the exercise and recognition of
power. (Rocheleau, 2005)

Abstract
Local people’s abilities to make maps only became widely known and facilitated
in the early 1990s. In recent years, changes have been rapid in both participatory
methodologies and spatial information technologies (SITs). The phenomenal spread of
participatory mapping has manifested in many variants and applications in natural
resource management and other domains. The medium and means of mapping,
whether ground, paper or Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS),
and the style and mode of facilitation affect who takes part, the nature of outcomes
and power relationships. Cartographic maps and SITs can tend to serve the state and
outside interests, disempowering and dispossessing local people. PRA/PLA and spatial
information technologies have combined as a form of counter mapping to reverse
and prevent this, empowering minority groups and those traditionally excluded from
spatial decision-making. Much depends on the behaviour, attitudes and commitment
of the facilitators who are technology intermediaries, and on who controls the process.
Ethical issues present dilemmas with questions of empowerment, ownership and use
of maps. Questions to be asked, again and again, are: ‘Who is empowered and who is
disempowered?’ and ‘Who gains and who loses?’

Of all the visual activities, often referred to as participatory rural appraisal (PRA)
methods, that have taken off and been widely adopted, participatory mapping has
been the most widespread. Participatory modelling has also made a breakthrough
through the work of Giacomo Rambaldi and his colleagues in the Philippines and
elsewhere (Rambaldi and Callosa-Tarr, 2000, 2002). Other methods, like matrix
scoring, seasonal diagramming, Venn diagramming, causal-linkage and flow
diagramming, and wealth or well-being ranking, have been adopted and used, one
134 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

can almost say ‘all over the world’. But the versatility and power of participatory
mapping, the relative ease with which it can be facilitated, the fun, fulfilment and
pride which people derive from it, and its multiple uses by so many stakeholders,
have helped it to spread more than the others. It has been a meme:2 an idea and
behaviour that have been taken up on a wide scale as people have heard about it
or seen examples. Spread has been explosive and exponential, like wildfire, with
innumerable adaptations and variations. By 2008 well over a million participatory
maps must have been made.

The origins and history of

participatory mapping
It is astonishing and sobering to see how far we have come and how fast, and how
ignorant we were just a few years ago. It is also striking how easy it is to overlook
early innovations.
Before the late 1980s and early 1990s when some of us were so excited at
what we were finding local people could do, indigenous, local and participatory
mapping had already taken place in different regions, countries and continents.
Indigenous cartographies3 – mapping and various forms of spatial representa-
tion by local people – have a long history, and very likely a prehistory. Some re-
markable examples are shown in the delightful book Maps are Territories by David
Turnbull (1989). The earliest is a wall painting dating to 6200 BC, from Catal
Huyuk. There are coastal charts carved in wood and carried in their kayaks by
the Greenland Inuit. There is a manuscript map of the Mississippi by Non Chi
Ning Ga, an Iowa Indian Chief, presented in 1837 in Washington as part of a
land claim. And most remarkable of all are stick charts from the Marshall Islands
in which shells represent islands, and sticks show currents and lines of swell. Yet
other examples in the book express cultural knowledge and senses of place of
Australian Aborigines and the San of the Kalahari.
Mapping facilitated by outsiders is more recent. More remarkable than what
local people had already done in mapping and other forms of spatial repres-
entation was ‘our’ educated professional ignorance of their mapping abilities.
Not even social anthropologists appear to have facilitated mapping as part of
their normal repertoire. We simply did not know what people could do. There
were initiatives which hindsight can see as precursors of what was to come. In
Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s, Frances Madden (pers. comm.) asked youths
to draw a map to show where waste bins should be located; but when she showed
the map to her supervisor he told her to go away and do a proper one. Around
the same time Robert Rhoades (pers. comm.) facilitated 3D modelling by farmers
in the Andes. A little later, Jeremy Swift4 and his research team asked Wodaabe
Fulani pastoralists in Niger to draw maps, which they did without difficulty:
their maps showed ecological zones and special areas, including one where their
cattle developed night blindness in the dry season forcing them to leave otherwise
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 135

good pastures. Reportedly, World Vision facilitated mapping in Tamil Nadu in the
early 1980s. Participatory soil maps were reported in the latter 1980s (Behrens,
1989).5 The value of mapping was discussed at the ‘Farmer First’ conference at
the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in 1987. We were on the edge of the
breakthrough, but it is fascinating to read what was written and understood at the
time, and to see that the cutting edge of the discussion was still more in terms of
mapping with farmers than mapping by them (Gupta and IDS workshop, 1989;
Conway, 1989). And doubtless there were other examples. There was a flood tide
of recognition of the richness, detail, validity and value of indigenous technical
knowledge but not yet full appreciation of farmers’ capabilities in mapping,
diagramming and analysis. We (agricultural extensionists and ‘educated’ pro-
fessionals in general) were still so conditioned by our own cartography and ideas
of what were proper maps, and by the belief that only we could make them, that
we did not realize how well and how usefully local ‘uneducated’ people did, and
could, make their own. So these earlier initiatives remained isolated and did not
spread.
Even if personal journeys give distorted views of events, they may throw
some light on process, timing and sequence. I was lucky to be a participant-
observer through the enthralling revolution which took place. First, before it
began, in the early 1970s, for work on social and organizational aspects of pastoral
development, I needed a map of soil–vegetation associations of the north-east of
Kenya. An oil-prospecting map covered the eastern half. The western half was
largely blank, with only a few widely spaced place names. I spent much time
being, as I thought, rather clever, filling in the blanks by asking pastoralists how
many hours it would take them to walk to places they could name but which were
not on the map from places which were on the map, and then triangulating and
entering the location. They then shouted out the dominant soil type of the area.
It never occurred to me to ask them to draw the map themselves! Agroecosystem
analysis (Conway, 1985; Gypmantasiri et al, 1980) was then a methodological
breakthrough of the 1980s, and contributed the practice of sketch mapping to
rapid rural appraisal (RRA). But the maps were still made by ‘us’ and often had
serious inaccuracies and omissions.
A seminal incident took place in 1988 in an RRA training at Lathodara
in Gujarat with the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) (India)
(McCracken, 1989, p20; Shah, 2003, p189). A headman found it difficult to
understand the map the outsiders had drawn until he turned it ‘upside down’ to
see it his way. This story went around.
Then during another RRA training in February 1989, in a village in the
Sudan, we asked a teacher to draw a map on the ground. A participant objected
that this was demeaning. He was educated and should do it on paper. The result
was small and not useful. So over two days we made our own sketch map. When
we checked it out with villagers, we, and they, were embarrassed: ‘You have shown
only one bakery, but we have three’.
We were teetering on the brink of learning that ‘They can do it’.
136 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Ground and paper mapping

The breakthrough came later in 1989 during the early evolution of PRA in India.
Villagers showed that they could themselves make their own often brilliant maps
on the ground and on paper. It came with moments of ahha! and wow!
These were astonishing at the time. The first PRA event, in Kalmandargi
village in Gulbarga District, was led by Jimmy Mascarenhas of MYRADA. While
two artists made useless pretty drawings of the view from the top of a hill, five
farmers nearby, facilitated by Prem Kumar and others of the MYRADA team,
dug up a grassy patch, and in a few hours fashioned a spectacular 3D model
of their village and watershed, using coloured rangoli powders to show land
types and uses. At the end one villager said with satisfaction and pride: ‘This is
something I have been wanting to do all my life.’
In the second PRA, in Kistagiri village in Mahbubnagar District, the first
social and resource maps were made. For me, the contrast could hardly have been
starker or more dramatic between what happened there and an earlier experience.
In 1974, I spent two hot days in a village in Tamil Nadu trying, and failing, to
make a map to show all the wells in the fields. In Kistagiri, when Sam Joseph
invited farmers to make their own map they plotted all their wells with much
animated cross-checking and correction, and then indicated which were in good
condition, and which were not. And they did this in 25 minutes!
In this dawn, as with hindsight it was, we kept wondering whether these were
near-miraculous one-off anomalies. We hardly dared to hope that they could be
repeated. But they were, again and again, and they sparked an explosion of part-
icipatory mapping in India which quickly spread to other countries.6 Colourful
illustrations of maps with slides were one reason why PRA spread so fast and
so easily and overwhelmed educated scepticism.7 I look back now on the 1980s,
before participatory mapping took off, with something close to disbelief and
shame that we could have been so ignorant for so long before discovering what
local people could do.
There are several reasons for estimating that the participatory maps that have
been made now number over a million: PRA methods have spread to over 100
countries; other participatory methodologies also use mapping; it has proved
quite straightforward to facilitate; people usually enjoy it, see their spatial real-
ities in a new way, and learn from what others show; it is a common and good
entry activity for other participatory processes; mapping is versatile for different
themes and purposes; and often several maps have been made in the same com-
munity by different groups. In 2002 when a project facilitated community soil
mapping in Bangladesh, it was found that most of the communities had made
simple maps before, in other meetings with outsiders (Saleque et al, 2005, p91).
And in Nepal a forester was intercepted before he even entered a village by a man
who produced a piece of paper and started drawing a map. ‘Have you done this
before?’ ‘At least a hundred times’ (pers. comm. Yam Malla).
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 137

Applications and uses

Participatory ground and paper mapping has been used for many purposes.8
Some of these are:

• Social mapping, identifying households, people, livestock, children who do

and do not go to school, people in different livelihood and other social cat-
egories, wealth and well-being groups. Census mapping is one form of this
(see Chapter 6 p119 and Barahona and Levy, 2003).
• Mapping to provide sampling frames (Marsland et al, 2000).
• Mapping for planning – where to locate services, land uses, cropping se-
quences or a route for a transect walk.
• Health mapping, for people with health problems, disabilities, special health
skills and knowledge and so on in communities. In the UK participatory
mapping by women has shown the location and concentrations of breast
cancer (Lynn et al, n.d.).
• Mobility mapping, showing who goes where for what, how often, taking how
long and at what cost (Theis and Grady, 1991).
• Education, in schools, by school children, with varying degrees of creative or
didactic style (e.g. Govinda, 1999).
• Mapping in Reflect circles for empowerment, awareness and literacy (Archer
and Nandago, 2004).
• Water and sanitation, for example in rural villages in India (Joseph, 1994),
and in Dar es Salaam (Glöckner et al, 2004). Mapping areas of open defeca-
tion is a key element in the Community-Led Total Sanitation movement in
numerous countries (Kar, 2003, 2005; Kar with Chambers, 2008).
• Farm mapping. This has been combined with mapping of nutrient flows
within the farm and over the farm boundaries (as undertaken by many
organic farmers in Karatina, Nyeri District, Kenya in 1996).
• Forage and animal illness maps (Conroy, 2005, pp216–217).
• Locations of danger and crime: in South Africa (Liebermann and Coulson,
2004); in Tanzania with the identification of locations of molestation, assault
and rape and their degrees of risk by women in villages in Mwanza Region in
Tanzania; and in Cali, Colombia to show dangerous urban places associated
with gangs and drugs (McIlwaine and Moser, 2004, pp57–58).
• Resource thematic mapping, for example of water resources, local land-use
classifications, cropping patterns and aquifers in India (Shah, 1994, p119),
and soil fertility mapping in Bangladesh (Saleque et al, 2005).
• Natural resource management, covering forestry, watersheds, irrigation,
coastal management, fishing, pastoralism, traditional territories, parks and
conservation, biodiversity, distribution of species, cultural sites and so on.
Such maps range from comprehensive resource mapping to mapping of just
one resource, for example livestock forage (Conroy, 2005, pp51, 55), or the
distribution of one species. The uses of these maps include resource and land-
use planning, co-management, wildlife conservation, identifying tenure and
rights, negotiating boundaries and resource uses, and resolving conflicts.
138 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

• Participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM and E) deserves special note.

Maps were used for impact monitoring of soil and water conservation and
changes in farming practices at least as early as 1990 by AKRSP (India) in
Gujarat (Shah et al, 1991b): farmers made baseline and impact maps which
could be compared, analysed and presented to other farmers. Participatory
monitoring of progress towards total community sanitation in hamlets in
Bangladesh has been recorded and updated on social maps in public places
where all can see them (Kar, 2003, 2005). Experience to date with the use of
participatory and other maps for monitoring and evaluation deserves its own
review study.9

Ground and paper maps can have multiple applications and uses. The same
map can be a frame for and agenda for discussions of a wide range of issues.
‘Interviewing the map’ has advantages over purely verbal discussion: a map is a
visual agenda; local detail and spatial relationships can be seen all at once instead
of referred to sequentially in disappearing words; discussion can be focused by
pointing to features; and rich insights can result.

Spatial information technologies and

participatory GIS
In the late 1980s it became more widely recognized that local people, not ne-
cessarily literate, could readily interpret black and white aerial photographs,
1:5000 being a good scale (Dewees, 1989; Mearns, 1989; Sandford, 1989).
Then in the 1990s, in parallel with the explosive spread of ground and paper
mapping, spatial information technologies (SITs) were evolving rapidly and
became widely available – satellite imagery, Geographic Information Systems
(GIS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and open access software. These
gave rise to the concern that being high-tech, precisely proportional, capable of
extreme exactitude, and controlled and understood by outsiders, SITs would be
used to disempower and dispossess local people and to exploit them and their
natural resources. As with cartographic maps, these would empower the state,
corporations and others who could command them. Differential access could
lead to gains to powerful outside interests to the disadvantage of communities and
poorer local people, further marginalizing those already marginalized.
A workshop was convened at the University of Durham in the UK in Janu-
ary 1998 (Abbott et al, 1998) to discuss dangers and potentials. As a counter
movement, participatory GIS (PGIS) had already begun. The range of experience
that could be brought together then was quite limited but the stakes were clearly
high. Since 1998 PGIS – used as a generic term for combinations of participatory
learning and action (PLA) and SITs has spread and evolved fast and much has
been learnt. PGIS has sought to empower minority groups and those traditionally
excluded from spatial decision-making processes (Mbile, 2006; PLA, 2006; Fox
et al, 2006; Rambaldi et al, 2006). In the words of Giacomo Rambaldi, a major
pioneer, advocate and disseminator of PGIS:
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 139

PGIS is a practice resulting from a spontaneous merger of participatory

learning and action (PLA) methods with GIT & S [Geographic Information
and Technology and Systems]. It builds on the integrated use of tools, methods,
technologies and systems ranging from simple sketch mapping, to participatory
3D modelling, collaborative aerial photo-interpretation, and the use of GPS
and GIS applications.With PGIS applications, indigenous spatial knowledge
is composed in the form of virtual or physical 2 or 3-dimensional maps that are
used as interactive vehicles for spatial learning, information exchange, support
in decision making, resource use planning and advocacy actions. (Rambaldi,
2005)

In PGIS, local people have been trained to use the technologies to construct
their own maps and 3-D models (see Rambaldi and Callosa-Tarr, 2002 for mod-
elling, and Corbett et al, 2006 and Rambaldi et al, 2006 for overviews) and use
these for their own research. These maps and models differ from the ground and
paper maps of PRA in their greater spatial accuracy, permanence, authority and
credibility with officialdom.
Applications have been many. They have included (Rambaldi et al, 2005,
p3): protecting ancestral lands and resource rights; management and resolution
of conflicts over natural resources; collaborative resource-use planning and man-
agement; intangible cultural heritage preservation and identity building among
indigenous peoples and rural communities; equity promotion with reference
to ethnicity, culture, gender and environmental justice; and hazard mitigation,
for example through community safety audits and peri-urban planning and
research. PGIS applications have been documented (Mbile, 2006; PLA, 2006)
for countries as diverse as Brazil (Amazon), Cameroon, Canada, Ethiopia,
Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Namibia, Nicaragua, South Africa,
Tanzania and Uganda. In addition, there are ‘. . . hundreds of non-documented
cases where technology-intermediaries (mainly NGOs) support Community-
based Organisations or Indigenous Peoples in using [Geographic Information
Technology and Systems] to meet their spatial planning needs and/or achieve
some leverage in their dealings with state bureaucracy’ (Rambaldi et al, 2005,
p4).

Medium and process

Different media, processes and power relations fit different applications and lead
to different outcomes. The question arose in the early days of PRA-type mapping
as to whether maps should be on the ground, with which many people were more
comfortable, or on paper. It came to be realized that the advantages of one were
disadvantages of the other. The same categories can be used for PGIS.
Process and sequence have proved important. For ground and paper, the
obvious conclusion from this comparison is for mapping on the ground to
precede drawing on paper. Mapping, especially on the ground, is a cumulative
process with detail added and corrected. With forage mapping, Conroy (2005,
p51) observes that ‘It is quite likely that people will forget to show certain forage
 Table 7.1 Pros and cons of modes of mapping: Ground, paper and participatory GIS

Ground Paper Participatory GIS

More temporary, cannot keep, vulnerable to More permanent, can store but is vulnerable to Most permanent. Can be stored electronically as
animals and people, trampling, rain, wind… water, mould, tearing, fire well as on paper

Familiar and comfortable for many Unfamiliar and inhibiting for some, especially Unfamiliar to many and may require special efforts
non-literates to make accessible and usable by most

Easy to alter, add to, build up, extend Committing, harder to alter, build up or extend Alterable by those with access

More democratic, less eye contact and verbal More exclusive, men and the educated may hold Limited to those able to spare time for training
dominance than usual, many can hold the stick the pen, presenting more their own than a group and for taking part over a longer period
and modify view

Freely creative with local materials More restrained, with materials from outside Disciplined, requiring training and supervision

Locally owned, outsiders cannot remove (except Vulnerable to removal by outsiders Variable. Large 3-D models not vulnerable to
as photographs) removal

Cannot be used for monitoring Can be used for monitoring, with updating Can be used for monitoring, with updating

Not convincing or usable with officials (unless Can empower when presented to officials Very empowering vis-à-vis officials, the state and
presented as a digital photograph) outside interests

More cross-checking and triangulation Less cross-checking, fewer may see Potentially considerable cross-checking but
depends on process

Local power and ownership more dispersed Local power and ownership liable to be more Local power and ownership depends on
concentrated among a few facilitation and process
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 141

resources on the map, and that it will need to be revised’. In the mapping of
agroecological zones in Eritrea (Box 7.1) five were mentioned, but when farmers
mapped they added a sixth. The public nature of ground mapping is a strength.
Passers-by offer comments, corrections and additions: in one South Indian village
the huts of the harijans were initially omitted until a passer-by pointed it out.
Who maps, and who draws, also matter. Initially there was the idea that
outsiders should copy the ground map onto paper, but that meant loss of detail
and quality. Soon it was realized that when local people did it, they redrew the
map, often improving on paper the sketch made on the ground, and that this
usually added detail and quality. A new twist is that ground and paper maps can
be now be copied, taken away and reproduced more easily by outsiders as digital
photographs.
With PGIS, further questions arise concerning training required, the duration
of the mapping or modelling process, the effects of the use of alien or unfamiliar
equipment, the need to visit places on the ground, and the balance between the
marginalization of some and the mastery, pride and ownership experienced by
others.

Maps, realities and power

Maps are instruments of power. They give visual expression to realities which
are perceived, desired or considered useful. For the same area, whether rural
or urban, land or sea, forest, pasture, farmland, waterway or park, hill or plain,
the form given to a map is determined by the motivation, interests, knowledge,
materials, instruments, time, care, training and social context of those who make
it, by the social process of its creation, and by those who commission or facilitate
it. There can be many different maps for the same place. As above, they can
differ in theme, in purpose, in what they show, in precision, and in legibility to
different people. They can be complementary or they can conflict. They can be
used to assert and establish territorial and usufruct claims, for negotiation, for
recording information, for planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluation,
and for finding one’s way around. They can be what Rocheleau (2005) describes
as maps-as-usual (property, terrain and administrative maps) or counter maps
which express, present and assert other realities, perceptions and claims. They are
as richly diverse in form as they are versatile and multiple in uses.
All maps then raise the questions: Whose realities do they express? Whose
purposes do they serve? And who stands to gain and who to lose?

Power and realities within communities

In participatory community mapping, there are differences within communities.

These were early recognized by pioneers of RRA and PRA. Andrea Cornwall
reported in 1991 on the differences between models (ground maps) made by
men, women and children in the same community in North Omo in Ethiopia:
142 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

the men gave prominence to the farming land, the women to the rivers and
watering points, and the children to grazing land which their elders had left out.
Men normally dominated group proceedings, but when separate mapping by the
women and by the children was facilitated they were able to express the issues and
realities that they knew about and that were important to them (IIED and Farm
Africa, 1991, pp46–48; Jonfa et al, 1991). Alice Welbourn’s seminal 1991 article
‘RRA and the analysis of difference’ identified four axes of intra-community
difference in villages where she had worked – age, gender, poverty–wealth and
ethnicity. The axes of difference vary by community and may also include religion,
caste, lineage, political allegiance or faction. They also overlap in various ways so
that clusters of significance will be different. Any of these clusters could make
their own map. In a PRA training she co-facilitated in Zimbabwe four groups
from the village worked and mapped separately – children, women, younger men
and older men (Redd Barna, 1993).
Differences in participatory maps by the gender of those who make them
appear universally significant. In many cultures as they grow older boys are free
to move and expected to be adventurous and explore, while girls are progressively
restricted and expected to live and work in or close to the home area. This is re-
flected in the maps they draw: in a village in Kenya, 13-year-old boys drew maps
with more roads and environmental detail, while 13-year-old girls’ maps had a
narrower concept of space and less environmental detail, and gave prominence
to home and school (Matthews, 1995). In a village in Sierra Leone where men
and women mapped separately men showed interest in roads and junctions, while
women were concerned with the well and hospital and wanted them close by.
Again and again it has been important to enable women to draw their own maps
as a means of expressing and analysing their priorities. Wherever it is women who
fetch water, for example, their preferences for the location of a water supply will
deserve priority over those of men.
The key for a facilitator in any community is to identify which axes or group-
ings are most significant, a point repeatedly made now in the literature. In a
community in the Brazilian Amazon ‘It was found important that different groups
(formal and informal, divided by a gender, age, religion and origin) were asked to
draw the landscape and the resource uses . . .’ (Viana and Freire, 2001). The key
is to ensure that subordinate groups are encouraged and can claim space and not
be marginalized, for example that women are not ridiculed by men if their maps
show less extensive detail. The practical and ethical principle is to ensure the
free and usually separate participation of subordinate groups, whether children,
women, those who are poorer, or those considered of socially lower status, and
then to enable their realities and priorities to be presented, appreciated and fairly
acted upon.

State maps, counter maps and combinations

‘Maps-as-usual’ represent the surface of the globe as a two-dimensional surface,

what Rocheleau (2005) calls the ‘Iron Grid of Descartes’. She identifies four
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 143

types: topographic (terrain) maps, thematic (special topic) maps, cadastral maps
denoting property boundaries, and political maps with a focus on administrative
units. These simplify by being able to represent with their x and y coordinates
only one thing at a time at one point on the surface. Cadastral maps, as James
Scott has described in Seeing Like a State (1998), are instruments to simplify local
complexities and make them legible – ‘precise, schematic, general and uniform’,
preconditions for a property regime and legible for taxation and conscription.
There is a long and widespread history of how these maps have been implicated in
disenfranchising local and indigenous people and enabling state and commercial
interests to appropriate and exploit resources.
Counter mapping (Rocheleau, 2005) is a term used to describe mapping that
seeks to defend the rights and interests of those who are weakened, disenfran-
chised or deprived by the use made of maps-as-usual by the state and powerful
interests. Counter mapping has taken many forms.10 At first these were described
as informal, made by local people without any technology for spatial exactness.
A comparison of cases (Borrini-Feyerabend et al, 2004, p149) concluded: ‘A key
lesson that emerges from these cases is that participatory mapping is an effective
method to promote land tenure regularisation, to value local knowledge, and
to strengthen cultural identity.’ The maps of indigenous peoples as in the early
1990s had a counter legibility but tended to lack legal and bureaucratic credibility.
All the same, they could have an impact. In Eritrea, a map and matrix made by
three farmers communicated directly to an official from the Land Commission
why the proposed consolidation of scattered holdings would not work (see Box
7.1).
Just how potent these forms of community mapping could be was shown in
Malaysia. After a community map in Sarawak had been instrumental in the legal
victory of an Iban village against a tree plantation corporation, the Government
passed a Land Surveyors Law in 2001 which made community mapping illegal
(Fox et al, 2006, pp98, 103). There could be few more dramatic indicators of the
power of mapping.
This power has been enhanced by aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and
GIS and GPS. Maps have then become even more instruments of power than
they were. Following a research project in several Asian countries, Jefferson
Fox and his colleagues concluded that ‘SIT (Spatial Information Technology)
transforms the discourse about land and resources, the meaning of geographical
knowledge, the work practices of mapping and legal professionals, and ultimately
the very meaning of space itself’, and argued that ‘Communities that do not have
maps become disadvantaged as ‘rights’ and ‘power’ are increasingly framed in
spatial terms’ (Fox et al, 2005, pp3, 7). Mapping has become necessary: failing
to be on a map corresponds to a lack of proof of existence, and of ownership of
land and resources. For many of the marginalized, not engaging ceases to be an
option.
By the latter 2000s, combinations of participatory modes and SITs as with
PGIS have spread quite extensively as effective forms of counter mapping. They
have been facilitated to enable local people to make their own maps and models,
and then used by them for their own research, analysis, assertion of rights and
144 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Box 7.1 Empowerment through mapping: An afternoon in Eritrea

Six of us visited a village. We had all been trained in PRA behaviours and knew
to keep quiet. One of us was from the Land Commission. The Government was
proposing land consolidation, to bring scattered fields together. We met the
village head in his hut. After a discussion we asked him what would be a good
land policy for his village. He replied

‘Whatever the Government says is right.’

 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 145

Outside, a woman farmer invited us for tea. The village head and another farmer
came with us. We had a long discussion about crops. All of us remained silent
except for the facilitator/interviewer. He asked if they could draw a map of the
village land, showing agroecological zones. With chalk and enthusiasm they drew
a large map on the mud floor, and then redrew it on paper, showing six zones.
Then they were asked to count out 100 maize grains, and draw a matrix on the
only suitable surface, the bottom of an upturned pan. The matrix had the agro-
ecological zones down the side and the main crops across the top. With much
debate, and changes in the scores, the farmers placed the seeds in the matrix.
They said they were scoring for importance – a composite score for the crop
and zone.This showed tangibly and visibly the complexity of their farming system,
and how farmers needed land in different zones.

Table 7.2 Relative importance of main crops by agroecological zone –

Adi-ktekla village, Mendefgra, Eritrea

Maize Barley Teff Wheat Sorghum Finger Beans and Total

millet peas
Gedena 3 3 5 11
Member 15 8 6 6 35
Tsagena 4 4 4 12
Tsebaria 9 5 14
Walekha 7 6 6 19
Huza 4 5 9
Total 3 22 20 10 15 9 21 100
Method: Listing after mapping then scoring with 100 maize grains on the matrix drawn with chalk
Analysts: Habtemaria Weldai, Gebru Zerehun, Aberash T/Maimanot

When they had finished, and the spread of scores

across the crops and zones could be seen by
everyone, the same head of the village turned to
the official from the Land Commission and said:

‘Now you can see why your policy will

not work.’

The map and matrix were later debated in policy

circles in Asmara.
146 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

resolution of conflicts over resources. In many instances they have served to

level or reverse power relations with government organizations, politicians and
corporations (see e.g. PLA 54, 2006, passim). One form of mapping could lead
to another: the inhabitants of a Kayapo village in the Amazon gave a political
orientation to their cartography as they began to realize the power of their
work with satellite imagery. They turned around a research programme from
representing their botanical knowledge to producing a political map to represent
their territory and rights (The Inhabitants of Moikarakô et al, 2006). Another
research project found that these technologies enhanced tenure security in cases
studied in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines.
Patterns have varied with implications for power relations both within
communities and between communities and other powers and organizations
(Fox et al, 2005 summarized in Fox et al, 2006). The effects have not always been
benign. Conflict can arise through defining boundaries which have previously
been flexible. In a case in Sarawak, community leaders used a community map
to collude with a corporation’s plan to lease customary lands for an oil palm
plantation (Fox et al, 2006, p103). But the balance of evidence is that more
often local people have gained: through conducting their own research, making
their own maps and models, and using these to mediate their relationships with
government organizations, politicians and corporations, and to support their
management of their own resources.
The pathways and patterns of power through mapping are thus many and
varied, and have twists and turns. In Rwanda a key element in the Ubudehe
movement (Shah, 2008; Ubudehe seminar, 2006) is participatory social maps
made on cloth at the community level. These are reported to have been made
in some 9000 rural communities (cellules). They show categories of wealth and
poverty, and can also show access to services. They have been used at the national
level for ministers to hold each other to account. In the words of one official,
‘There is information challenging us daily from Ubudehe. This is not information
analysed by some bureaucrat in a cosy office. It’s information from the ground
by the people themselves. From where I sit as a government official, this is a
great planning tool’ (Shah, 2008, p3). The Rwandan experience demonstrates
the potential for a synergy of power: it shows that not only can local people be
empowered, but also officials and politicians who make use of the detail and
credibility of their maps. It presents conditions in which participatory mapping
can be a positive sum with gains both for communities and for those with official
roles in the state.

Facilitation, behaviour, attitudes and ethics

One reason why it took so long for participatory mapping to become a self-
spreading movement may be the beliefs, behaviour and attitudes of professionals.
Most local people, asked if they can make a map, have in the past said no. Before
the early 1990s perhaps few were asked anyway, and if they were, their negative
responses were taken at face value. We have learnt that the facilitator has to believe
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 147

that ‘They can do it’, and also to allow people time to work out for themselves how
to do it. A little initial help drawing with a stick on the ground has sometimes been
needed to start things off, but almost always this leads quickly to ‘handing over
the stick’ and then shutting up and letting the process take off. Earlier, these were
not normal professional behaviours. Induced disability – the inability of ‘lowers’ to
do things because of the behaviour of ‘uppers’, is still widespread in development
but less than before. And the maps people make affect the perceptions, behaviour
and attitudes11 of those who facilitate or watch.
Ownership and use are pervasive issues related to context, purpose, medium,
process, facilitation, behaviour, attitudes and relationships. The challenges are
there in every process. Photography is a case heightened and changed by tech-
nology. There is a new ease with digital cameras of ‘capturing’ a map. On the
positive side, this can mean that the original map stays with a community, and
that prints of the photographs can be returned to them as thanks. On the negative
side, it can mean that information is much more easily extracted and removed
than before. If the original map was only on the ground, and no photographs
are returned, people in the community are left with nothing except that they
learnt through the process. Here, as ever, it comes back to personal awareness,
commitment and responsibility on the part of facilitators.
With SITs, practical ethical issues are sharpened by the exclusive command,
initially at least, of an alien technology by the outsider. There is a danger of dis-
empowering people because, unlike ground and paper mapping, there has to be
a period of training which puts the outsider in a dominant, knowledgeable role.
Facilitators have been well described as ‘technology intermediaries’, persons
who introduce local people to the technology and enable them to use it. Like
other participatory mapping, but more acutely, PGIS and SITs present ethical
challenges.

Ethics:The Who? and Whose? questions

Some of these can be expressed as ‘who?’ and ‘whose?’ questions. The inclusive
checklist that follows serves as a sobering reminder of just how many dimensions
of power, intelligibility, usefulness and ownership there can be, and how these
relate to the bottom lines of Who gains?, Who loses?, Who is empowered? and
Who is disempowered?

Who? and Whose? questions

Source: Rambaldi et al, 2006, p10812

Stage 1. Planning
Who participates?
Who decides on who should participate?
Who participates in whose mapping?
And who is left out?
148 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Who identifies the problems?

Whose problems?
Whose questions?
Whose perspective?
And whose problems, questions and perspectives are left out?

Stage 2. The mapping process

Whose voice counts? Who controls the process?
Who decides on what is important?
Who decides, and who should decide, on what to visualize and make public?
Who has visual and tactile access?
Who controls the use of information?
And who is marginalized?
Whose reality? And who understands?
Whose reality is expressed?
Whose knowledge, categories, perceptions?
Whose truth and logic?
Whose sense of space and boundary conception (if any)?
Whose (visual) spatial language?
Whose map legend?
Who understands the physical output?
And who does not?
And whose reality is left out?

Stage 3. Resulting information control, disclosure and disposal

Who owns the output?
Who owns the map(s)?
Who owns the resulting data?
What is left with those who generated the information and shared their knowledge?
Who keeps the physical output and organizes its regular updating?
Whose analysis and use?
Who analyses the spatial information collated?
Who has access to the information and why?
Who will use it and for what?
And who cannot access and use it?

And ultimately . . .
What has changed?
Who benefits from the changes?
At whose costs?
Who gains and who loses?
Who is empowered and who is disempowered?
 Whose Space? Mapping, Power and Ethics 149

Conclusion
The conclusion has to be pluralist: we know that many forms of spatial repres-
entation and mapping can empower those who are variously weaker, poorer,
vulnerable, marginalized or on the peripheries. There is a place for people’s
expression of their spatial realities on the ground and on paper. There is a place
for aerial photographs and satellite imagery. There is a place for PGIS and
GPS. There is a place for participatory 3-D models, both freely fashioned and
proportional using GIS. There is a place for cloth maps in every community.
There is huge scope for sequences and combinations. None of these is ‘the best’.
There is no ‘best’. Which fits where depends on context, capabilities and purpose.
What matters is for those who facilitate to reflect on power and focus on ethics,
referring continually to the who questions.
It has to be asked, again and again, how much mapping and modelling em-
power and enhance equitable local control and how much they disempower and
lead to exploitation. This chapter, and most of the published sources, report on
good practice. But how much bad practice is there? For the future, the need
and the great opportunity is for those who pioneer and adopt good practices
to struggle to inform and inspire others, so that what is already a self-spreading
movement on a very wide scale will also be self-improving with quality assurance
built in. Technologies like coloured chalks on the ground, or GIS from satellites,
can fascinate and mesmerize, But they are means not ends. For participatory
mapping and modelling to fulfil their promise, technology is secondary. People
have to come first. The major challenge remains, with mapping as with other
approaches and methods, that those with power and those who facilitate have the
vision and commitment to ensure that the processes lead to sustainable gains, not
losses, for those who are poorer, more marginalized and less powerful.

Notes
1 Much of this chapter has grown out of a paper (Chambers, 2006) to the
International Conference on Participatory Spatial Information Management
and Communication: ‘Mapping for Change’, held in the Kenya College of
Communication and Technology, Nairobi 7–10 September 2005. It owes
much to the discussions of that conference, the many other contributors
and papers, and exchanges on email. I thank all concerned and hope they
will understand that it is simply not feasible to acknowledge their ind-
ividual contributions. Many of the papers have been edited and can be
found in Participatory Learning and Action, vol 54 (2006), and Peter Mbile
(ed) The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries,
vol 25 (2006). Participatory Learning and Action 54 is available from
www.iied.org/NR/agbioliv/pla_notes/backissues.html#free. Also available to
order in Arabic, Bangla, Chinese (traditional and simplified), English, French,
Hindi, Persian-Dari, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili and Tamil at: www.iied.
org/pubs/display.php?o=14524IIED
150 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Accessible sources include www.ppgis.net for an open forum on Part-

icipatory Geographic Information Systems and links to other sources
(accessed 26.03.08).
2 A meme originally meant an idea, skill, story or any kind of behaviour that
is copied from person to person by imitation (Dawkins, 1976, cited in
Blackmore, 2003, p22).
3 In March 2006 a conference on Indigenous Cartography and Represent-
ational Politics was held at Cornell University. It sought to initiate a critical
dialogue between different groups involved with indigenous cartographies,
including the tensions between indigenous knowledge and scientific
knowledge and social changes in communities resulting from mapping
projects. See www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/mapping
4 Pers. comm. in Chambers (1983) Rural Development, p99.
5 Cited in Paul van Mele et al (eds) (2005) Innovations in Rural Extension,
p69.
6 That participatory mapping took off in India and spread from there is my
interpretation. That is what I was aware of. There may have been parallel
developments elsewhere. There tends to be a time that is ripe for innovations
that then occur in different places at the same time, but one receives more
notice and so is thought to have been the originator of the others.
7 When I showed slides of the Kalmandargi model and the Kistagiri maps,
all of them created by villagers in at most a few hours and with only light
facilitation, at the Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad, the Director asked
me ‘And how long did it take you to train the villagers to do that? One year?
Two years?’
8 For a fuller listing of applications with examples see Mukherjee, 2002,
pp150–203.
9 I shall be grateful to anyone who can point me to an overview of experience
using maps for participatory monitoring and evaluation.
10 For a listing of forms of counter mapping see Rocheleau, 2005.
11 For a fuller treatment of behaviour, attitudes and beyond see Chapter 6 of
Chambers, Ideas for Development (2005) together with references to sources
which I am not repeating here.
12 This list of questions is a lightly edited version of one built up progressively
both at the Mapping for Change International Conference on Participatory
Spatial Information Management and Communication held at the Kenya
College of Communication of Technology, Nairobi, Kenya, 7–10 September
2005 and in subsequent email exchanges between the authors of the paper
(Rambaldi et al, 2006) and others.
 8

Traps and Liberations

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas, as in escaping from the
old ones. (John Maynard Keynes)

I thought I knew about village life as my roots are in the village, and I still
visit family in my village from time to time. But I know nothing about
what it is like to be poor and how hidden this kind of poverty can be.
(Participatory researcher, Views of the Poor, Tanzania, in Jupp, 2004)

Abstract
The challenge is for development professionals to be in touch and up to date. One means
is liberation from the Jurassic trap of large multi-purpose questionnaire surveys by
inventing and adopting alternatives such as participatory numbers. The urban and
capital city trap has become ever more serious, a new black hole with gravity intensified,
especially for aid agency and INGO staff, by meetings, negotiations, policy discussions,
workshops and the digital tyranny. The many ways to beat the biases of development
tourism can be a source of fun as well as insight. Learning face to face with people
living in poverty deserves a continued revival. Immersions with overnights are gaining
momentum. More needs to be learnt about how to liberate, retaining past learning,
improving going to scale, and enabling through values and incentives. Practical ethics
are part of pro-poor professionalism. A paradox of power is the win–win that all can
gain when those with power over liberate themselves by empowering others.

Context and challenge: To be in touch

and up to date
For humankind in the 21st century there are many challenges: global warming,
international governance, security, trade justice, tax justice, nuclear armaments
and power . . . The list can be long. Linked with all these, pervasively and
persistently, are issues of poverty, inequality and injustice, and what we can call
development policies and practice. This book has no pretensions to deal directly
with the biggest issues. But indirectly, it points to directions and levers for change.
The themes of this chapter are that we, development professionals, are mired in
152 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

traps, not all of which are well perceived, that we have new paths to liberation,
and that following these can be exhilarating, fulfilling and fun.
Part of the background is the litter of errors, each burying its predecessors,
in the history of development. The World Bank, in particular, seems to have
a periodicity between its damaging dogmas. The most clearly disastrous was
structural adjustment, forced on the weakest and most indebted countries to
repay their debts: by cutting budgets for education, health, infrastructure and
other services, it deprived and further marginalized and intensified the suffering
of hundreds of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people, and may
well have led to the premature death of millions of children and adults. Now we
have, or have had, the dogmas of neo-liberalism with the spectacular hypocrisy
of gargantuan agricultural subsidies to already rich farmers in the North further
impoverishing farmers in the South whose subsidies have had to be stopped.
Faced with mega errors like these, to concern oneself with the minutiae of modes
of inquiry in development conjures up the old clichés: the ostrich with its head in
the sand, or fiddling while Rome burns.
These big issues are not confronted head-on in this chapter. At best some of
the seeds sown here, many of them collected from others, may germinate to make
a difference. This they may do if they contribute to commitment and realism, if
through them there are fewer errors and less harm done, and more policies and
actions that lead to social justice and better lives for those who are most vulnerable
and deprived.
In the past two decades, the case for learning about and from poor people and
understanding their conditions and perspectives has become better recognized. In
rhetoric, poverty is higher than ever on the development agenda. The complexity
and diversity of poverty are better appreciated. At the same time, the realities
of poor people are changing fast. The communications revolution has touched
many more poor and rural people through television, cassettes, CDs and CDRs,
radio, newspapers, telephone networks, mobile phones, email and internet, and
has opened windows for them onto other lifestyles, not least those of the urban
middle classes. Inequalities have become starker. In many rural and urban areas,
livelihood strategies and livelihoods have diversified. For those committed to pro-
poor policies and practices, the intensified challenge is continuously to learn and
unlearn, to be in touch and keep up to date.
This applies to all development professionals. especially bureaucrats working
in governments in the South, academics, consultants, communicators, and most
visibly those who work in aid agencies, whether multilateral or bilateral, and in
international and national NGOs. They may work in Northern headquarters, in
developing countries’ capital cities, or outside them.
I shall consider two dimensions. The first is methodological, about inquiry
and knowing. The second is personal, about learning, changing and acting: it
is no good knowing unless something is done as a result. I want to suggest that
together these two dimensions can contribute to an ethic and practice of pro-poor
professionalism.
The imagery is traps and liberations: traps of which development profes-
sionals are often unaware; and escapes and liberations opened up by participatory
 Traps and Liberations 153

approaches and methods. The evidence and arguments are informed by the past
and present, and point forward to a future in which change can be expected to
be, if anything, faster and faster.

Out of the Jurassic trap: Alternatives to dinosaurs

Chapter 1 argued that many large questionnaires and surveys are pathological
– expensive, laborious and misleading – and that ‘scientific’ methodology was
often misplaced. But in the name of sophistication and rigour, many powerful
economists, statisticians and scientists persist in complicating their scientific
sledgehammer to crack the local nut. They are, as we say these days, visually
challenged. If your only optical instrument is a telescope, things close to you look
blurred. As this becomes more evident, these normal professionals manifest brick-
wallitis: when you bang your head against a brick wall and it does not fall down,
bang harder. They add to the questionnaire and increase the size of the sample
and of the control. They enlarge the telescope; and the blur gets worse.
As we have seen, there are other, cheaper, faster and more credible modes of
inquiry: direct observation (Chapter 3), rapid rural appraisal (RRA) (Chapter 4),
participatory rural appraisal (PRA) (Chapter 5), participatory numbers (Chapter
6) and participatory mapping and GIS (Chapter 7). There are many alternatives
to large questionnaires and surveys, and most of them can be facilitated in ways
which empower local people. The evidence and examples are so many and so
credible that as a means to investigate a topic a long questionnaire with a large
sample is ripe for extinction (pp13–16).
Complexity underpins the point.
The conventional view, in which I was myself trapped (pp19, 21), has been
that for complex topics, multiple causality and multiple potential impacts, long
questionnaires were needed to capture and quantify all the relevant details for
analysis. This is precisely wrong. Long questionnaires are not open to serendipity;
they do not learn; they do not adapt; they generate much garbage; they have,
in short, a learning disability. As pointed out in Chapter 1, this is not to argue
that censuses and other time series national surveys should necessarily be
abandoned.
What we have learnt is that the more complex and multifaceted an issue, the
stronger is the comparative advantage of local people using group-visual PRA
methods. Repeatedly, they have shown that they can conduct far more complex,
grounded, detailed and quicker analysis than is feasible with a conventional
questionnaire. Meera Shah and her colleagues (1999a, pp51–53) have illustrated
how adolescents can carry out complex analysis of sexual behaviour. Girls listed
a typology of sex partners and dimensions of selecting them, and then ranked
and scored these against each other in a matrix. ‘Such an analysis may seem very
complex, and perhaps difficult to understand for the reader, but . . . it took the girls
only 40 minutes to carry out . . . and discuss the reasons . . .’ (Shah, 1999a, p52).
A parallel point applies with farmers and agricultural scientists. In studying
complexity and diversity, farmers have comparative advantages over scientists.
154 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Unconstrained by the reductionist rigidities of conventional research design with

its few variables, predetermined treatments, and requirements for replications,
farmers can learn quickly from observing and adjusting to a wide range of
physical and crop conditions. In the late 1980s this was understood with farmer
participatory research. Sumberg and Okali wrote (1989, p112):

We contend that farmers’ role in technology development becomes more critical

and cost effective as the proposed technology becomes more multi-faceted and
complex ... The need is not to keep the trials ‘simple enough for farmers to
understand and evaluate’ (Farrington and Martin, 1988) nor to develop more
sophisticated statistical methods, but rather for research and research institutions
to accept the proposition that adoption by farmers is validation of a
technology, one might say by definition, even if we are unable always to
identify or quantify the technology’s effects. (Emphasis in the original)

This has been far from the attitudes and behaviour of some leading rice scientists
with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). Some, indeed, have denied its
validity despite its exponential adoption by now (2008) probably hundreds of
thousands of farmers. One reason why scientists have been so much slower to
learn than farmers is that SRI changes six cultivation practices all together and
the changes are synergistic. This does not fit into a normal experimental frame.
So farmers can innovate, experiment, observe and evolve their practices rapidly
in ways impossible for their disabled scientist colleagues. Every farmer is by
definition an experimenter, searching for practices that work, and able to try out
and learn fast from a multitude of varied practices and from other farmers. NGOs
are similarly free: an organization that was training farmers in Orissa tried out 26
varieties (Prasad et al, 2007, p6) on a small field of less than three acres, without
the controls that scientists would have been constrained to have. This approach of
continuous innovation, observation and learning generates a long further agenda
for trials and research (see e.g. Sabarmatee, 2007, p41).
The conclusion is that for studies of complex or sensitive subjects, part-
icipatory approaches, whether with visual/tangible and group approaches and
methods, or with continuous observation and adaptation of many variables, have
many advantages over questionnaires and conventional scientific research. We
are not talking here about modes of inquiry that lack rigour. To the contrary,
their rigour is often superior – based on personal motivation, observation,
group analysis, triangulation, making adjustments, and continuous learning by
doing. The main limitations are the inventiveness of those who devise them, the
training of facilitators and above all the understanding and support of those with
professional, bureaucratic and financial power. If this chapter persuades some of
them to see and act differently, it will have served a good purpose.

From urban trap to new black hole

The urban trap (pp26–29) has intensified. Capital cities have become black holes,
their gravity too strong for escape. This affects all, including government staff, but
 Traps and Liberations 155

is most conspicuous with the staff of aid agencies and INGOs. The trap refers to
headquarters in Northern countries as well as capital cities in the South.
Three factors stand out.
First, the capital trap itself. In the past, donor and lender agencies had tech-
nical assistance personnel and field projects to visit. As these became less fash-
ionable and were more and more abandoned,1 and as sector-wide approaches,
direct budget support and policy dialogue became dominant and prestigious
activities, so more and more time came to be spent in meetings – between aid
agencies trying to ‘harmonize’ with each other,2 between aid agency and govern-
ment staff, and again between them and a proliferation of partners including civil
society.
The problem has been compounded by the absurd self-defeating aid policies
of trying to do more with less, meaning higher budgets with fewer staff, who in
consequence have less and less time to make visits or for personal and profes-
sional development. So spatially centralized are mindsets, that in aid agency
parlance ‘the field’ now usually means the receiving country which in turn usually
means the capital city; a field mission from the headquarters of an aid agency is
a mission to a capital city, not to the field outside the capital.3
In parallel, a pandemic of workshops has spread like a virus through capital
cities.4 Aid instruments and their acronyms have multiplied, demanding more
reporting.5 Nor does a sector-wide focus diminish the trap. Rather, it demands
and attracts a flood of consultants who spawn a plethora of reports which pile up
in the queue to be read, discussed and acted on: in the four years to 2005, there
were 93 consultants’ reports on education in Rwanda (pers. comm. Renwick
Irvine). The backlog of unread reports preys on the consciences of agency staff
and adds to the magnetic hold of the capital where they have to be read and fol-
lowed up on. And then there are important visitors and visiting missions.
Taken together, all this makes it easier to understand how in an African
country, two expatriate social development advisers reportedly never went out-
side the capital city in the first nine months of their posting, and how in an Asian
country another such adviser reportedly only went out of the capital city once in
three years. Where there is a security problem, the hold of the capital city is even
more severe, especially for those in the UN whose insurance policies may not
cover visits to villages: a senior adviser engaged in drafting a national development
strategy may never have been outside the capital. For some aid agency staff,
perhaps many, rural visits are only possible in their own time at weekends, if then.
And these are people whose life and work is meant to be attacking and reducing
poverty. Such isolation and ignorance are a pathology.6
Second, digital addictions and tyranny. Mobile phones make staff ac-
cessible wherever they are. The internet has transformed access, information,
activities and relationships. To learn about poverty, you now visit a website, not
a village. Email has become at the same time resented, addictive and tyrannical,
tying staff more and more to their computer screens, and reducing personal
contact. Aid agencies are more vulnerable than ever to instant demands from
a distant head office. A senior official of a multilateral bank received a long and
imperious email from his boss in headquarters just as he was going into a morning
156 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

of back-to-back meetings. When he came out of these, he found a reminder asking

why he was taking so long to reply. This dominating and demoralizing use of
email appears to have gone largely unremarked. Blackberry is a Trojan horse of
intrusive invasion and erosion of private time and space; someone known to have
one cannot hide. Hierarchy can then be strengthened, together with an orientation
upwards to authority rather than downwards to poor and marginalized people.
And the traps of central places and capital cities close ever tighter.
Third, the personal dimension. Aid agency, senior government and NGO
staff in capital cities may be allured by the prestige and importance of policy
dialogue. This is seductive for almost all of us, not least when early in our careers.
That is where power can be exercised; that is how to make a difference. And better
it may seem, to be seen and heard speaking well in a meeting than to be unseen
listening to and learning from poor people. There may, too, be a reluctance to
expose oneself, to be physically or morally uncomfortable, to be confronted by
the realities of poverty, or to be, or be thought to be, some sort of poverty voyeur.
Understandable though it may be, there is here a psychopathology of avoidance.
Better, we can rationalize, to go nowhere near poverty, to shut it out, than to have
any exposure that might be blurred, distorted or misleadingly unrepresentative.
The biases of the organized visit of rural development tourism can even be an
excuse – ‘I have heard all about that. I am not going to fall for that’, as it has been
expressed. It is easy for development professionals in capital cities to find ‘good’
reasons for not going out and meeting poor people.
But a straw in the wind was the OECD’s review of the United Kingdom’s
development aid (OECD, 2006) when it observed:

The Review team would also encourage staff currently working in headquarters
to spend more time visiting the field and country office staff to spend more time
out of capital cities. Greater efforts should be made in getting key staff closer to
the development realities they support ...

Out of the black hole: Beating biases is fun

One solution, easy to recommend, is simply to make more visits away from
the workplace, and to make them longer. The decline in rural visits by urban-
based professionals is lamentable and demands resolute reversal. Both rural and
urban visits will always be ways of keeping in touch and up to date with people,
conditions and change. Fighting to find ways to escape traps and to beat biases
are not only good things to do; they should also be fun.
With rural development tourism, there are many ways to avoid and offset the
biases. ‘Old hands’ like President Lyndon Johnson (see note 9, p47) have known
some of these. Some can involve decisive and undiplomatic interventions. But it
can be rude and embarrassing to alter what has been arranged; and if people in
communities have been warned of a visit, and barring compelling reasons, it is
bad not to go to them as planned. To avoid these and other traps, here are some
common-sense ideas of what a visitor can do:
 Traps and Liberations 157

Send messages in advance

• Make your purpose and hopes clear.
• Indicate your hope for informality and willingness to ‘rough it’.
• Avoid the frequently visited VIP circuit.7
• Consider avoiding lunch.8
• Ask for time for just wandering around.9
• Ask that no programme be prearranged.10

Reflect and offset during a visit

Reflect critically on how the biases are affecting perception and learning, and try
to offset them. A longer personal list is better, but some of the more important
are:

• Spatial and project: where is being visited and what seen, and where is not
being visited and not seen?
• Person: who is being met, seen and heard and who not met, seen and heard
– women, children, the sick, the very old, migrants, those who are busy, non-
users of services, the marginalized and excluded, and those, of course, who
have died?
• Seasonal: what are things like at other times of the year, especially during the
rains?
• Diplomatic: what questions are not being asked, where are you not going,
whom are you not meeting because of politeness or timidity? Are you striking
a good balance between probing and being culturally and gender sensitive?
• Professional: what are you predisposed to notice and ask about, and not to
notice or ask about?
• Security: are insecure areas, and people who are insecure, being excluded?

Offset biases and enjoy

• Take it in turns ‘to wear the tie’. A USAID team took it in turns to be the
important person who received the first garland, met the notables, sat at the
table, and made the speech. While this was going on, others slipped away and
wandered around.
• Use local and unconventional transport. Bicycles are brilliant, and can
sometimes be hired or borrowed in villages, especially in South Asia. Horses
can reach further places faster than walking. Local buses and bicycle rickshaws
(in South Asia) have much to recommend them. Nor should helicopters be
derided. They do not give the experience of remoteness but their ability to
offset spatial biases is unique. In the Ethiopian famine of 1984 they helped
reveal the plight of remote communities. Rajiv Gandhi when Prime Min-
ister of India made unannounced visits to inaccessible tribal communities
in central India and one imagines may have been able to listen to the local
people without the normal high-pressure preparations and interventions of
squadrons of officials.
158 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

• Allow an extra day. Plan in an unplanned day during which you can indeed
wander around or follow up on leads. This can be as good as it is difficult
to justify to those with normal mindsets and bureaucratic reflexes and who
ought to know better. If you are old, or credibly infirm, say you need to rest.

Include the excluded

David Hirschmann (2003), drawing on experience of working within the time and
other constraints of being a consultant, has advice for including the excluded:

• Use rhetorical space. Make use of donor rhetoric of participation, gender,

poverty and so on to open up spaces to give voice to, listen to and learn more
about those who are poorer and more excluded, not least women.
• Reinterpret information. Take account of the ‘unseen’, those not included
in survey and other data, and consider who has been left out and why and
what needs to be done to have them included.
• Turn the room around. Tactfully change patterns of seating, meeting and
interaction to include and give voice to the excluded and unheard. Separate
meetings with women, and more time for them to exert influence, are often
needed.

Gender issues deserve underlining. Not only are women often absent or mar-
ginalized in meetings, but it is harder for them to find blocks of time, or even
places, for meeting undisturbed. The principle of ‘Ask them’ applies: to ask them
the most convenient time and place for them. For rural women in South Asia this
is frequently the least convenient time for ‘us’: after dark, when all their duties are
done. And they can show astonishing stamina by continuing their meetings after
midnight. And try to assure a gender balance in any visiting group or team.11
There are many other ways to offset biases. Many of them can be fun. Be-
ing aware of how one is trapped can lead to wry smiles. Inventive improvisation
often leads to good learning. Experiences provide stories and jokes to share with
colleagues. At all costs, awareness of the limitations of brief visits should not deter
but encourage development professionals to go where poor people are, to meet
them, to collect and share experiences, and learn to do this better. All of us who
are practitioners or victims of development tourism, whether rural or urban, can
develop our own ideas for good practice.
My own favourite is advice from the Alpine Journal. Designed for ski
mountaineering, this applies to much else in life, and equally, if not more, to rural
and urban visits:

Start early
Don’t rush
Think!
 Traps and Liberations 159

Learning face to face

In the 2000s learning face to face has come to the fore, often with deeper and
more insightful learning, sometimes personally transformative. Four forms can
be noted: team reality checks; total participatory research; immersions with
overnights; and listening and life stories.

Team reality checks

Team visits and interactions with local people have been a key part of RRA.
RRAs with officials have transformed views of land tenure and policy in Tanzania
(Johansson and Hoben, 1992), and in Madagascar and Guinea (Freuden-
berger, 1998). Responding to three critical evaluations, United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) initiated annual participatory assess-
ments with refugees in which the staff of the headquarters in a country go out
and meet and listen to refugees. An evaluation (Groves, 2005) found it to be
‘extremely positive and useful tool in that it brings staff closer to the realities of
the people of concern’. In the words of one staff member:

There has been a big effect for me personally and for the implementing partners
that I work with. Before, we knew that there were differences between sex and
age groups but we didn’t realise to what extent. There has been a total change
in implementing partners’ attitudes.

The Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) in Bangladesh began

in 2007 to pioneer a new form of reality check. This is designed to listen to
poor people’s realities on primary healthcare and primary education. It will
be conducted with the same households at the same time of the year, October/
November, when conditions are often at their most difficult for poor people,
repeated each year for five years. It combines immersions (living with the poor)
with more conventional participatory approaches. It stresses listening and learn-
ing the perspectives of poor people themselves. The findings will feed into annual
policy reviews (Sida, 2007; Jupp with others, 2007b).

Total participatory research

Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) undertook a remark-

able activity in Tanzania in which some of its staff were trained in participatory
research and then spent a whole day living and working each with a very poor
family (SDC, 2003; Jupp, 2004a). Dee Jupp, who facilitated it, has written: ‘The
outcomes of the exercise were extraordinary. Not only was a wealth of insights
into the life of poor households gathered, but the experience turned out to be
transformational for many of the research team’ (Jupp, 2007a). In spite of this, the
approach has not, to my knowledge, ever been repeated. Participants said ‘The
160 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

image of the baby crying all day with hunger will always be with me’, ‘I’ve worked
in rural villages for more than twenty years, but I have never had an experience
like this’, ‘We heard the untold stories. It was an eye-opener as families shared
their problems that would never be aired in group meetings’, and ‘Even village
leaders could not tell you what we experienced for ourselves’.
The insights gained included that poor people gave higher priority to their
shelter and housing than had been thought, and that some did not know about
services provided free by the state. The outcomes of this participatory research
included photographs taken by poor people which were later exhibited in Bern.
The main benefit, though, was personal experiential learning, and its contribution
to SDC planning and priorities.

Immersions with overnights

Immersion is the term commonly used to describe an outsider being hosted by a

family and staying in a community for a few days with overnights. As a practice
it has been growing, and may be near a tipping point. Immersions are now well
documented.12 Staying in communities as a guest, as a person, and not as an
official or bringer of benefits, opens up a range of experiences and insights other-
wise inaccessible. For one thing, much changes after dark. People relax and talk
more freely. There is no rush to finish off and leave. There is less awareness of
personal differences. People talk about other things – family and relationships,
what matters to them, and subjects otherwise too sensitive like corruption,
exploitation, local conflicts, and the wider world . . . The guest is less likely to
be treated prudently with chosen words and information. The overnight stay is
subject to its own pressures – to stay not with a poor family but with one which is
better off, as may be felt appropriate by community members themselves; or to
camp in the school, or in a tent outside the village; or not to stay in the community
at all but to put up at a nearby government rest house. The decent reflexes of
hospitality on the part of those organizing a visit for the stranger deserve to be
respected, but can also be politely but firmly resisted.
The essence of the immersion with overnights is that the visitor is not an
important person but a fellow human being and can become a friend. She or
he spends nights living in a community, taking part and helping in life, and
experiencing and learning as a participant. There are many forms of immersion
and many ways of arranging them. They can be spontaneous, on an impulse
or seizing an opportunity; but more usually they are prepared and facilitated
as reflective experiences. They can be unstructured, or they can be designed to
explore a theme.
Immersions have been pioneered, adopted and promoted in varied forms
(Eyben, 2004; Irvine et al, 2004, 2006; PLA, 2007). For some social anthro-
pologists, they have long been professional practice. Pioneers have included
Karl Osner with the Exposure and Dialogue Programme (EDP) in which
typically groups of senior officials and politicians together have a period of
orientation, a few days staying with a host family, and then a time of individual
 Traps and Liberations 161

and joint reflection. (By 2008 there had been some 77 EDPs with almost 1000
participants.) Other organizations practising immersions are the World Bank with
its programme for senior managers introduced by James Wolfensohn; the very
large trade union SEWA (the Self Employed Women’s Association) in India using
immersions for the induction of its own staff and organizing them for others;
and ActionAid International. Among bilateral agencies, Sida is leading. Senior
staff (Göran Holmqvist and Staffan Herrström) set an example with their own
immersions, and then in 2007 Sida became the first bilateral agency to make im-
mersions officially approved and encouraged as practice for its staff (Nilsson et
al, 2007).
The benefits of immersions are repeatedly affirmed and illustrated by the
reflections of those who have experienced them. In the words of an official of an
international aid agency:

I have asked myself what would have happened if I had spent one week per
year in a village somewhere over the last decade ... ten different contexts, and a
number of faces and names to have in mind when reading, thinking, writing,
taking decisions and arguing in our bureaucracy.

One wonders whether the lethal policies of structural adjustment would have
been imposed so harshly on indebted countries if those responsible had spent a
few days and nights hosted by poor communities in those countries. Immersions
should be highly cost-effective ways of enhancing the realism and impact of
pro-poor policy and practice and reducing the risk of gross errors. Through
their reality checks, they hold the potential to discharge responsibility and
accountability both upwards to funders and taxpayers, and downwards to poor
people themselves. The question now is not how an organization can afford the
time and other resources for immersions for its staff. It is how, if it is seriously
pro-poor, it can possibly not do so.

Listening and life stories of people living in poverty

Oral histories have a long pedigree. Recent examples have shown how empathetic
interaction and listening can be a source of insight, personal learning and
inspiration. Harsh Mander’s (2001) Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives is
the stories of forgotten women and men, girls and boys, in contemporary India
– street children, sex workers, women, dalit and tribal survivors of atrocities, riot
victims, especially women, homeless and destitute people, scavengers of night
soil, and those living with leprosy and HIV. Their narratives show not only how
they survive and cope; they bring out their endeavour to overcome, with rare
and humbling courage, resilience, optimism, humanism and hope. In the same
spirit and genre, ActionAid researchers in Asia listened to and recorded 250
life stories in Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh. As the editors
of the resulting volume Listening to People Living in Poverty (Parasuraman et al,
2003) write, the book ‘. . . presents quintessentially the worm’s eye view of the
experiences of poverty and its impact, against the bird’s eye view that dominates
162 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

the present discourses on poverty’. They provoke and challenge us with their
reflection (p26) that ‘In a world overwhelmed by bits of floating information,
introducing emotions into the reflective process frees meaning-making in creative
ways.’ Kumaran, one of the researchers, concludes a powerful paper ‘Listening as
a Radical Act’ (2003, p14) by saying that

Life story collection is much more than a research method. It is an attitude

of mind, a disposition of heart . . . by privileging this method of collecting
data, we have given legitimacy and significance to different ways of being a
researcher and a person. Soon the alternative ways of doing research may come
to complement other conventional ways, and hopefully create a radically new
development researcher ...

Learning how to liberate

These forms of learning face to face can be experienced as liberating – through
new ways of knowing, being and relating. Many of the other approaches and
methods considered in this book can also liberate by opening up new and better
ways of learning. The more participatory of these methods, when facilitated well,
are also empowering for local people. For quality and scale, three challenges
stand out:

1 Recovering and reviving the good already known

So many methods, approaches and lessons learnt get silted over by whatever
is new. Some like questionnaires respond to a demand, and have a frame and
momentum that assure reproduction and survival. Others like participatory map-
ping are so versatile, powerful and popular that they persist. Other methods and
approaches such as some of those of RRA, like being observant (Chapter 3) and
semi-structured interviewing (Chapter 4), have been largely buried and forgotten.
In part this has been because PRA visual methods have been so powerful and
attractive. Also, in any training there is only so much that can be covered, and
when PRA methods have primacy others are pushed off the agenda.
The challenge is revolving to retain and augment a full repertoire. This has
become more exacting with the proliferation of participatory methodologies. But
the flip side of the coin is that the repertoire is now so rich that we have opport-
unities for inventiveness and versatility that are without precedent, as we shall
explore in Chapter 9.

2 Retaining quality with going to scale

PRA, and, though less well known, RRA before it, usually deteriorated when they
were taken to scale. They shared this unfortunate experience with innumerable
other methodologies. We need to learn better how to build self-reinforcing
quality into methodologies. The literature on the subject is not sparse, and
usually advocates steady expansion and good training, but if the liberations of
participatory approaches are to spread well, much needs to change.
 Traps and Liberations 163

The challenge is to learn much more about how to retain and enhance quality
when going to scale, and to put lessons learnt into practice.

3 Enabling incentives and values

Institutional change is often needed, from a top–down control orientation to a
more democratic enabling orientation. This is painfully well known, and often
stressed. But many organizations still trap, confine and constrain their staff.
The challenge is to learn more about the interactions of the institutional and
the personal dimensions, and the liberating incentives and values which make
space for and reward creative diversity in a participatory mode.

Whose trap? Whose liberation?

Issues of Ethics
The flip side of thinking about traps and liberations is to ask about local and poor
people. Do participatory approaches and methods trap them? There are many
questions of practical ethics.
Ethical issues with research have always been there and have received much
attention. RRA, PRA and PLA have generated their own concerns. Some who
use participatory approaches in an extractive mode have been much preoccupied
with abuses and ethical dilemmas:

• Taking people’s time. The time of poor people is, contrary to common
professional belief, often very precious, especially at difficult times of the year
(such as commonly during the rains). Rural people are often polite, hospitable
and deferential to outsiders, who do not realize the sacrifices of time they are
making. A day of weeding lost at a critical period can have high hidden costs
in a smaller harvest.
• Raising expectations. Any process of analysis facilitated by an outsider is
liable to raise expectations of some benefit, even when the outsider goes to
pains to explain that they have nothing to offer and nothing will follow from
their visit. Disappointment and disillusion with visitors and organizations
outside the community then follow.
• Extracting information only for the outsiders’ benefit without this
being clear to those who provide it. This is familiar and can apply to al-
most any outsiders. The information taken away may take various forms such
as a map which is removed, or local knowledge, for example of medicinal or
other plants. This is a major issue with knowledge of commercial value.
• Extracting information which will be used against people. I cannot
cite cases but this must surely occur.
• Exposing people to danger. Street children who made maps in Cairo in all
innocence showed where the drug dealers operated: this could have got them
in trouble if the authorities had learnt and taken action. Urban dwellers in
Jamaica analysing violence had to be stopped once for their own safety when
164 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

local thugs began to take a suspicious interest. Children in a refugee camp

inadvertently showed the market where they went with their parents to sell
relief food illegally.
• Repeating activities. Some (doubtless accessible) villages in Malawi are
said to have been ‘carpet-bombed’ with PRA, and reportedly intercept visitors
and negotiate with them before allowing them to enter, while more ‘remote’
villages are never visited.
• Causing tensions or violence in a community. This has occurred esp-
ecially with women who take part in participatory activities, and who are later
abused and beaten by their husbands when the outsiders have left. This can
apply to any ‘lower’ group in a community.

To tackle these, a code of ethics has been drafted for those who use such methods
to obtain numbers.13

The paradox of power: Reversals for pro-poor

professionalism
Power can be seen to have four forms (VeneKlasen and Miller, 2002, p45):

Power over (others)

Power to (choose and do things, agency)
Power with (others, collective power)
Power within (self worth and confidence)

A paradox of power is that the exercise of power over can be a trap. It can go
with responsibility, worry and stress. It can be part of a syndrome of control from
above that diminishes and disempowers those below. All this is well known. What
is less recognized is how fulfilling it can be for those with power over when they
empower others. This can liberate by diminishing stress for those with power over.
It can also give many satisfactions from learning what those empowered discover
and show they can do. In terms of liberation, it can be a win–win.14
The paradox of this reversal of normal thinking and practice is overarching.
It applies to all the traps and liberations. In every case, in every dimension, those
with power over have the power to free and empower others. They can make
space for and support alternatives to large questionnaire surveys. They can seize
and make space for themselves and others to escape the traps of headquarters and
capital cities. They can promote learning face to face. They can set an example
with immersions themselves, encouraging others, and making time and providing
resources for them to do likewise. They can open all this up through example,
incentives and rewards.
This is all part of the fulfilment of a responsible pro-poor professionalism.
It already has pioneers and champions with the vision and guts to show a lead.
It needs many more. Above all, it needs more who seek out direct learning, face
to face. For that is how to keep up with the changing realities of people living in
 Traps and Liberations 165

poverty; that is how to be more in touch and up to date; and that is how to rekindle
passion in the fight for a fairer and better world.

Notes
1 See for example, Groves (2004). The abandonment of projects was often
unethical, and reflected the ignorance and insensitivity of donors isolated in
aided countries’ capital cities, and more so in their headquarters in their home
countries. Had they been more in touch, in some of the ways suggested in this
paper, they might have behaved better.
2 Harmonization can mean instructions from home headquarters to influence
more powerful lenders or donors in an aided country. ‘. . . the fashionable
joint funding schemes which are supposed to support harmonisation and
supposedly create greater efficiency, seem to me to do the opposite – endless
time spent in meetings trying to harmonise with folk who simply do not see
things the same way and do not have the same set of values’ (pers. comm. Dee
Jupp).
3 See for example, the usage in the Paris Declaration (DAC, 2005) of ‘missions
to the field’ and ‘field missions’.
4 On a visit to Ghana in 2003, the only time when aid agency staff could be met
was at breakfast. Some of those who came left early because of a World Bank
workshop on the PRSP (attended by at least 200 people). And there were at
least two other major development-related workshops going on in parallel.
5 For example, the World Bank requires what Wilks and Lefrançois (2002)
characterize as an ‘assessment overload’ of up to 16 analytical reports in
its client countries, each of which is liable to accentuate the capital trap as
officials, consultants and others struggle to complete them. Intentions to
harmonize demands for reports were articulated in the Declaration adopted
at the High-Level Forum on Harmonisation in Rome in February 2003, and
in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (DAC, 2005) adopted in March
2005.
6 In these strictures I do not pose as ‘holier than thou’. In several respects, my
own isolation and ignorance can also be described as sick.
7 If you are given a visitor’s book to sign, with signatures of the great and good,
or supposedly so, smile wryly and chalk up a failure.
8 Formal arrangements for this often superfluous meal can be tiresome for
hosts, complicate itineraries, limit the time spent seeing, listening and learning,
and again and again curtail visits. If there are bananas, you can say bananas
are fine. Or at most sandwiches, samosas or their local equivalents. But use
your judgement on this. Lunch can provide opportunities for conversations
otherwise denied; in three days of field visits near Kabul in May 2006, I was
able to have only one conversation with a woman. She was a social organizer.
In the open she wore a full burka and was an unperson. Once seated in a
curtained-off area for lunch, she removed the cover to reveal an animated and
enthusiastic woman with whom I was able to have a fascinating talk. Without
lunch, I would have missed this privilege, so rare, I was told, for a male visitor
166 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

in Afghanistan.
9 This request is often not effective, but making it establishes the point that
you want this, and puts a foot in the door even if it does not always open it.
In a community outside Kabul, a spare hour after the formal meeting was
invaluable for meeting some of the poorer people.
10 This, too, may not work. I have made the request and arrived to be court-
eously presented with a detailed itinerary of visits to people who would be
waiting for me. As an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, Anil C.
Shah (pers. comm.) was able to avoid this. When visiting an area he would
choose on a map where to go, and pick a village which was far to reach.
Arriving unexpectedly, his findings were stark, revealing and embarrassing
for the local staff.
11 This is precisely hardest in those societies where women are most subjug-
ated; in only one of three days of field visits from Kabul in May 2006 did
we have a woman in the party who was able to talk to women’s groups! And
for men to talk to them was utterly out of the question. The male bias was
spectacular.
12 The best starting point for sources on immersions is Participatory Learning
and Action 57, 2007. It contains history, personal accounts, advice and
experience on organization, and reflections on process and learning. It is
available online at www.iied.org/NR/agbioliv/pla_notes/backissues.html.
Other websites are www.exposure-dialog.de/english/ for the Exposure
and Dialogue programme, www.actionaid.org for immersions organized
by ActionAid International, and www.praxisindia.org for more general
information.
13 A code of ethics was drawn up by the Participatory Numbers group (see
note 1, p131) in the UK. It was long and appears lost. A shorter, succinct
statement is needed.
14 I have tried to explore further how acts of empowering others can be a
win–win in ‘Transforming Power: From zero-sum to win-win?’, Chambers,
2006a.
 9

Participatory Methodologies:
Drivers for Change

Revolutions should be described not in terms of group experience but in terms

of the varied experiences of individual group members. Indeed, that variety
itself turns out to play an essential role in the evolution of scientific knowledge.
(Thomas Kuhn, 1993)

Reality is far too complex to be understood from one particular frame.

(William Savedoff, 2008)

...it is essential to keep on discovering new ways of finding out ... It is not
innovation but innovativeness ... that needs to be nurtured. (Dee Jupp, 2007,
p122)

. . . since we are in a world of permanent white water, we are going to be

beginners indefinitely. (Peter Vaill, 1996, p81. Emphasis in original)

Abstract
With astonishing speed, the journey has brought us new modes of inquiry, most recently
with the flowering, proliferation and spread of participatory methodologies (PMs).With
the pluralism and diversity of PMs we are in a new space: with a vastly enhanced
repertoire; with a new eclectic creativity; and with a wealth of innovations specific to
context and purpose.
Theory is implicit and emergent in this book. It is part of the pervasive paradigmatic
shift from things to people. Theories of chaos, complexity and emergence resonate with,
shed light on and underpin the evolution and spread of PMs. To these can be added
eclectic pluralism, with a coherence and complementarity between context (local,
complex and diverse) and eclecticism (adaptive, creative and pluralist).
PMs can be drivers and means to personal, institutional, professional and social
change. Many blocks impede their recognition, evolution and adoption. Practical
priorities are: to foster methodological diversity and enrich the repertoire; to make time
and space for reflection, unlearning and innovation; to identify and multiply innovators
168 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

and facilitators; to help people in funding agencies understand what they can do; to
transform modes of teaching especially in tertiary education; and to institutionalize
critical reflection and focused brainstorming.
The emergent paradigm informs and resonates with an immanent ideology and
a new professionalism. At the core are principles and commitments to equity, respect,
diversity, and human rights. Who finds out, who learns, and who is empowered are
core questions. The challenge and opportunity are for participatory methodologies to
provide entry points for confronting and changing relationships and power. As long
as there is a human race and organized society, participatory methodologies will
remain frontiers for inquiry and drivers for personal, institutional and professional
transformations. For those who wish and are willing, the scope is boundless. The
exhilaration, fun and fulfilment of innovation and change for the better should never
end.

The journey so far

Our journey in this book has covered experiences and developments over some
four decades. It has the limitations of a personal view. I have tried to describe the
main features and currents of change in those parts of the streams where I have
found myself. Others have had other experiences. Anyone else would have written
a different book. Much else has been significant. Still, in this last chapter I will try
to express what it seems to me has been happening, how it can be understood
in terms of theory, why it has been so little recognized, its potentials, and ways
forward and what this could mean for our world. I shall argue that the flowering
of a multiplicity of participatory methodologies now presents us, humankind,
with opportunities that are without precedent.
The journey that began with the dinosaurs of massive multi-subject ques-
tionnaires and with the biased empiricism of brief rural visits led through the
search for better modes of inquiry to the repertoire and principles of rapid rural
appraisal (RRA). This in turn evolved, fed by other flows, into the marvellous
excitements of early participatory rural appraisal (PRA), its exponential spread,
its widespread misuse, and its diffusion and subsuming in the broader family of
participatory methodologies (PMs) and participatory learning and action (PLA).
These in turn have now evolved, cross-fertilized and spread during the past
decade with an exhilarating diversification and creativity, spawning innumerable
forms and varieties. In the mid-1990s we were coming to terms with the spread
of PRA. In the latter 2000s the challenge is to comprehend the astonishing range
and implications of a new multiplicity of PMs. This is much more than collecting
stamps or catching, classifying and naming butterflies. It is trying to see the
range of potentials of the proliferating diversity of PMs, and to understand and
nurture the conditions and processes that support the dispersed creativity and
performance through which they continue to emerge and evolve.
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 169

Methodological diversity and pluralism

Methodological monocultures or fundamentalisms confine and cramp creativity.
On its own, the large multi-subject questionnaire survey is unimodal, a reflex
for moving on a flat Earth. For many, it remains as a knee-jerk, embedded as
an automatic choice as method for inquiry. The same can be said of some other
monocultures. For a time, there were even PRA fundamentalists, consultants who
proselytized and sold PRA as a standard solution for every problem.
Some fundamentalisms survive. But increasingly they are passé, overtaken
by the burgeoning multiplicity of participatory options of the 21st century. The
diverse pluralism of these options has three dimensions.
The first is the rich range of tried and tested PMs. In the early and mid-1990s
there was a proliferation of named methodologies, a few of them originating
earlier. Many had short lives or spread little. The survivors have diverse and
distinctive characteristics. The selection of PMs outlined in Chapter 5 were:

• farmer participatory research (itself a family of PMs)

• farmer field schools and integrated pest management
• Reflect
• Stepping Stones
• Internal Learning System (ILS)
• the Participatory Action Learning System (PALS)
• Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).

Others with distinct characteristics include:

• Participatory Technology Development (Haverkort et al, 1991; PTD, 2005)

• Open Space (Owen, 1997)
• Planning for Real (Gibson, 1996)
• Participatory Poverty Assessments (Norton et al, 2001; Robb, 2002)
• Theatre-based approaches (Abah, 2004; McCarthy and Galvão, 2004;
Guhathakurta, 2008)
• Participatory Geographic Information Systems (Chapter 7)
• Outcome Mapping (Earl et al, 2001)
• Most Significant Change (Davies and Dart, 2005; Willetts and Crawford,
2007)
• Appreciative Inquiry (AI) (Ludema and Fry, 2008)
• ALPS (the Accountability, Learning and Planning System of ActionAid)
(ActionAid International (AAI), 2006c)
• Participatory video (Lunch and Lunch, 2006)
• Star (Nakiboneka, 2008)
• Participatory Vulnerability Analysis (AAI, 2008)
• Negotiated learning (Guijt, 2007b)
• Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage (PACA, 2008).
170 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

In addition there are two large families:

• Participative Inquiry and Practice (Reason and Bradbury, 2008), embracing

many approaches to action research which have been largely separate from
the streams described in this book. Examples are action learning (Pedler
and Burgoyne, 2008), cooperative inquiry (Heron and Reason, 2008) and
participatory action research (Swantz, 2008; Rahman, 2008).
• Participatory democracy for which there has been an explosion of PMs,
especially in India and South America, including citizen’s juries (Wakeford
et al, 2008), participatory budgeting, budget tracking, monitoring of service
delivery, responsibility mapping, report cards, holding officials to account,
social audits and related applications of digital and internet technology (pers.
comm. John Gaventa).

And there are surely many more. Together with PRA/PLA (Chapter 5) and
participatory methods that generate numbers (Chapter 6) these present an
extraordinary collection of methods and ideas which have worked. The range of
recipes, ingredients and how these can be combined has expanded and continues
to expand it would seem exponentially.
The second dimension is ease of borrowing and adapting methods and
approaches. This can be understood in terms of the visibility, divisibility and
porosity of named PMs. As far as I know, there is open access to details of all
the PMs listed above. They are global commons. At least as important, they are
divisible, that is dimensions and elements of them can be picked out and adapted
and used. This is true not only of those that are broader approaches (like AI) but
also of those that are methodologically more internally integrated as systems (like
ILS): from AI it is possible to take the idea of asking people first to show what
they are proud of, and from ILS the idea of the visual diary. Porosity – having
permeable boundaries, no copyright, no exclusive ownership – permits and
encourages the borrowing and adapting.
The third dimension is innovation as a way of working and being, inventing
and improvising anew for each purpose and context. More and more consultants,
facilitators, researchers and activists have become eclectic and innovative
pluralists who devise sequences and combinations of methods to fit each case.
To do this they draw on more and more experiences, ideas and sources. The pot-
ential for mixed methods has proliferated at the same time as the more creative
practitioners have been able and willing to explore and exploit it. They draw on
multiple repertoires and put together and improvise sequences fitting for purpose
and context. What they do is new each time. At its best this is a performance, an
art form. And what they do is often not named.
All this can apply in participatory workshops and with participatory field
research.
Eclectic combinations and sequences, combined with improvisation, are a
part of many participatory workshops. Unfortunately, these are rarely recorded
and published. An exception is a two-day workshop for participants from Middle
Eastern countries facilitated by two of my colleagues. In the words of one of
them:
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 171

Peter Taylor and I facilitated a journey of discovery over a couple of days

that combined personal recall of experiences with creative writing, theatrical
enactment, conceptual sense-making and practical application during field
visits. (Pettit, 2006, p76)

One wonders how many similar experiences are never shared.

More numerous are accounts of ad hoc invention for participatory field
research. We have seen (Chapter 6, pp116–117) how, in Malawi, Sarah Levy
and her colleagues evolved an ingenious sequence of participatory methods
combining social mapping, household listing, and food security sorting and
piling, in order to find what categories of people had benefited from the Targeted
Inputs Programme. Many of such PMs devised by creative consultants for
context and purpose are one-off. We can learn here from the work of Dee Jupp.
Four of the PM innovations she has led (Jupp, 2007a)1 have been:

• a Participatory Poverty Assessment in Bangladesh (UNDP, 1996) in which

focus groups of poor women and men discussed and ranked their priorities
for changes which were doable and would make a difference to their lives
• a Participatory Human Rights Assessment with visuals (Jupp, 2007a, pp108–
109)
• participatory research with very poor people in Tanzania (SDC, 2003; Jupp,
2004)
• a giant wall mind-map developed in a Somali peace-building process (Jupp,
2007a, p113).

These could be applied in many places. Yet none has to my knowledge been
used elsewhere. One wonders how many goldmines like these lie untapped. Con-
sultants have to go on to other work. Sponsoring agencies have got what they paid
for. Donor staff have to get on with spending their budgets: they are not rewarded
for recognizing and disseminating PMs. And they too move on. A thousand
flowers have bloomed, faded and died. Only a few have seeded or hybridized. Big
opportunities have been missed.

Implicit and resonant theory

As we saw in Chapter 5, PRA/PLA-related theory has been induced from practice
rather than the other way round. This has been described in terms of three
domains: first, attitudes, behaviours and mindsets; second, methods especially
those involving groups, visuals and tangibles; and third, sharing and relationships.
Moving from PRA and PLA to participatory methodologies more generally,
three other underlying dimensions of theory can be discerned, explaining and
underpinning what has been happening. They are: the shift from a paradigm
of things to one of people; theories of chaos, complexity and emergence; and
creative and eclectic pluralism.
172 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Paradigms: From things to people2

Tensions and changes in development thinking, procedures and practices can

be interpreted in terms of paradigms: one associated with things, and one with
people. Paradigm here refers to a mutually reinforcing pattern of concepts,
values and principles, methods, procedures and processes, roles and behaviours,
relationships and mindsets, and orientations and predispositions.

CONCEPTS

VALUES MINDSETS RELATIONSHIPS

PRINCIPLES ORIENTATIONS
PREDISPOSITIONS

METHODS
PROCEDURES ROLES
PROCESSES BEHAVIOURS

Figure 9.1 Dimensions of a paradigm

Two contrasting paradigms, of things and of people, can illuminate significant

differences and are relevant to the argument here.
The two paradigms are contrasted for emphasis. But dichotomies can dis-
tort and caricature by polarizing and presenting elements that are often com-
plementary or continua as though they are mutually exclusive. It is not a question
of bad/good or either/or. Each has its fitting context. We need good physical infra-
structure on the things side and good relationships and capabilities on the people
side. Moreover, much good practice straddles and combines the two.
That said, the paradigm of things comes from, fits and works with the physical
world: it is top–down, centralized, standardized, simplified and reductionist; it
values measurement; and its outputs are physical things such as infrastructure
and reports. The paradigm of people comes from, fits and works with the social
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 173

Table 9.1 Contrasting paradigms of things and people

Generative basis Things and procedures People and processes

Orientation, planning and Top–down Bottom–up
access Centralized Decentralized
Controlling Empowering

Key words Planning Participation

Design Emergence
Blueprint Process

Methods Standardized Performative

Reductionist Inclusive
Universal Contextual
Fixed Flexible

Embodying Rules Principles

Expressing Conventions Values

Implicit assumptions about Linear Non-linear

causality and change Controllable Uncontrollable
Predictable Unpredictable

Valuing and relying for rigour Regulation Responsibility

and quality on Precision Fitness
Measurement Judgement
Statistical analysis Triangulation

Roles and behaviours Supervising Facilitating

Enforcing Enabling

Typical procedure and Questionnaires Participatory methodologies

processes Randomized
control trials
Logframes

Mode and ethos Hierarchical Democratic

world: it is bottom–up, decentralized, diverse, complex and inclusive; it values

judgement, and has outputs that are social such as capabilities and relationships.
Much development practice can be interpreted as in tension between the norms
of these two paradigms, and a struggle to shift from the historically dominant
‘things’ set of economists and engineers, to the ‘people’ set, in principle the
domain of all disciplines, in practice mainly of social scientists. Methodologically,
questionnaires, randomized control trials, sampling, statistical probabilities
and logframes belong on the things and procedures side, while participatory
methodologies belong on the side of people and processes.
174 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Self-organizing systems: Chaos, complexity and emergence

The paradigm of people resonates with the theories of chaos (Gleick, 1988), com-
plexity (Waldrop, 1994), emergence (Johnson, 2002), and ideas of deep simplicity
underlying complexity, diversity, dynamism and unpredictability (Gribbin, 2004).
These have rarely been considered in development (but now see Ramalingam et
al, 2008).3 Concepts and insights of systems theory and complexity science can
illuminate realities that are obscured or misperceived through linear, control-
oriented, standardized, top–down approaches. For example, interconnected and
interdependent elements and dimensions, feedback processes, non-linearity, and
sensitivity to initial conditions are all found in development processes. Messy
partnerships (Guijt, 2008)4 and relationships and unpredictable outcomes are
commonplace.
Perhaps the most relevant concept is that of self-organizing systems on the
edge of chaos. The edge of chaos is the zone of diverse, self-organizing and
emergent complexity which lies between top–down rigidity and random chaos.
Computer simulations have provided insights. In this zone systems manifest
complex behaviour based on simple rules. For example, random blobs on a
computer screen can be programmed with three rules so that they form flocks and
fly around together (Resnick, 1994), behaviour that could never be programmed
in a conventional top–down manner.
In many contexts in the natural world there is similar complex behaviour
without a central authority: besides birds flocking and fish shoaling, ant colonies
are much cited. Slime moulds are perhaps the most iconic example. They at times
exist as dispersed individual cells, invisible to the naked eye: at others they come
together as visible aggregates. For 20 years mycologists searched for specialized
‘pacemaker’ cells that they believed must be determining this behaviour. The
alternative explanation, now accepted, of widespread responses of individual
cells to changes in the environment, was for long met with scepticism. And it
is this scepticism that is of prime interest, for it expresses our deeply rooted
mindsets that look for explanations in a central authority, what Steven Johnson
(2002, pp29–67) calls ‘the myth of the ant queen’, the idea that the complex and
continuously emergent behaviour of ants in a colony must be controlled by the
queen.
The shift to a mindset that recognizes such forms of self-organization has
been gradual and is far from complete. It has been a revolution in the way we
think about the world and many of its systems (Johnson, 2002, pp54–55). Its logic
is bottom–up. Applied to human society, it takes the form of emergent, complex
and unpredictable behaviour generated by active agents bound variously by
simple rules, conventions, principles and/or values. In an obvious form, based on
rules, this logic can be found in games, football and chess for example.
Participatory methodologies manifest this bottom–up logic. In understanding
behaviours in PMs, it helps to distinguish between rules and conventions, which
are lower-level, specific and detailed determinants, and principles and values
which are higher-level general guides. Rules and conventions are to be followed,
to be obeyed; principles and values are to be interpreted, to be embodied. With
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 175

PMs, good performance is based less on rules and conventions, and more on
principles and values.
This point is illustrated by manuals. Typically, these instruct in detail what
to do and in what sequence. In the early days of Reflect, a large Mother Manual
was produced. When it was interpreted too literally as rules, it had to be replaced
with a loose-leaf sourcebook of ideas which are ingredients rather than a recipe
(Archer and Newman, 2003). Users had to exercise judgement (based implicitly
on principles and values) in choosing and interpreting what to do. This spawned
a proliferation of local innovation and ownership (Box 9.1).

Box 9.1 Reflect: From Mother Manual to multiplicity

After the piloting of Reflect, in Bangladesh, El Salvador and Uganda in 1993/4 and
its early evolution, experience was brought together in a Mother Manual. This
was intended as a resource for the introduction and development of Reflect in
other places and countries. It recommended adaptation of its participatory tools
to address critical local issues. But it was interpreted literally as detailed rules,
resulting in routinised and inappropriate application. It was withdrawn and more
emphasis was placed on selecting and training facilitators, and shifting the balance
of activity to give less prominence to literacy and more to critical analysis and
empowerment. This spawned more creativity and variety of local practice. In an
evaluation in 2001, of 134 organisations surveyed, 28 were still using the Mother
Manual, 17 had regional or national manuals, 55 local manuals, and 34 no manual
(CIRAC, 2001, p47).

For me, a fascinating and similar discovery has been an inverse relationship
between rules and instructions on the one hand, and commitment and creative
diversity on the other. In PRA training I used for years to take 20 minutes or so
to ‘teach’ how to do matrix scoring. Trainees would then practise, and we would
walk around and comment. I would point out who had done it ‘right’ and where
they had got it ‘wrong’. I slowly realized that this froze out spontaneity, creativity,
diversity and discovery. I now take two or three minutes to show a rough example,
give a minimal framework and resources, and tell groups to form themselves
and get on with it. One result has been that I have come to learn many methods
for matrix scoring that I had never imagined! Another is that participants learn
experientially for themselves, from their own inventions, practice, mistakes and
reflective critiques.
Bimal Phnuyal had already gone down this road. When conducting a PRA
training he had used to give a long background of PRA to participants before
they went to practise in the field. He would describe the key features and steps
for each technique. Participants as well as trainers wanted to ‘clarify’ everything
before practice. Then in a training of facilitators in El Salvador, in 1998, they
176 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

went straight into mapping. Participants produced a beautiful community map.

They were then asked to reflect on and write down how they had done it. ‘We as
trainers benefited more from this experience, we could learn how we can learn by
doing, and why it is not necessary to give theory first. Participants can theorize
from their own practice’ (Pers. comm. 1998).
As with many PRA methods in group situations in communities, starting
conditions may be influenced by a facilitator, and suggestions made, but when the
stick, if held at all, is metaphorically or literally handed over, actors then invent
processes for themselves.
A practical illustration of self-organizing systems is known as SOSOTEC
(self-organizing systems on the edge of chaos). This provides and expresses
principles for participatory workshops, teaching and learning (Chambers, 2002,
pp93–94, 105, 123–128). The predisposing conditions are first, commitment by
actors to common goals – like learning about a subject, or sharing and collecting
insights, or meeting together for a common interest; and second, simple enabling
principles or rules. In a participatory workshop, SOSOTEC can be effective for
many decentralized activities, like rearranging furniture, meeting and greeting one
another, and open-ended activities with self-forming groups as in Open Space
(Owen, 1997). Often this bottom–up logic of enablement engages and releases
energy and interaction leading to learning and understanding. And principles and
rules or guidelines can and often are made in a participatory mode by participants
themselves.
In a SOSOTEC mode, there is power to empower. This can be exercised
either through power over, or through power with (Chapter 8, p164). The mode is
to convene and set minimum enabling principles or non-negotiables. An example
is women’s savings groups in South India, convened and facilitated by the NGO
MYRADA. There were only two non-negotiable principles: first, that accounting
should be competent and transparent; second, that leadership and the holding
of offices should regularly rotate. Beyond that, the over 2000 groups were free
to make their own rules and procedures. They then looked not upwards and
outside for authority, but to themselves, and took ownership and pride in their
self-organizing and adaptive systems.
Participatory methodologies can be seen through this lens. They generate
self-organizing systems with emergent properties, the detail of which cannot be
foreseen. Whether it is matrix scoring or mapping, or the formation of women’s
savings groups, or any one of most if not all participatory methods or meth-
odologies, we find that active adaptive agents, interacting together within a few
common values, principles and rules, manifest behaviours and realities that are
both complex and unpredictable.

Pluralism: Eclectic, versatile and creative

These frames or theories combine to support and understand what is happen-

ing, the flowering and spread of a new eclectic, versatile and creative pluralism
based on principles and values found and expressed in behaviours, attitudes
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 177

and mindsets. These can include mutual respect, humility, listening, sensitivity,
courage, awareness, integrity, curiosity, playfulness, humour, originality, critical
reflection . . . They are qualities of good facilitators and innovators.
This eclectic pluralism is antithetical to exclusive branding and the ego of
ownership. It also extends the PRA principle of sharing without boundaries.
That originally was thought of as sharing freely the approaches and methods of
PRA. But now it applies to all methodologies. For a time there was a multiplicity
of brands, ownerships and associated egos. But as methodologies have continued
to proliferate, so the boundaries have become more porous and less significant.
Pervasively the spirit now is one of seeking, finding, borrowing, adopting,
adapting, cross-fertilizing and inventing. There is no territory, no ownership, no
copyright. Like Linux and Wikipedia there is open access, and anyone can use
and contribute. As a courtesy the originator of an idea, process or method may
be acknowledged. But in mixing, matching, adapting, inventing and creating
methodologies there are no intellectual property rights or patents. There are no
permissions to be sought.
That said, it is reasonable that those who have evolved a tradition which bears
a label can seek to minimize its misuse or abuse as it spreads. They may indicate
minimum empowering ground rules and sequences, and principles and values.
But when others adopt, adapt and use well what they have developed, instead of
resentment and dismay they should feel pride and pleasure. And this pride and
pleasure can be most fulfilling when they are not even known to have been the
source.
The case for eclectic pluralism has two foundations.
First, eclecticism is for flexibility, creativity, diversity, hybridization, and local
and contextual fit. A method or methodology may prove to be one-off, as with
the Dee Jupp examples above: opportunities for wider adaptation and use may
be lost; or it may be that what was tailor-made for a context and purpose was fit-
ting but not amenable to spread. However, the needs here are to share and spread
not just methodological innovations but more so the attitudes, behaviours and
mindsets that are vital to processes of innovation, and beyond that to multiply
innovators.
Second, pluralism contrasts with any methodological monoculture, like
sometimes that of questionnaires. The now defunct monoculture of the mech-
anistic Training and Visit system for agricultural extension (Benor and Harrison,
1977) contrasts with the creative pluralism of a project for innovations in rural
extension in Bangladesh which had 45 sub-projects, many of these with their
own methodology (van Mele et al, 2005). Paradigmatically, pluralism has to be
part of innovation systems (van Mele and Braun, 2005). Practically, for inquiry,
methodological pluralism, as in mixed methods approaches, contributes cross-
checking and triangulation and multiplies insights.
The combination of these in eclectic pluralism is an affirmation of the para-
digm of people and process. Creative, emergent and to a degree unpredictable,
it opens up almost infinite variation in modes of inquiry through adaptations,
mixes, inventions and improvisations of methods and approaches. When methods
and PMs are improvised anew to fit each context and purpose, the range of
178 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

potentials appears almost without limit. The scope for innovation and discovery
for any facilitator is unbounded. Resources of ideas and experiences are global
and increasingly shared and accessible; and the potentials and opportunities for
creativity are multiplying. Eclectic and creative pluralism should become a major
dimension of many modes of inquiry in the 21st century.

Potential to transform: PMs and their facilitation

as drivers for change
These theories link and support each other. Emergence and self-organizing
systems on the edge of chaos fit with the people paradigm of bottom–up logic,
empowerment and enhancing capabilities. Eclectic pluralism then offers new
versatility and scope, through the endless combinations and adaptations it
promises for local and social relevance. And the resulting participatory method-
ologies are about so much more than the inquiry with which this journey started.
For they facilitate transformations of power. They enable local people and lowers
generally to appraise and analyse the complexity and diversity of their realities.
And beyond that they can nurture critical awareness and action to transform
power and claim social justice. PMs can then be a fertile seedbed not only for
methodological innovation but also for social change.
Interventions to change a paradigm (Figure 9.1) can be with any of its comp-
onents – concepts; values and principles; methods, procedures and processes;
roles and behaviours; or relationships. Through critical self-awareness and
reflection, they can also start with mindsets, orientations and predispositions.
Figure 9.2 now takes us into another space and invites us to approach
from another direction, starting with participatory methodologies as drivers of
change.
Change can start in any circle and spread through the arrows, or it can start
with PMs.
Empirically, for any PM, the causal links of the diagram present an agenda of
questions, asking case by case to what extent and how it has or could influence
change. Reviewing the range of PMs described in this book, I find that all of
them entail approaches, methods and processes, all of them imply sharing and
influence relationships, and all of them affect behaviour, attitudes and mindsets,
and these in turn become part of professional, institutional and personal change.
The links are clearer and more marked with some PMs than others, and they
vary in the balance and strength of their drives and how these feed through into
the professional, institutional and personal domains. Stepping Stones, Reflect
and Star, for example, are strong in the field context on behaviour, attitudes,
mindsets, sharing, relationships and personal change but less so on professional
and institutional change. But they can also entail and generate changes that are
professional in terms of training and orientation and institutional in the norms of
supporting and implementing organizations.
The personal dimension is primary. Much has been written about the
dynamics of personal learning and change. Learning cycles are variously
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 179

PERSONAL

BEHAVIOURS
ATTITUDES
MINDSETS

PMs

METHODS RELATIONSHIPS

PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONAL

Figure 9.2 Participatory methodologies as drivers for change

expressed as sequences, for example action – experience – reflection – learning –

planning – action–reflection . . . and so on. In Figure 9.2 this experiential learning
takes place largely in the behaviours, attitudes and mindsets circle, but can then
extend into the others. All but the most transient and superficial PMs entail
experiential learning and change for those who facilitate or take part, the more
so when critical reflection is part of them: behaviours generate experiences and
relationships, which in turn influence orientations and perceptions. Facilitators
and participants often state that something has changed for them, and some
describe the effects as transformative. Some reflective practitioners say that their
family life is affected as well as their work.
At the core of PMs as potential drivers for change, is facilitation and the
orientation and the personality of the facilitator. ‘Asked who are the most
important persons in the development, spread and evolution of high-quality
PMs, without hesitating I will respond that it is the facilitator’ (Nandago, 2007,
p37). Facilitation can be a mode of interaction in almost every human relation-
ship and context. It is part of a participatory paradigm, feeding into and being
informed and itself transformed by the experiences of process. For professional,
180 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

institutional and personal change, PMs and facilitation appear potent points of
entry. The big question is whether on a large scale and over decades they could
be significantly transformative in our world.

Blocks to realizing potentials

Whatever the answer to that question, and whatever the participatory rhetoric,
the spread of PMs and facilitation faces formidable blocks. There is more than a
blind spot here; in some professions and organizations, it is more like a dark night
(though one may hope, just before a dawn). Blind spots and dark nights cry out
for explanation. With PMs, some of the reasons seem to be:

• Powerful people, especially economists in global and central organizations,

call the shots (Chapter 1) concerning methodology. They are known to expect
traditional and inappropriate ‘scientific’ and medical research designs, such as
the so-called ‘gold standard’ of randomized control trials. Others are obliged
and willing to accept grants and fees to feed them with fodder harvested and
prepared in familiar forms.
• Most faculties in universities, colleges and training institutes have been
socialized into and are trapped in top–down didactic modes of teaching.
For them to change would be challenging personally, professionally and in-
stitutionally, would require effort and imagination, and would entail risks to
career and so to income and family.
• Many have been trained and socialized into the ideas, values, methods,
behaviours, mindsets and relationships of the linear paradigm of things, and
regard these as the only forms of rigour.
• Top–down categories, language, mindsets and requirements impede in-
novation and the expression of local diversity and complexity. The logframe
is but one example of such a restraint (Wallace, 2006).
• Staff in funding agencies – governments, aid agencies, INGOs and founda-
tions – are only familiar with traditional methodologies and are neither willing
nor able to invest time in changing the approaches of those they fund. Nor
are they prepared or able to allow enough time and space for the development
and pilot testing of PMs. (Exceptions are mainly in South Asia, and with
some of the more imaginative, flexible and innovative bilateral funders,
such as Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), Swiss Agency
for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and foundations like Ford and
Rockefeller.)
• PMs are vulnerable to the withdrawal of funding, especially when they are
evaluated according to the norms of the things paradigm, as tragically hap-
pened with Stepping Stones in several African countries (Welbourn, 2007 and
pp95–96).
• Creative and eclectic consultant-facilitators are still relatively few.5 Many
of those who have the abilities are trapped in bureaucracies with other re-
sponsibilities. There is no training anywhere, to my knowledge, in how to be
creatively eclectic and inventive with PMs.
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 181

• Many innovations pass unnoticed. Consultants are not paid to disseminate

their innovations. Those who sponsor them rarely budget for dissemination.

Weighing the massive interacting inertia of these blocks, it is scarcely surprising

that PMs are not more widely recognized, promoted and adopted. At the same
time, the challenge is clear and the opportunity immense.
So the questions are: what have we learnt? And what should be done and by
whom?

Lessons of experience and ways forward

Looking back, lessons can be sought in the experiences with RRA, farmer first
and PRA. In all these cases establishing contacts and networks of innovators,
convening workshops and conferences, and publishing the outcomes contributed
to establishment and spread. Professional innovators marginalized in their own
institutions met others similarly isolated and drew comfort from their common
experience and the new collegiality of a marginalized minority. Later, publications
in prestigious (international, peer-reviewed) journals contributed to acceptance
and respectability.
With PMs these activities – networking, workshops and conferences, pub-
lications in prestigious journals, and collegiality among marginalized innovators
– are all needed and are taking place. Other key lessons of experience apply to
actors and organizations. Seven seem salient, each pointing to action:

1 The personal dimension: Innovators,

facilitators, disseminators
With PMs, the personal dimension is central. Multiplication, spread and quality
require innovators, disseminators and facilitators. Some people have ‘got it’: as
innovators and facilitators they are creative and sensitive; have an inner conviction
and confidence; enjoy taking risks; love new ideas; learn from being wrong; ever
try new things; and bounce back from failure full of new energy. Remembering
Dr Zeuss’s dictum that ‘Adults are obsolete children’, they are adults who can still
play like children.6 A good facilitator of Community-Led Total Sanitation should
be able to dance and sing7 (pers. comm. Kamal Kar). We need more such people
with the time, space, encouragement and daring to innovate and facilitate, and
champions to support them.
The scarcer resource is not funds but people. Innovators, disseminators and
facilitators may be different people. But perhaps an ideal is combinations in the
same person or group. Creative innovators are the rarest. The key is finding them,
helping them gain experience, and supporting them, and doing these on a larger
scale. Many are trapped in organizations and need to be liberated. We need many
more of those with the flair for PMs to be given more space by their organizations
or to be able to break out from them.
182 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

The shortage of innovators and facilitators is the major constraint on the

quality and scale of PMs. Innovators are needed but in fewer numbers than
facilitators. PRA training was all the rage in the first half of the 1990s. Some of
it, particularly by IIED and by Indian trainers who travelled to other countries,
was of very high quality, but much of it was poor, even execrable. More recently,
again and again, for example with Reflect, Stepping Stones, IPM and STAR,
the identification and selection, training, orientation, mentoring and support of
facilitators has been stressed as the key to quality (see e.g. Nandago, 2007).
The potential of training people in facilitation, and encouraging them to
practice it in everyday life, is at the early stages of being explored. The ILAC
(Institutional Learning and Change) initiative in the CGIAR (Consultative Group
for International Agricultural Research) has convened three-day workshops of
scientists and managers, conducted by Sam Kaner (see Kaner et al, 1996). Those
who have been through the experience have returned to their organizations with
new orientations and behaviours, leading, for example, to more democratic and
participatory conduct of meetings. The quality of this training may be exceptional,
but there may be seeds here of an approach which over years could, through many
pathways, help to transform power and relationships in many organizations.

2 Time and space for creativity

The past two decades have seen an accelerating proliferation of innovations

in methodology. Especially where these have sought to generate participatory
numbers, they have demanded weeks or months, not days, for puzzling,
experimenting, failing and succeeding, and trying out new ideas, sequences and
combinations, in a process of crafting a combination and sequence of methods
that seems to work. The participatory research on starter packs in Malawi took
three weeks for a team of three, testing, brainstorming, and trying different
methods and mixes, before they were able to evolve an adequate methodology
(pers.comm. Fiona Chambers). Anirudh Krishna took six months of trial and
error to develop the stages of progress methodology. For years, the problem of
comparability between communities with wealth ranking appeared insoluble,
and was only cracked in South Africa after much effort and numerous trials
(Hargreaves et al, 2007; Anton Simanowitz, pers. comm.). Reflect similarly went
through trials for many months, in three different countries. Alice Welbourn
(2007, p133) records that Stepping Stones took much longer to produce than
originally envisaged and than any normal organizational planning would allow.
Examples are legion.
These experiences show that time and space are needed for creativity if what
is done is to fit purpose and context. Lack of time and resources allowed by
sponsors and funders is one reason for the default knee-jerk of the questionnaire.
All too often, even now, there is too little time and no space to debate approach
and methods, and then for open-ended experimentation. Logframes, targets
and budgets needing to be spent compound the problem and constrain or stifle
creativity. The time allowed needs to be optimized. The relationship between
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 183

time and creativity can even be a U-shaped curve – high with little time, and high
with plenty. Dee Jupp has pointed out that as a consultant with a time-bound
contract she has been impelled to be extremely creative. Some pressure can
surely sometimes help. Creativity can be intense in a crucible of crisis. But this
depends on the eclecticism, creativity and confidence of the pioneer, the ambient
conditions, and the nature of the methodology. And methodologies evolved
under time pressure may be precisely those that do not spread, whereas those
that take longer do. For those that entail social change, and need to seed move-
ments, time and patience may always be needed, as was the case with Reflect
and Stepping Stones, both for evolving the core methodology, and for its local
evolution and adaptation.

3 Methodological diversity: Enriching the repertoire

For creators and facilitators part of this is simply enriching a personal reper-
toire. A good chef may specialize in the dishes of one region, country or culture.
An excellent chef will have a wider expertise. And the greatest of all will have
improvised and invented new dishes.8 Every meal, too, is for them a work of art
and even love. The analogy is too obvious to labour. But one difference may be
that a good creator and facilitator will take more risks, and expect more learning
from mistakes, than a cook; for what the facilitator is doing is more different
each time, and less under control. People in a process do not behave like cooking
ingredients on a stove.
For facilitators this implies a lifetime of learning, gaining skills and confid-
ence, trying different ways of doing things, searching for alternatives, and adding
continuously to the repertoire on which they draw. There are many sources, not
least colleagues and co-facilitators. The internet harbours amazing treasures, but
many facilitators are addicted to action and prefer that to searching.
One way to enrich the repertoire is to rediscover and revive from the past.
There are many elements in the heritage that can be adopted, adapted, mixed
and further evolved to fit current and future needs. Dogmatic rejection is also
itself to be rejected: for all eclectic pluralism is by definition inclusive and needs
to draw on past experience.

4 Funders9

Funders are crucial actors. They are powerful. They may mean well but repeatedly
they do damage in two ways.
The first is too much money in too short a time. For what is needed, there
may be no shortage of funds. The problem increasingly is too much money, too
few staff to be able dispense it sensitively in small packets, and too tight a time
frame. In development aid, this is part of the chronic pathology of bilateral and
multilateral agencies driven and driving hard in the wrong direction, increasing
disbursements and decreasing staff, all in the name of efficiency. It is difficult to
184 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

understand how so many intelligent people can be so stupid. Community-Led

Total Sanitation (Kar refs, pp96–97 and Box 9.2) in Bangladesh was not helped
by an excessive grant to an INGO which then had for years to focus its attention
on recruiting staff and gearing up to spend the money, when what was needed
was more immediate training, mentoring and support for facilitators.10
The second is conditions that come with the money. The creator of Stepping
Stones, Alice Welbourn, has written (2007, p131):

Increasingly donors expect us to define clearly in advance what all our outputs
and outcomes are going to be, and who the funding is or is not going to be spent
on. So there is no investment in creativity, there is no faith in us as creative
agents of change, nor in the people with whom we might work, as independent
thinkers who might come up with new good ideas themselves, based on their own
experiences, along the way.The set agenda which allows no room for exploration
or experimentation is stifling critical opportunities for learning.

Box 9.2 Transformative action by funding organizations

Kamal Kar, a freelance participatory facilitator, together with partners in

Bangladesh (VERC and Water Aid), evolved a participatory methodology known
as Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS).This turns much conventional wisdom
on its head, notably about subsidies for individual household toilets in rural areas,
and spends less for greater benefits to communities. Staff of the Water and
Sanitation Programme (WSP) of the World Bank recognized this, and sponsored
international visits of key decision-makers to Bangladesh, and of Dr Kar to India,
Pakistan, Indonesia and other countries to conduct training. These visits were
seminal for the international spread of CLTS. Without them, CLTS might have
been stillborn, or very limited and slow in its scope. The vision and commitment
of the WSP staff, and later of other organizations such as Plan International and
UNICEF, have been critical.

In contrast, some of the early activities in PRA were supported with funding
from the Aga Khan Foundation, ODA (DFID as it is now), the Ford Foundation,
NOVIB, SDC and SIDA (now Sida), among others. The grants were generous
but not on a scale that made it difficult to spend them reasonably well. And the
conditions were flexible: what was actually done never corresponded with what
it was thought at the outset would be done,11 and the funders understood and
appreciated this.
The potential contribution of funders is as great as the danger that they will
do damage. The questions and challenges are whether they can:
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 185

• recruit and support creators. These are often consultants

• make small enough grants over long enough periods
• be patient and allow enough time for PM development and piloting
• provide for support, experiential learning, mentoring and rewards for
facilitators
• make provision for writing up and dissemination

and, most difficult

• find and support organizations and processes that select, socialize and
support creators, facilitators and disseminators.

5 Transforming university and college teaching

Transforming the cultures and practices of universities and colleges is, in the
long term, the most important task. Mostly, they are deserts for methodological
innovation, which is little recognized as an academic activity;12 and van Mele and
Braun (2005, p153), reviewing innovations in agricultural extension, write: ‘It
is difficult to see how such innovations might have arisen in a research institute
or university, where staff advancement depends on academic publications.’ But
modes and styles of teaching are a more serious problem. As long as teaching is
didactic, those taught will be didactic in turn: they will be magnetized to carry
top–down teaching and instructing into their working lives and careers. The
overused but apposite metaphor is fishing babies from a river without going
upstream to stop the person who is throwing them in. Many, perhaps most,
perhaps at times almost all, lecturers and courses in universities are, through
their top–down teaching styles, throwing the babies in. I have heard it remarked
of students that ‘By the time they leave university the damage has been done.’
The PhD process can be the most harmful. Rehabilitating those who have been
disabled by the experiences of education is tackling the problem too late. We have
to go upstream and stop the harm at source.
Participatory learning has many manifestations. Despite this, higher educa-
tion faces severe obstacles: the embedded and entrenched habits of lecturing;
unwillingness to experiment; fear of being ridiculed by colleagues or marginalized
for promotion; the legacies of dead architects who built tiered auditoria which
inhibit or prevent discussion; sclerotic curricula; tight timetables; huge classes to
be lectured to, in one case at Makerere University in Uganda, 500 at a time; and
the embedded conservatism, too, of some students who prefer listening to (or
dozing through) lectures to proactively finding out for themselves.
Many participatory alternatives have been and are being evolved. There
are islands of innovation. In March 2007 a two week e-forum on teaching and
learning with large numbers harvested many alternatives, ideas and tips. This en-
courages the long-term hope that teaching and learning can be transformed, that
teachers will become much more coaches and facilitators, and that participatory
workshops13 will become more the mode of learning, with students learning by
186 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

talking, by teaching each other, and above all by experiencing. All of this points
towards our need to learn more about learning and changing.

6 Experiential learning, critical reflection

and brainstorming

One pathway is critical reflection. Repeatedly development professionals, whether

in aid agencies, agricultural research, NGOs or academia, talk of their need for
time to stop, think and reflect. In part this is an expression of the human con-
dition: there is never enough time. In part it is a symptom of lack of self-discipline
and personal organization. In part too it is often an indicator of addiction to
overwork and long hours. For all that, both subjectively and objectively, it is a real
need. Nor is it adequately provided for by most organizations.
At the personal level it needs critical reflection on one’s conditioning, mindset,
frames for making meaning, and predispositions. Beyond that it requires time and
openness. Koy Thompson (2008), reflecting on his immersion experience with a
family in northern Ghana, celebrates:

...doing nothing in order to unlearn. Why unlearn? Because unlearning is

a state of mind that encourages critical thinking and openness. Because to
unlearn, you have to drop your professional defences, the position of power you
have over other people by virtue of your money, knowledge, experience, and
status, and become vulnerable.

Professionally we are pointed towards teaching and learning. Our profes-

sions, professional bodies, universities and colleges do not run courses on
unlearning. Nor has anyone, to my knowledge, written a book on the unlearning
organization.
An exception, indeed an extreme one, is the Community Development
Resource Association (CDRA) in Cape Town which devotes one week in four
to review, reflection and planning. As a civil society support organization that
conducts workshops and training it is exceptional; and many would find such
an allocation of time excessive. But it is a discipline and an experience that has
enabled it to make outstanding contributions to development understanding and
practice, not least through its annual ‘reports’, which are really not reports at all
but insightful reflections.14
Another example is the practice, which may be on the increase, of staff of an
organization taking a week away together for guided reading and reflection.15 One
variant of this is the immersion, when development professionals are hosted by a
poor community and stay and live and experience with them quite often for some
three days and nights, preceded by orientation and followed by reflection.
Group immersions for brainstorming are a strange gap in development
practice. I refer here to a group of people dedicating a number of days together
totally to tackling a problem, opportunity or need and coming up with a creative
way forward. The only case that comes to mind led to the ALPS (Accountability,
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 187

Learning and Planning System) of ActionAid International (David and Mancini,

2004; David et al, 2006). Two attempts to reduce the burden of reporting in
ActionAid had failed. The Chief Executive gave six people, including the Chief
Finance Officer, five days to come up with a solution. They met in Harare. They
were undisturbed. The solution had to be radical. It was. It has evolved to become
integral not just to how AAI does its business and seeks to relate to partners, but
also to its culture and how it sees itself.
The wonder is that we, development professionals, do not do this more often.
Consider the following candidates for similar creative brainstorming that could
lead to proposed participatory procedures or programmes, and add your own
to the list:

• non-linear alternatives to the logframe

• more alternatives to questionnaires
• internalizing facilitation as a way of relating in an organization
• how to find people who ‘have got it’ with PMs, and support, encourage, train
and mentor them for eclectic and creative pluralism
• devising ways in which funding agencies could support the dissemination of
new participatory methodologies the creation of which they have sponsored
• participatory learning with large groups (e.g. 100 students).

Could five or six well-selected people spending a few days together in a retreat
mode on any of these subjects come up with proposals that would be as trans-
formative as ALPS was for ActionAid? And if they might why are we so poorly
organized that this is so rare as a practice?

7 Combinations and sequences: Personal, institutional

and professional
The listing above leaves out the crucial synergies and power of combinations and
sequences. So it is fitting to conclude with an example which should be a wave
of the future, inspiring and showing ways forward for many disciplines. This is
veterinary participatory epidemiology (PE) in East Africa (Catley, 2007). In the
mid-1990s participatory approaches and methods of RRA and PRA were widely
used in small-scale community-based livestock projects, but not by research
centres, veterinary schools or government veterinary services. By mid-2007 PE
was professionally accepted and substantially established and integrated into
these organizations and spreading to other countries and other applications such
as the surveillance of avian flu.
The strategy to institutionalize PE began with a survey to understand the
concerns of veterinarians working throughout Africa, and then efforts to address
these. A deliberate attempt was made to create a branch of RRA/PRA that vet-
erinarians could call their own. Studies to ‘play the numbers game’ explored and
established the validity and reliability of PE (Catley, 2007; Abebe et al, 2007).
188 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Complementarities were identified and exploited between PE and established

epidemiology; and publications were sought and gained in respected international
peer-reviewed journals. A key event was a two-week training course on PE for
national government epidemiologists and senior academic staff from veterinary
schools in seven East African countries with an initial focus on attitudes and
behaviour and including field-testing of PE methods face to face with livestock
keepers during the training. This was followed up with support to Masters
students in veterinary schools leading to Masters theses and publications. Over
time PE was evolved and adapted creatively and diversified into a range of impact
assessments and other applications.
The success of this strategy illustrates synergies of changes which are pers-
onal, professional and institutional. For these, participatory methodologies can
be a key point of entry. But on their own they are not a panacea. For them to
be transformative demands long-term engagement, sensitivity to professional
concerns, institutionalization in universities, research organizations and govern-
ment departments, and throughout and above all sustained and creative personal
commitment.
The story of participatory epidemiology in East Africa is not over. Many chal-
lenges remain. But enough has been achieved to encourage and inspire others
in other professions and disciplines, and in other countries, to evolve and use
participatory methodologies creatively as a means of personal, professional and
institutional transformation. It shows ways forward. The challenge is to make it
indeed a wave of the future.

Coda: Visionary realism

The journey of this book started with ‘us’, development professionals and our
modes of inquiry. It was we who investigated, visited, observed and analysed.
The path then took us through RRA, discovering better modes of inquiry,
and then to PRA and enabling local, and especially poor, people themselves to
appraise, analyse, plan and act. PRA became one of the inclusive PLA family of
participatory methodologies. We have seen that PMs and their facilitation have
been evolved and applied in innumerable human contexts, demonstrating an
extraordinary versatility. And now these are more than ever part of the common
melting pot in which methods and approaches mix and merge and from which
methodologies are created. The journey has been from extractive inquiry to
empowerment, from owned and branded methodologies to open access and
eclectic pluralism.
This has also been a journey into a new paradigm. Three decades ago elements
of it were there, but inchoate. Now they cohere. There is congruence between the
professional, the institutional and the personal: the professional shift of methods,
values and behaviours from those of things, rules and top–down planning to those
of people, principles and bottom–up participation; the institutional shift from
confining controls to empowering supports, making space for creative diversity;
and the personal change from regulator and controller to coach and facilitator.
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 189

Central to these transformations are combinations of personal reflexivity and

institutional change. Changes in institutions, especially in organizational norms,
values, procedures, rewards and relationships, complement personal change
and vice versa. Congruence between the personal and the institutional is a
predisposing condition for participatory processes in groups and communities,
and for the continuous discovery together of ways of doing things which fit local
contexts. And, as I have argued, participatory methodologies are themselves
seminal points of entry for good change.
The new paradigm informs and resonates with an immanent ideology and
a new professionalism. At the core are principles and commitments to equity,
respect, diversity, human rights and changing power relations. Who finds out,
who learns, who is empowered are again and again local people and whoever are
‘lowers’. We now know that their knowledge, capabilities and potentials usually
exceed their own expectations and those of others. We are driven then to turn-
ing on their heads the normal mindsets, methods, behaviours and attitudes of
professionals and those with power.
The potentials are awesome. If PMs can change power and power relations;
if they can apply in almost every domain; if the potential for their invention and
use is greater than ever; if they can improve gender and other social relations; if
their use is often fulfilling and fun, and adds spice and quality to the experience of
living and being – if these are realities, what then are the limits to the changes they
can spark and support? Introduced and evolved more and more in all domains
of human relationships – teaching and learning, government, NGO and other
organizations and their management and procedures, families, religious practices,
the private sector, international relations and meetings, political processes, how
we bring up children . . . can participatory methodologies, and facilitation as a way
of being and relating, be drivers for deep and lasting change, transforming our
world for the better, not just now but over decades and centuries to come?
The journey enters new territory. As long as there is a human race and
organized society, adventures of inquiry, of empowering others and of eclectic
and creative pluralism, will continue. PMs for inquiry, revealing realities and
generating insights, will always be a frontier for innovation. But the challenge is
far more than this. It is for PMs and facilitation to go beyond inquiry, to be an
entry point and means to transform power and relationships, and so our world.
For those who wish and are willing, the scope is boundless. The opportunities
presented by PMs will for ever open up. The exhilaration, fun and fulfilment of
innovation and change for the better should never end.

Notes
1 Let me recommend Dee Jupp’s (2007) contribution ‘Keeping the art of part-
icipation bubbling: Some reflections on what stimulates creativity in using
participatory methods’ in Brock and Pettit (eds) Springs of Participation,
pp107–122 for evidence and ideas which support much of the argument of
this chapter.
190 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

2 For fuller explication of the things and people paradigms and the shift
between them see Chambers (1997), pp36–38.
3 Ramalingam et al (2008) is a useful and comprehensive review of potential
implications of complexity science for development and humanitarian
work. That paper has contributed to these paragraphs. Among the concepts
the authors present and analyse are: system characteristics and behaviours
emerging from simple rules of interaction; non-linearity; attractors; chaos
and the edge of chaos; adaptive agents; self-organization; and co-evolution.
4 Irene Guijt’s (2008) book Seeking Surprise breaks new ground in rethinking
monitoring and argues for transforming its ‘DNA’. Elements in this include
messy partnerships as collective cognitive agents, distributed cognition,
sense-making and cognitive dissonance or ‘surprise’. Guijt argues that it is
through the new configurations of messy partnerships and other types of
alliances that institutional transformation must increasingly unfold.
5 However, I can think of half a dozen of the most creative who left their
organizations in order to devote themselves to participatory approaches and
methods full time.
6 Children learn fast – they make and correct mistakes. They fall down again
and again but rarely hurt themselves badly. Adults have further to fall and
often hurt themselves when they do. Do we need to be closer to the ground
and more adventurous, and risk falling more often?
7 It is foolhardy to quote this, lest it be used against me. Dancing is fine, but
I dread those international parties where everyone is more or less forced to
sing a song. We are all different and all have a basic human right (which I
exercise on such occasions) not to participate.
8 The highly successful New York restaurateur Danny Meyer ‘wants the
kitchens of his restaurants to be scenes of rampant and collegial improvisa-
tion . . . Cardoz [one of the chefs] often works without recipes, wielding some
twenty-one different spices. “I just play”, he has said of his approach to
creating dishes’ (Abrahamson and Freedman, 2006, p195).
9 For a fuller statement see Chambers (2007) ‘Creating, evolving and sup-
porting participatory methodologies: Lessons for funders and innovators’,
in Brock and Pettit (eds) Springs of Participation, pp177–189. This includes
practical advice.
10 When it was clear that CLTS had huge potential, a bilateral agency sent out
a mission. When I learnt that it was proposing a grant of £3 million, I pro-
tested that that was far too much. The mission returned with proposals for
£17.5 million. It is simply very difficult, I think, for those who work in these
agencies to recognize the disservice they do to participatory approaches and
methodologies by either throwing too much money at them, or failing to give
consistent support at much lower levels.
11 For example, I was astonished to see that in my proposal to AKF, DFID
and the Ford Foundation for two years in India 1989–91, a major part of
my work was to concern agricultural research! But what was exciting and
important was the way people, especially in Indian NGOs, were pioneering
PRA, and that was where I concentrated. There was never a murmur from
 Participatory Methodologies: Drivers for Change 191

my sponsors. In later budgets I included a substantial item for ‘Unanticipated

opportunities’. Again and again, this proved invaluable. To give a recent
example, it allowed the Participation Group at IDS to engage with and
support Community-Led Total Sanitation in its early, and unforeseen, days.
Could 10 or 20 per cent of a budget be accommodated for ‘Unanticipated
opportunities’ in a logframe? Why not? But the tightening conditions of
donors are diminishing, not enhancing, the impact they are so keen to have
measured.
12 I know I should not, but I cannot restrain myself from mentioning my own
experience. In 1988 I argued in an IDS retreat that we should exploit our
comparative advantage in methodological innovation. Not a single one of my
colleagues even commented. Admittedly it was hot at the end of a hard day,
and the bar was opening, but all the same . . .
13 See for example Chambers (2002).
14 The annual reports of CDRA are posted at www.cdra.org.za
15 Research institutions rarely have residential facilities for groups of visitors
to come on retreats. Yet for the partnerships and relationships of the 21st
century, these would provide wonderful opportunities for interaction and
mutual learning and understanding. The Institute of Development Studies,
Sussex, at the time of writing, alone among development studies centres in
the UK, does have accommodation and the opportunity to convert this into
a specially designed retreat centre.
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 Index

Absalom, E 87 Babbage, Charles 105

accuracy 71, 73, 76, 88, 100, 107–108, Ban Ki-Moon 45
125, 127, 139 Bandara, Madduma 69
proportionate 74, 79 Bangladesh
ActionAid 42, 62, 113, 115, 121, 127, 161, CLTS 96, 97, 122, 184
169, 186–187 fuel costs 33
Adams, Adrian 31 home gardens 55, 58
Afghanistan 48n14, 112, 165n8, 166n11 matrix scoring 112, 123
Aga Khan Rural Support Programme 55, participatory mapping 136, 137, 138
89, 103n5, 135, 184 Participatory Poverty Assessments 114,
agriculture 126, 171
complexity and diversity 50–52 Reflect 95, 123, 175
farmers’ experiments 58 seasonal bias 44
farmers’ participation 60, 61 showpieces 34, 43
farmers cf scientists 58–59, 153–154 team reality checks 159
indigenous knowledge 75, 80 Barahona, Carlos 21, 105, 123, 127, 130
mapping See mapping beggars 43
microenvironments See behaviour See attitudes and behaviour
microenvironments biases
PRA See Participatory Rural Appraisal active, present and living biases 36
(PRA) airport bias 42
research misfits 55–56 diplomatic bias 38, 44–45, 157
RRA See Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) elite bias 35–36
sequential creation 54 field visits 50–51
subsidies 152 male bias 36, 54, 93
transfer of technology 49–50, 60 microenvironments 61
trial and research sites 50, 54 offsetting 74, 79, 82, 156–158
unimportant crops 54–55 person bias 35, 44, 157
urban agriculture 62 poverty bias 45
agroecosystem analysis 88, 135 poverty perception 25, 26, 31–39, 79
ALPS 169, 186–187 professional biases 38–39, 45, 157
ANANDI 96 project bias 33–35, 43–44
ants 174 roadside bias 31–33, 43
Appreciative Inquiry 169–170 seasonal bias 36–38, 44, 157
Archer, David 95 security bias 45–46, 157
Ashe, J. 38 spatial biases 31–33, 42–43, 61, 157, 164
attitudes and behaviour 86–87, 98, tarmac and roadside bias 31–33
146–147, 154, 178–179 urban bias 7, 26–29, 31, 33, 41, 46, 52,
Australia, Aborigines 134 154–155, 156
awareness 60 user and adopter bias 36
224 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Biggs, S. 94 danger, exposure to 163–164

Blackberry 156 Dawodu, A. 18
blindness 51–52, 63 democracy of the ground 100
Bolivia 115 Descartes, René 142
Booth, David 128 Devavaram, John 90, 126
Borrini-Feyerabend, G. 143 development professionals
Boserup, Ester 57 awareness 60
Botswana 75 biases See biases
bottom-up logic 174–175 blindness 51–52, 63
brainstorming 186–187 ethics 147–148, 163–164
Braun, A. R. 184–185 field visits 50–51
Brazil 31, 62, 142, 146 learning 152, 159–163, 186–188
Burkina Faso 57–58 observation 60, 64–65, 76–77
organization of visits 157–158
cadastral maps 143 overnight stays 160–161
Callaghan, James 48n11 personal dimension 156, 181–182
Cambodia 97, 146 short-time horizons 51
Campbell, G. J. 10–11 simplified view of livelihoods 52
capital city trap 154–155 transport 157
Carruthers, Ian 26, 78 traps 152–153, 154–156
Catal Huyuk 134 visionary realism 188–189
causality 16–19, 79, 153 Devitt, Paul 35
cavalcades 47n5 DFID (ODA) 184, 190n11
Cawthorne, Tobias 48n17 digital trap 155–156
CDRA 186, 191n14 Dilts, Russ 94
centralizing 49, 50 dinosaurs 1–3, 115, 153, 168
CGIAR 61, 114, 182 diplomatic bias 38, 44–45, 157
Chambers, Fiona 182 Doyle, Arthur Conan 16, 49
children Dreze, Jean 13, 48n16
birth weight 75 drought 126
learning by 190n6 Dubois, Marc 121
neglected activities 52
China 117–118, 125 eclecticism See pluralism 177
Chinnappa, Nanjamma 42 economists 6, 15–16, 153
Chung, K. 127 edge effects 64
CIRAC 122–123 Egerton University 88
Clark University 88 Egypt, street children 163
Cobbett, William 43 Eisenhower, Dwight 47n9
Colbert, E.H. 1 El Salvador 95, 175, 176
Collinson, Michael 70–71 elite bias 35–36
Colombia 114, 126, 137 Ellman, A. 78
Community-Led Total Sanitation emergence 174–176
(CLTS) 96–97, 111, 122, 137, 184, empowerment See power 95–96, 99–100,
185, 191n11 102, 122–124, 127, 138–139, 141–149,
complexity 18, 19, 21, 50–52, 55–56, 62, 164, 176
88, 105, 153–154, 174–176 Epstein, Scarlett 26
Conlin, S. 77 Eritrea, participatory mapping 143,
Conroy, C. 139–141 144–145
consultants 14, 155 ethics 142, 146–148, 163–164
Conway, Gordon 79 Ethiopia
Cooke, B. 91 animal health 120
Cornwall, Andrea 141–142 insecurity of tenure 59
creativity 58–59, 168, 175, 182–183 microenvironments 55, 59, 61
 Index 225

participatory mapping 141–142 Guijt, Irene 190n4

participatory surveys 110, 117, 120 Guinea 83n9, 159
PRA 90 Gupta, Anil 55, 58, 63
remote areas 157
roadside bias 43 Hadjipateras, A. 95–96
showpiece 34 Harriss, Barbara 42, 68
surveys 15 Harriss, John 34, 42, 68, 69–70
expectations 163 Hart, Judith 48n11
Exposure and Dialogue Programme 160, Hatch, John 77
166n12 Henevald, Edward 32
Hildebrand, Peter 76
fabricata 9–11, 15, 23n10 Hildebrand’s sondeo 76
facilitators 142, 146–147, 175–176, 178, Hirschmann, David 45, 158
179–180, 181–184 HIV/AIDS 95, 161
family planning 10–11 home gardens 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62
Farmer, Benny 25, 68 Honadle, G. 77
Farmer First 50 135, 181 housing indicator 75
farmer participatory research 93–94, 154, Hulme, David 42
169 Huxley, Thomas Henry 11
Feuerstein, Marie Therese 83n8
field visits 50–51 ICRISAT 50, 54, 116
focus groups 113, 114–115, 129, 171 ILAC 182
Ford Foundation 103n5, 180, 184, 190n11 immersions 159, 160–161, 166n12,
Fox, Jefferson 143 186–187
Francis, Sheelu 90, 126 India
Freire, Paulo 89, 94 airport bias 42
fuel costs 33 CLTS 97
fun 9, 14, 24n17, 132n8, 134, 152, 156–158, domestic violence 126
189 experiences 68, 69–70
funders 91, 180, 183–184, 185, 190n9 farming innovation 154
fuel costs 33
Galbraith, John Kenneth 47n9 group interviews 78
Gambia, PRA 89 Harijan colonies 32
Gandhi, Rajiv 157 health risks 46
gender IADP 34
Internal Learning System 96 ILS 96, 100, 122
male bias 36, 47, 54, 93 Integrated Rural Development
microenvironments and 54, 61–62 Programme 13
participatory mapping and 141–142 matrix scoring 112
PRA and 93 microenvironments 55, 56, 57, 59
relations 189 monsoons 36
violence 164 National Council for Applied Economic
visiting groups and 158 Research 4
women’s neglected activities 52 National Sample Survey 12, 128
Germany, roof gardens 62 participatory mapping 135, 136, 137,
Ghana 64, 165n4 138
Gill, Gerry 3, 9 participatory research 115, 118, 125,
Grandin, Barbara 116 126
Greenland 134 PRA 89, 90
Groundnut Scheme 75 roadside bias 31–32, 33
group interviews 77–78 rural development tourism 47n9
group-visual synergy 85, 99–100, 125 rural poverty 31, 40, 43, 44
Guatemala 114 seasonal bias 44
226 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

SEWA 161 Kar, Kamal 90, 96, 181, 185

showpieces 34, 43, 48n11 Kenya
soil lifting 63 farm mapping 137
soil maps 54 field visits 51
surveys 2–3, 9–10, 12, 13, 15 group interviews 77
Unheard Voices 161 microenvironments 57
indigenous technical knowledge 51, 75, 78, minilivestock 62
80, 82, 135 participatory mapping 135, 142
Indonesia participatory poverty assessment 114
CLTS 97 poverty bias 45
home gardens 57, 61 PRA 88
integrated pest management 94 roadside bias 32, 43
participatory mapping 146 rural poverty 31, 40
roadside bias 32 security of tenure 59
rural development tourism 47n5 showpieces 34, 48n10
innovation 58, 88–89, 150n6, 170, 177, stages of progress method 118
181–182, 189 surveys 2–3, 13, 16
Institute of Development Studies 191n15, urban bias 46
191n12 wealth ranking 115
Integrated Pest Management 94, 182 key indicators 75–76
Internal Learning System 70, 96, 122 key informants 77
International Food Policy Research Keynes, John Maynard 151
Centre 114, 116 Kipling, Rudyard 82
International HIV/AIDS Alliance 102 Kothari, U. 91
International Institute for Environment and Krishna, Anirudh 15, 118, 130, 182
Development 88 Kuhn, Thomas 167
International Rice Research Institute 64 Kumar, Prem 90, 136
interpretation of information 158 Kumar, Somesh 90
interviews
group interviews 77–78 Ladejinsky, W. 77–78
guided interviews 78 Laos 121
semi-structured 88 Laulanié, Father Henri de 64
Inuit 134 learning
investigator effects 3–4 brainstorming 186–187
Irvine, Renwick 155 case for 152
cycles 179
Jamaica 114, 134, 163–164 ethics 163–164
Jamieson, Neil 79 experiential learning 64–65, 95, 97,
Jayakaran, Ravi 90 186–187
Johnson, Lyndon 47n9, 156 face to face 159–163
Johnson, Steven 174 indigenous technical knowledge 75
Jordan 65n4 liberation 162–163
Joseph, Sam 90, 136 life stories 161–162
journalists 26, 29, 30, 45 lifetime learning 183
Juma, Calestous 58 listening 74, 161–162
Jupp, Dee 159–160, 167, 171, 177 negotiated 169
overnight stays 160–161
Kalahari 32, 134 participatory learning 185
Kalton, G. 17 RRA 74
Kanbur, Ravi 107 team reality checks 159
Kaner, Sam 182 total participatory research 159–160
Kanina, Wangui 48n17 Leonard, David 40
 Index 227

Levy, Sarah 105, 123, 124, 127, 130, 171 indigenous cartographies 134, 143
Lewis, John P. 47n3 media and processes 139–141
liberation 162–163 ownership 148
Liberia 32 participants 147–148
life stories 161–162 participatory GIS 97, 100, 138–141
LINUX 177 pluralism 149
listening 74, 161–162 power and 141–147
livelihoods 52 PRA 87, 99–100, 133
living bias 36 professionals’ attitudes 146–147
Living Standards Measurement social and census maps 111, 137
Surveys 12–13, 128 soil maps 54
living standards measurement surveys Mars, Zoe 103n14
12–13 Marshall Islands 134
local researchers 76 Mascarenhas, Jimmy 90–91, 136
logframe 174, 187, 190n11 matrix scoring 87, 90, 91, 104, 111, 112,
Longhurst, Richard 26 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133–134,
143, 145, 153, 175
McCracken, Jenny 90 Maurya, D. M. 94
McIlwaine, Cathy 114, 126 Mayoux, Linda 96, 108, 122
Madagascar 64, 83n9, 159 men, See gender
Madden, Frances 134 Mexico 59
Makerere Institute of Social Research 21–22 Meyer, Danny 190n8
Malawi microenvironments
census 13, 123, 126 1990s action 59–60
food security 116–117 adaptability 58
national statistics 119 biases 61
participatory methodologies 171, 182 concentration 56
participatory numbers 106, 113, 123, destruction 60–61
126, 128 disgusting practices 63
showpiece 34 diversity and complexity 56–57
spatial bias 164 examples 53
Starter Pack Study 126, 129, 182 farmers cf. scientists 58–59
surveys 18, 21, 113 gender bias 54
Targeted Inputs Programme 116–117 innovation 58
Malaysia 34, 143, 146 meaning 53
male bias 36, 54, 93 minilivestock 62
Mali 61 misfit with normal research 55–56
Malla, Yam 136 nutrition and health 57
Manandhar, D. S. 18 properties 56–58
Mander, Harsh 161 protection 56
manuals 91, 175 research station conditions and 54
mapping reserves 57
3-D modelling 139 restraining migration 57–58
applications and uses of participatory sequential creation 54
mapping 137–138 significance 62
conventional maps 142–143 small and dispersed 54
counter maps 143–147 specialization 56
ethics 147–148 unimportant crops 54–55
facilitation 146–147 unobserved 49–50, 52–56
ground and paper mapping 136 urban agriculture 62
history of participatory mapping migration 57–58
134–136 Millennium Development Goals 124
228 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Miller, V. 164 Pacey, Arnold 82n2

minilivestock 62 Pachauri, Saroj 57
Mollison, Bill 62 Pakistan 86, 97, 115
monsoons 37 Paoletti, Maurizio 62
Moore, M. P. 32, 40–41 paradigms 2, 12, 21–22, 49, 60, 79, 102,
Moris, Jon 2 171–174, 188–189
Morrow, A. L. 18 Paris Declaration 165n3, 165n5
Moser, Caroline 17, 114, 126 Participative Inquiry and Practice 170
Most Significant Change 169 Participatory Action Learning System
Mozambique 95, 123 (PALS) 96, 122
MYRADA 55, 136, 176 Participatory Appraisal of Competitive
Advantage 169
Nandago, M. 179 participatory democracy 170
Narayan, Deepa 114 participatory epidemiology 187–188
natural resource management 43, 92, 121, participatory GIS 97, 100, 138–141
137 Participatory Human Rights Assessment 171
neo-liberalism 152 Participatory Impact Assessments 120
Nepal Participatory Learning and Action (PLA)
participatory mapping 136 evolution 86, 88–89
participatory monitoring and principles 97–101
evaluation 121 participatory mapping See mapping
participatory surveys 113, 127 participatory methodologies
Reflect 101 blocks 180–181
rural poverty 31 bottom-up logic 174–175
surveys 10–11, 18–20 creativity 182–183
NESA 96, 122 diversity and pluralism 169–171,
Newman, Kate 95 177–178, 183
NGOs drivers for change 178–180
as blocks to potentials 180 fundamentalisms 169
PRA 89, 91 innovation 170, 181–182
project bias 34, 43–44 lessons of experience 181–188
Reflect 95 list 169–170
spatial bias 42 paradigms 172–174
urban trap 28–29 self-organizing systems 174–176
wealth-ranking 102, 115–116 theory 171–178
Niger 134–135 visionary realism 188–189
Non Chi Ning 134 participatory monitoring and
Noponen, Helzi 96, 122 evaluation 120–122, 138
Nottingham University 47n8 participatory numbers
NOVIB 184 activities 111
aggregation from focus groups 114–115
observation 51–52, 60, 64–65, 76–77 alternatives to questionnaires 127–128,
OECD 156 153–154
Okali, C. 153 applications 111
open access 177 benefits 124–127
Open Space 169, 176 commensurability 116–118
opportunism in research 25–26, 68–70 comparative research mode 110, 112
optimal ignorance 74 emergence 106
Osner, Karl 160 empowerment 120–124
outcome mapping 169 future 129–131
out-datedness 11, 151–153 individual generation 109
overnight visits 160–161 insight into sensitive subjects 125–126
 Index 229

local generation 110 principles 97–101

meaning 106 rigour 97–100, 103n12, 104n16
methodological challenges 128–129 sharing without boundaries 85, 87–88,
methods 111–112 101
modes of generation 109–110 spread 91–93
monitoring and evaluation 120–122, 138 theory 97–101
national statistics 119 Uganda 21–22
participatory approaches 110 visuals 100, 103n2, 104n1
Participatory Impact Assessments 120 Participatory Technology
Participatory Poverty Index Development 169
(China) 117–118 Participatory video 169
participatory statistics 122–124 Participatory Vulnerability Analysis 169
policy insights 126 participatory workshops 170–171
political influence 123–124, 126 personal dimension 102, 156, 179,
power and learning 127 181–182, 188
reversals 127 Peru 118
social and census maps 111 Pettit, Jethro 97, 171
standardization 110, 128–129 Philippines 75, 123, 133, 146
surveys 113–114 Phnuyal, Bimal 101, 176
validity and reliability 125 photography 147
wealth ranking and well-being grouping Plan International 115–116
115–118 Planning for Real 169
Participatory Poverty Assessments 169, plant indicators 75
171 pluralism
participatory research 88, 93–94, 154, creative pluralism 89, 177–178
159–160, 171, 182 eclectic 70, 82, 177–178, 187
Participatory Research and Gender Analysis mapping 149
(PRGA) 94 methodologies 169–171, 177–178, 183
Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Participatory Rural Appraisal 101
applications 92, 93 Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) 74, 80
bad practice 91 politeness 38
behaviour and attitudes 87, 98 poverty
beyond PRA 101–102 See also rural poverty
criticisms 91–93 comparisons 116–118
democracy of the ground 100 indicators 75
diagrams 87, 88, 90, 99–100 life stories 161–162
diversity 85 participatory poverty assessments
elements 85, 86–88 114–115
evolution 88–89, 129–130 perception biases 25, 26, 31–39, 79
experience 89–91 rural development tourism 25–26
fundamentalists 169 unperceived rural poverty 26–41
group-visual synergy 85, 99–100 poverty bias 45
male bias 93 power 15, 49, 127, 133, 138, 189
maps 87, 99–100, 133 as blocks to potential 180
meaning 85 mapping and 141–147
methods 86–87, 99–100 paradox 164–165
mindsets 98 to empower 176
parallel streams 93–97 Pradan 96, 122
participatory numbers 100 preference ranking 112
pluralism and diversity 101 presence bias 36
practice 86–97 Pretty, Jules 125
precursors 80–81 professional biases 38–39, 45, 157
230 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

professionalism, pro-poor 152, 164–165 evolution 79–81

public relations 34–35 existing information 74
experience 68–70
quantitative approaches flexibility 80
See also participatory numbers group interviews 77–78
alternative statistics 123 guided interviews 78
benefits 107 Hildebrand method 76
hegemony of statisticians 73 inderdisciplinary approach 80
national statistics 119 key informants 77
qualitative and quantitative learning indigenous technical
approaches 14–15, 106–109 knowledge 75, 80
questionnaire surveys local researchers 76
alternatives to 15, 16, 21, 106, 127–128, origins 70–71, 129–130
153–154, 187 participatory rural appraisal and 80–81
complexity and participation 19–22 principles 74, 80
computer processing 7, 14 rationale 71–74
consultants and 14 relevance 71–72
continued demand for 13–16 sources 81
convergence on 5–6 team reality checks 159
developed cf developing countries 10 techniques 74–78, 82
experiences 2–4, 12, 16 terminology 81
fabricated data 8, 9–11 using key indicators 75–76
family planning example 10–11 Reading University 119, 130
improvements 13–15 realism 188–189
investigator effects 3–4, 9–10, 11 Reddy, Dr 42
large-scale multi-subject 1–22 Reflect 94–95, 101, 122–123, 137, 175,
large-scale time series surveys 12–13 178–179, 182
Living Standards Measurement reflection, critical 95, 157, 186–187, 189
Surveys 12–13, 128 research, conventional scientific 16–19,
mixed methodology 14–15 153–154
rationale 5 research misfits 55–56
report writing 8 research sites 50, 54
researcher pressure 4, 8 rhetorical space 158
shortcomings 3–11 Rhoades, Robert 134
survey slavery 6–9 rice cultivation 63–64, 154
time pressures 13–14 Richards, Paul 55, 58, 83n8
top-down reductionism 12 Rocheleau, D. E. 133, 141, 142–143
trap 153–154 Rockefeller Foundation 180
types 12–13 rural development tourism 25–26, 29–31,
university tenure and 13–14 72, 74, 156
urban bias 5, 7, 52 rural poverty
World Bank and 15–16, 18 active, present and living bias 36
diplomatic bias 38, 44–45, 157
Ramalingam, B. 190n3 elite bias 35–36
Rambaldi, Giacomo 133, 138–139 male bias 36, 54, 93
Ramachandran, Vidya 90 perception biases 26, 31–46
Randomized Control Trials 17–19, 174 person bias 35, 44, 157
Rapid Assessment Procedures 81 poverty bias 45
Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) professional biases 38–39, 45, 157
aerial surveys 78 project bias 33–35, 43–44
dangers 79 rural development tourism 25, 26, 29–31
direct observation 76–77 seasonal bias 36–38, 44, 157, 164
 Index 231

security bias 45–46, 157 Srinivas, M. N. 5

spatial biases 31–33, 42–43, 61, 157, 164 Ssennyonga, Joseph 32
tarmac and roadside bias 31–33, 43 STAR 178–179, 182
unperceived 39–41 statisticians 6, 21–22, 153
urban bias 31, 33, 46, 52, 154–155, 156 statistics 8, 105, 122–124
urban research trap 26–29 Statistical Services Centre, Reading
user and adopter bias 36 University 119, 131
Rwanda 113–114, 146, 155 Stepping Stones 95–96, 178–179, 180,
182, 184
San 134 stereotypes 52
SARAR 114 structural adjustment 152, 161
Save the Children Fund 113, 126 Sudan 34, 38, 57, 90, 135
Savedoff, William 167 Sumberg, J. 153
Scoones, Ian 61 surveys
Scotland 65n2 See also questionnaire surveys
Scott, James 13, 143 aerial surveys 78
SDC 159–160, 180, 184 participatory surveys 113–114
seasonal bias 36–38, 44, 157 rural surveys 73
seasonal diagramming 133–134 Sustainable Agriculture Programme 88
security of tenure 59 Swift, Jeremy 134
self-organizing systems 174–176 System of Rice Intensification 63–64,
semi-structured interviewing 78 66n10, 154
Senegal 31
serendipity 14, 79, 153 Tanzania
Shah, Anil 90, 166n10 participatory mapping 137
Shah, Meera Kaul 90, 153 participatory poverty assessment 114
Shah, Parmesh 90 participatory research 159–160,
sharing 85, 87–88, 101, 177 171
Sharp, Kay 110, 117 refugees 31
showpieces 34 RRAs 83n9
Sida 159, 161, 180, 184 showpieces 34
Sierra Leone 142 team interaction 159
silt deposition fields 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, Taylor, Peter 171
59 teaching 184–186
slime moulds 174 team reality checks 159
social anthropologists 9, 11, 27, 33, 36, 41, teamwork 76, 80, 82
68, 69, 70, 72–73, 73, 88, 106, 134 Thailand 79, 115, 146
soil colour 75 theatre 169
soil sciences 63 Thomas, A. 26
Somalia 121, 171 Thomas, Tom 42
SOSOTEC 176 Thomson, Koy 64, 186
South Africa 12, 62, 116, 137, 186 Thornton, Alec 62
spatial information technologies 138–141, time 163
143 timidity 38
specialization 39, 41 Tinsley, Douglas 47n5
Spielberg, Stephen 1 Training and Visit System 83
Sri Lanka transect walks 63, 78, 88
experiences 68, 69 transfer of technology 49–50
participatory research 115 transport 157
roadside bias 32, 33 traps 152–153, 154–156
rural poverty 40–41 triangulation 80, 99, 177
surveys 2–3, 13 Turnbull, David 134
232 Revolutions in Development Inquiry

Uganda wealth-ranking 87, 102, 105, 115–118,

active bias 36 134, 182
Makerere University 185 Welbourn, Alice 95, 142, 184
National Household Survey 119 Wickremesinghe, G. 32, 40–41, 69
PALS 96 Wikipedia 177
participatory numbers 112, 119 Wilken, Gene 54
Reflect 95, 175 Wilson, Ken 51
stages of progress method 118 Witcombe, J. R. 94
Stepping Stones 95 Wolfensohn, James 161
surveys 21–22 women See gender
UNHCR 159 workshops 155, 176
United Kingdom World Bank
development aid 156 assessment overload 165n5
DFID 14 dogmas 152
matrix scoring 112 senior managers programme 161
microenvironments 65n3 spatial bias 42–43
Overseas Development staff health risks 46
Administration 103n5, 184 structural adjustment 152, 161
United Nations, staff health risks 46, surveys 4, 12, 15–16, 18
155 Water and Sanitation Programme 185
universities 180, 184–186 World Development Report 114–115
university tenure 13–14 WorldVision 135
updatedness 11, 151–153
Uphoff, Norman 64 Yemen 97
urban trap 26–28, 26–29, 54–56
Zaire 76
Vaill, Peter 167 Zambia
Van Mele, P. 184–185 fuel costs 33, 47n8
VeneKlasen, L. 164 matrix scoring 112
Venn diagramming 133–134 microenvironments 54
Veterinary Participatory Epidemiology 125, participatory surveys 113, 126
127, 131, 187–188 rural poverty 31
visionary realism 188–189 Zimbabwe
visit organizing 157–158 agronomists’ blindness 51
Voices of the Poor 114–115 microenvironments 54, 57, 61
participatory mapping 142
Wallace, Tina 95 participatory surveys 113
water management 69 PRA 91