Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is an approach used by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other agencies involved in international development. The approach aims to incorporate the knowledge and opinions of rural people in the planning and management of development projects and programmes.
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The roots of PRA techniques can be traced to the activist adult education methods of Paulo Freire and the study clubs of the Antigonish Movement. In this view, an actively involved and empowered local population is essential to successful rural community development. Robert Chambers, a key exponent of PRA, argues that the approach owes much to "the Freirian theme, that poor and exploited people can and should be enabled to analyze their own reality."[1]
By the early 1980s, there was growing dissatisfaction among development experts with both the reductionism of formal surveys, and the biases of typical field visits. In 1983, Robert Chambers, a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (UK), used the term Rapid Rural Appraisal to describe techniques that could bring about a 'reversal of learning' [2]. Two years later, the first international conference to share experiences relating to RRA was held in Thailand [3]. This was followed by a rapid growth in the development of methods that involved rural people in examining their own problems, setting their own goals, and monitoring their own achievements. By the mid 1990’s, the term RRA had been replaced by a number of other terms including ‘Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)’ and ‘Participatory Learning and Action’ (PLA).
Chambers acknowledges that the significant breakthroughs and innovations that informed the methodology were not his, but that development practitioners in India, Africa and elsewhere were responsible for this. Practitioners such as James Mascarenhas, Parmesh Shah, Meera Kaul, John Devavaram and others in India collaborated with Chambers to explore emerging techniques and tools. These early pioneers were responsible for the spread of PRA to Africa and elsewhere. In Africa, the methodology found enthusiastic advocates in Kenya (Charity Kabutha, Daniel Mwayaya), South Africa (Kamal Laldas Singh and others), Zimbabwe (Sam Chimbuya, Saiti Makuku), Ghana (Tony Dogbe). Chambers raised funding for South-South Exchanges which were seminal to the internationalisation of the PRA community of practice. Kamal Laldas Singh who joined Chambers at the IDS, helped catalyse the South-South and in-country networking that attempted to encourage reflection and learning amongst practitioners. The rapid spread and adoption of the methodology led to issues of abuse and quality.[4]
Hundreds of participatory techniques and tools have been described in a variety of books and newsletters, or taught at training courses around the world. These techniques can be divided into four categories:
To ensure that people are not excluded from participation, these techniques avoid writing wherever possible, relying instead on the tools of oral communication like pictures, symbols, physical objects and group memory. Efforts are made in many projects, however, to build a bridge to formal literacy; for example by teaching people how to sign their names or recognize their signatures.
A key idea that has accompanied the development of PRA techniques is that of a new professionalism. Robert Chambers has explained this as follows:
“The central thrusts of the [new] paradigm … are decentralization and empowerment. Decentralization means that resources and discretion are devolved, turning back the inward and upward flows of resources and people. Empowerment means that people, especially poorer people, are enabled to take more control over their lives, and secure a better livelihood with ownership and control of productive assets as one key element. Decentralization and empowerment enable local people to exploit the diverse complexities of their own conditions, and to adapt to rapid change”.[5]
To be an external agent of change within this discipline implies two-way learning. Development agents learn to both appreciate and lever the power of oral culture and the transformations that are possible within it. Walter J. Ong has argued that “many of the contrasts often made between ‘western’ and other views seem reducible to contrasts between deeply interiorized literacy and more or less residually oral states of consciousness.”[6]
There are those who see limits to PRA. This is on a range of grounds - for example that it doesn't work, that it reveals the secrets of rural communities to be managed by development agencies, or that it is a tool of cooptation into neo-liberal development agendas. These were summarized in Participation: The New Tyranny? [7]