Pergamon

Pergamon
World Development, Vol. 22, No. 9, pp. 1253-1268, 1994
Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain F.R. 0305-750X/94 $7.00 + 0.00
0305-750X(94)00050-6
Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience* ROBERT CHAMBERS+ Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, U.K. Summary.-The more significant principles of Participatory Rural
Appraisal (PRA) concern the behavior and attitudes of outsider
facilitators, including not rushing, "handing over the stick," and
being self-critically aware. The power and popularity of PRA are
partly explained by the unexpected analytical abilities of local
people when catalyzed by relaxed rapport, and expressed through
sequences of participatory and especially visual methods. Evidence to
date shows high validity and reliability of information shared by
local people through PRA compared with data from more traditional
methods. Explanations include reversals and shifts of emphasis: from
etic to emic, closed to open, individual to group, verbal to visual,
and measuring to comparing; and from extracting information to
empowering local analysts.
1. INTRODUCTION Participation is now widely advocated and documented as philosophy and
mode in development (e.g., Cernea, 1985), but the gap remains wide between
fashionable rhetoric and field reality. One practical set of approaches
which has coalesced, evolved and spread in the early 1990s bears the label
Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). This has been described as a growing
family of approaches and methods to enable local (rural or urban) people to
express, enhance, share and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions,
to plan and to act.
PRA has many sources. The most direct is rapid rural appraisal (RRA)
from which it has evolved. RRA itself began as a response in the late
1970s and early 1980s to the biased perceptions derived from rural
development tourism (the brief rural visit by the urban-based professional)
and the many defects and high costs of large-scale questionnaire surveys
(Chambers, 1980; Carruthers and Chambers, 1981; Longhurst, 1981). PRA has
much in common with RRA but differs basically in the ownership of
information, and the nature of the process: in RRA information is more
elicited and extracted by outsiders as part of a process of data gathering;
in PRA it is more generated, analyzed, owned and shared by local people as
part of a process of their empowerment.
PRA also flows from and shares much with other approaches and traditions.
These commonalities and debts include the idea that local people can and
should conduct their own appraisal and analysis, found in activist
participatory research (e.g., Freire, 1968); many forms of diagramming,
derived from agroecosystem analysis (Gypmantasiri et al., 1980; Conway,
1985, 1986, 1987); the importance of rapport and of the emic-etic
distinction, from applied social anthropology; and an understanding of the
complexity, diversity and riskiness of farming systems and poor people's
livelihoods, from farming systems research (e.g., Gilbert, Norman and
Winch, 1980; Shaner, Philipp and Schmehl, 1982). PRA draws on these
traditions and shares much with them.
The more developed and tested methods of PRA include participatory
mapping and modeling, transect walks, matrix scoring, well-being grouping
and ranking, seasonal calendars, institutional diagramming, trend and
chance analysis, and analytical diagramming, all undertaken by local
people. Among many applications, PRA has been used in natural resources
management (soil and water conservation, forestry, fisheries, wildlife,
village planning, etc.), agriculture, health, nutrition, food security and
programs for the poor (RRA Notes, 1988-; IDS, 1993).
By early 1994 activities labeled as PRA have, in various forms, evolved
in or spread to at least 40 countries in the South, including Bangladesh,
Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana,
Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania,
Mexico, Namibia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Sierra
Leone,
_______________
*This paper is the second in a three-part series examining participatory
rural appraisal. The first paper appeared in the July 1994 issue of World
Development (Vol. 22, No. 7).
+Final revision accepted: February 23, 1994. South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe. PRA has also been spreading from the South to Australia, Canada,
Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Much of the
innovation has been in the non-government organization (NGO) sector,
especially in India and Kenya, but increasingly government agencies have
been adopting and adapting PRA approaches and methods. Increasingly, too,
graduate students are conducting their research in a PRA mode, and
university faculty have shown interest in over 20 countries.1
Empirically, much PRA has proved powerful and popular. This article sets
out to present and analyze the principles, insights, validity, reliability,
and modes of PRA, and to understand the nature of its power and
popularity.2
2. THE PRINCIPLES OF PRA
Effective RRA and PRA have been found to require practitioners and
facilitators to follow basic principles. Some are shared by RRA and PRA,
and some have been additionally evolved and emphasized in PRA.
The principles of RRA and PRA have been induced rather than deduced: they
have been elicited by trying out practices, finding what works and what
does not, and then asking why. Although different practitioners would list
different principles underlying RRA and PRA (see e.g., Grandstaff,
Grandstaff and Lovelace, 1987, pp. 9-13; Grandstaff and Grandstaff, 1987a;
McCracken, Pretty and Conway, 1988, pp. 12-13; Gueye and Freudenberger,
1990, pp. 10-19) and these have been evolving over time, most might include
and accept the following:
a) Principles shared by RRA and PRA
- A reversal of learning, to learn from local people, directly, on the
site, and face-to-face, gaining, insight from their local physical,
technical and social knowledge.
- Learning rapidly and progressively, with conscious exploration,
flexible use of methods, opportunism, improvisation, iteration and cross-
checking, not following a blueprint program but being adaptable in a
learning process.
- Offsetting biases, especially those of rural development tourism, by
being relaxed and not rushing, listening not lecturing, probing instead
of passing on to the next topic, being unimposing instead of important,
and seeking out the poorer people and women, and learning their concerns
and priorities.
- Optimising tradeoffs, relating the costs of learning to the usefulness
of information, with tradeoffs between quantity, relevance, accuracy and
timeliness. This includes the principles of optimal ignorance-knowing
what it is not worth knowing, and then not trying to find it out, and of
appropriate imprecision-not measuring what need not be measured, or more
accurately than needed, following the dictum attributed to Keynes that it
is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
- Triangulating (Grandstaff, Grandstaff and Lovelace, 1987, pp. 9-10:
Gueye and Freudenberger, 1991, pp. 14-16) meaning cross-checking and
progressive learning and approximation through plural investigation. This
variously involves assessing and comparing findings from several, often
three:
- methods
- types of item or sets of conditions
- points in a range or distribution
- individuals or groups of analysts
- places
- times
- disciplines
- investigators or inquirers and combinations of these.
- Seeking diversity, meaning looking for and learning from exceptions,
oddities, dissenters, and outliers in any distribution. This has been
expressed in terms of seeking variability rather than averages (Beebe,
1987, pp. 53-54). and has been described in Australia as the principle of
maximum diversity, or "maximising the diversity and richness of
information" (Dunn and McMillan, 1991, pp. 5, 8). This can involve
purposive sampling in a nonstatistical sense. It goes beyond
triangulation, for it deliberately looks for, notices and investigates
contradictions, anomalies, and differences, and includes negative case
analysis.
(b) Principles additionally stressed in PRA
Of these shared principles, PRA puts special stress on offsetting biases,
and the associated changes in outsiders' behavior. In addition, PRA in
practice manifests four further principles:
- They do it: facilitating investigation, analysis, presentation and
learning by local people themselves, so that they generate and own the
outcomes, and also learn. This has been expressed as "handing over the
stick" (or pen or chalk). It requires confidence that "they can do it."
Often the facilitator initiates a process of participatory analysis and
then sit