PARTICPATORY APPROACHES TO RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

GEOG. 327: PARTICPATORY APPROACHES TO DEVELOPMENT

            COURSE INSTRUCTOR: LUGAIRI ESTONE

CREDIT HOURS: 45           CF: 3

Course Description

This course introduces students to the role and fundamentals of participatory approaches in development. It is designed to provide a critical understanding of theoretical and practical developments in the evolution (and contested nature) of ‘community development’ in a comparative societal context. It provides an overview of the theory and practice of community development, including an historical review, an examination of contemporary issues and debates, theories of social change, methodological considerations, and examples of current community development initiatives. The course explores various models of community development in relation to their goals, processes and outcomes. In addition, it explores participatory approaches (beneficiary-oriented research methods) currently adopted by development agencies and donors in community development.

Course Objective

The overall objective of this course is to equip students with competencies to understanding effective and efficient participatory approaches to development. It provides students with a thorough review and analysis of community development theory and practice.

Learning Outcomes

The course will enable students to:

i)        Demonstrate understanding of the concept of participation in community development interventions and research

ii)      Appreciate the potential and limitations of participatory approaches in different situations
gain knowledge, skills and experience in using several of the participatory methodologies and tools in development work situations

iii)    Develop requisite skills and competence to facilitate participatory community development initiatives

iv)    Gain knowledge, skills and experience in using several of the participatory methodologies and tools in development work situations

Course Outline

Topic	Content	Week
Conceptualization of development and participatory research	1.1    What is development? 1.2    Research in development 1.2.1     Meaning of research 1.2.2     Participatory research 1.2.3     Characteristics of participatory research 1.2.4     Principles and benefits of participatory research	1-2
Community development	2.1  Meaning of a community 2.2  Meaning of community development 2.3  Characteristics of community development 2.4  Principles of community development	3-4
Participation and participatory development in community development	3.1  Community participation 3.2  Characteristics and types of participation 3.3  Principles of participation 3.4  Different strategies for community participation 3.5  Participatory development 3.6  Importance of participation and participatory development 3.7  Capacity building and community participation 3.8  Participation as a medium of empowerment	5-6
Stakeholders in community development	4.1 Who is a stakeholder? 4.2 Types of stakeholders 4.3 Stakeholder Analysis	7
CAT
Community needs assessment	5.1 What is a needs assessment? 5.2 What is community needs assessment? 5.3 Objectives of community needs assessment 5.4 Types of community needs assessment 55 Implementing community needs assessment 5.6 Conducting community needs assessment 5.7 Tools for community needs assessment 5.8 Community needs assessment techniques	8-9
Participatory approaches in community development	6.1 Rapid Rural Appraisal 6.2 Participatory Rural Appraisal 6.3 Participatory Poverty Assessment 6.4 Participatory Action Research 6.5 Appreciative Inquiry	10-11
Participatory monitoring and impact assessment	7.1 Meaning 7.2 Benefits of conducting a development impact assessment 7.2 Guidelines for analyzing specific development impact	12
Challenges to effective participation and participatory development	8.1 Challenges to effective participation and participatory development 8.2 Ways to ensure effective participation and participatory development	13

Teaching Method

There will be lectures and class discussions in this course. Lectures will emphasize on theoretical and conceptual understanding of the concept of community development and participatory research methods. Class discussions will focus on discussion of assigned readings and materials complementing or substantiating the lectures.

Course Assessment

1. CAT1                                                              15 %
2. CAT2                                                              15 %
3. End trimester examination                              70 %

Reference/Learning Materials

Arnstein, S. R. (1971). ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, no. 35, July.

Botes, Lucius and Dingie van Rensburg (2000).        Community participation in development: Nine plagues and twelve commandments. In Community Development Journal, an international forum. Vol. 35 No. 1. Oxford University Press.

Chambers, R. (1994).  The origin and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 5 (7) pp. 953-69.

Chambers, R. (1997a). Paradigm shifts and the practice of participatory research and development in power and participatory development: Theory and practice. London: Intermediate Technology Publications.

Chambers, R. (1997b). Whose reality counts? Putting the first last. London: Intermediate Technology Publishers.

Cornwall A. (2008) Unparking ‘Participation’: Models, meaning and practices. OxfordUniversity Press & Community Development Journal

Conyers, D. (1984).    ‘Decentralisation and development: a review of the literature’, Public Administration and Development, vol. 4: 187-97.

Freire, P. (1976). Education, the practice of freedom. London: Writers and Publishers Cooperative.

Guijt, I., & Kaul Shah, M. (1998). Waking up to power, conflict and process. The myth of community. I. Guijt, and Meera Kaul Shah. London: Intermediate Technology Books

Cooke, B. & Kothari, U. eds. (2001). Participation: the new tyranny? London: Zed Books, Ltd.

Narayan, Deepa, and Lyra Srinivasan (1994). Participatory Development Toolkit: Training Materials for Agencies and Communities. World Bank: Washington, DC.

Sharp, Kay (2001).      Voices of Hunger: A Desk Review of Issues Arising from Participatory Analysis of Poverty and Food Insecurity. Background paper for the DFID Food Security Strategy Paper.

World Bank (1996). Participation Sourcebook Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF DEVELOPMENT AND PARTICIPTORY RESEARCH

1.1 What is Development?

What is ‘development’? How is ‘development’ defined and understood by the various different parties in the society? In other words, what does “development” really means to different individuals, regions and countries? The definition of development has been a major area of controversy.

Development is a concept which is contested both theoretically and politically, and is inherently complex and ambiguous, with many different and sometimes contentious definitions. The meaning of “development” is informed by one’s culture, tradition, environment, philosophical beliefs, and epoch.  It must be viewed in relation to time, place, and circumstance.  It is therefore defined differently by various people and scholars depending on the context in which the term is used. There are three discernable definitions of ‘development:

i)         ‘Development’ is a process of structural societal change.

Development is ‘a process of historical change’. It is focused on processes of structural societal change, it is historical and it has a long-term outlook. This is the view of ‘structural transformation’ and ‘long-term transformations of economies and societies’. This means that development involves changes to socio-economic structures – including ownership, the organization of production, technology, the institutional structure and laws. All countries change over time, and generally experience economic growth and societal change. But the concept of development as applied to society is a complex one. Development is not necessarily the same as “change” in society. Change in a society may be negative (detrimental) or positive (beneficial). Development is equated with positive change and progress or improvement in the well being of human beings in terms of living standards.

Development encompasses continuous ‘positive change’ in a variety of aspects of human condition and society. In this way, development is a process of structural societal change; but positive and progressive change. It includes progress towards achievement of “economic independence”. But this does not mean non-dependency, but instead economic independence refers to a situation where the following requirements are met:

a)      A reasonable degree of self-sufficiency

b)      A sustainable degree of diversification of sources and destinations of goods and services

c)      Freedom to formulate decisions, economic policies and objectives and pursue them without undue influence from other quarters.

ii)      ‘Development’ as a short- to medium-term outcome of desirable targets

This is simply concerned with development as occurring in terms of a set of short- to medium-term ‘performance indicators’ – goals or outcomes – which can be measured and compared with targets (for example changes in poverty or income levels). This means that development entails the ability to meet desired positive targets and goals in the short – to medium – term. Poverty reduction objectives in general, and the MDGs in particular are such targets. The key feature is that development is focused on the outcomes of positive and progressive change so that it has a relatively short-term outlook

iii)    ‘Development’ as a dominant ‘discourse’ of Western modernity

In this perspective, development in developing countries is equated to the Western notion of development. Therefore, development is taken to be equivalent to Western modernity. Thus demonstrating the Western modernity and values is taken to be the same as development.  This has been used by the neocolonialists to impose Western ethnocentric notions of development upon the developing countries on the assumption that what is good for them should also be good for the Third World. Thus development (and poverty) is social constructs by Western countries that do not exist in an objective sense outside of the discourse (a body of ideas, concepts and theory) and that one can only ‘know’ reality through discourse.

From the above three perspectives, Development can be broadly defined as the process of socio-economic change directed towards satisfaction of basic human needs by improving then standards of living, social participation and control in order to strengthen self-reliance, and ecological soundness to achieve harmony with the environment and make development sustainable over a long period of time. Simply, development refers to the continued improvement in the living standards as a result of economic growth. It should be understood as the sustained improvement in the standards of living or welfare. It includes economic development as well as social development which is concerned with the distribution of the aspects of development (fairness and equity). Therefore, development is not purely an economic phenomenon but rather a multi-dimensional process involving reorganization and reorientation of entire economic AND social system. The economic and social systems are interrelated, interdependent and mutually-reinforcing. The benefits of economic development should be fairly, justly and equitably distributed.

Development is a process, not a level. It is a process which enables human beings to realize their potential, build self-confidence, and lead lives of dignity and fulfillment. It is a process which frees people from fear, exploitation, and oppression. Through development, political independence acquires true significance. It is a path to achieve certain goals. Development is process of improving the quality of all human lives in three equally important aspects or objectives/goals including:

i)        Life sustenance: This refers to the ability to provide basic necessities and raise people’s standards of living such as incomes and consumption, levels of food, medical services, education through relevant growth processes. This is the basis of economic development.

ii)      Self-esteem: This is the feeling of self respect and a situation of not being used by others for their own aims and ends. This entails creating conditions conducive to the growth of peoples’ self-esteem through the establishment of social, political and economic systems and institutions which promote human dignity and respect. This involves a sense of worth and self respect. The nature and form of self-esteem vary from one culture to another.

iii)    Freedom from servitude: This involves increasing peoples’ freedom to choose by enlarging the range of their choice variables, e.g. varieties of goods and services. There is an expanded range of choices for societies and their members. The advantages of development (the creation and sharing of wealth) should increase the range of human choices and liberate members of the society from conditions of being slaves. It should enable a society to gain greater control over nature. It makes a nation strive towards political development. Development should free people from obstacles that affect their ability to develop their own lives and communities. Development, therefore, is empowerment: it is about local people taking control of their own lives, expressing their own demands and finding their own solutions to their problems.

The above three basic aspects, objectives or goals represent common goals of man and societies. The goal of development is to expand the capabilities of people to live the lives they choose to lead. Development aims at improving people’s lives (livelihood, security, environmental, physical and mental well being) and it is most appropriately defined with their active participation. Development is different from growth since it has broader and deeper meanings. Growth is necessary but not sufficient condition of development.

In order to achieve the above varied aspects (goals) of development, countries ought to put in place well-focused development strategies. A general theory of development strategy should include the following premises or assumptions or aspects:

i)        The development strategy should embrace the fact that no meaningful development can take place if the development process depends on outside factors either of capital or expertise. Development must be propagated by a spontaneous catalytic action with energy which is essentially indigenous.

ii)      A development strategy must be ultimately interwoven with the fabric of the society. The strategy must be concerned with the social consequences of the development. It should not challenge the known norms and aspirations of the society. Development and development plans are about people rather than things.

iii)    A development strategy must recognize that neither capital nor capital accumulation constitutes development; they are efforts in the development process but are not development in themselves. It follows that capital mobilization is a pre-requisite for development but not development unless used for development purposes.

iv)    A development strategy must be equipped with the necessary incentives/inducements or conditions for all those with entrepreneurship potential. Development gains more momentum when it is not imposed but participated in by the people of the area in a meaningful way.

v)      Development requires a frontal attack on a massive scale. It requires a “big push” and the push must be based on the few scarce resources. The "Big Push" theory suggest that countries needed to jump from one stage of development to another through a virtuous cycle in which large investments in infrastructure and education coupled to private investment would move the economy to a more productive stage, breaking free from economic paradigms appropriate to a lower productivity stage. This therefore implies that there is need for proper choice of development projects

vi)    Development must always aim at achieving balanced growth (equitable development). It should not concentrate in certain areas or sectors at the expense of the others. Everybody and every sector in the economy should feel the fruits of development.

1.2 Research in Development

In order for individuals, societies and countries to efficiently and effectively understand and address their various development challenges, problems, needs and issues, it is important that they arrive at decisions based on valid and reliable information and thorough analysis. This can be done through the application of a systematic and scientific search for information known as research.

1.2.1 Meaning of Research

There is no ideal definition of the term “research”; hence you will find a diverse set of definitions based on the context of the person(s) using it. More than hundreds of definitions of research have been available in written form in different books, encyclopedias, dictionaries and in research literature. These definitions may have difference in wordings but meanings are similar. The word research (derived from French word recherche which means to search closely, where "chercher" means "to search"), loosely means:

i)        “to investigate thoroughly”

ii)      “to go about seeking”

iii)    “careful and diligent search”

iv)    “studious inquiry or examination”

v)      “a search for knowledge”

According to Cambridge Dictionary, research is “a detailed study of a subject, especially in order to discover new information or reach a new understanding”.  Broadly, Research is defined as a scientific and systematic search for pertinent information on a specific topic or question of interest. This definition consists of three distinct and equally significant parts including:

1)      Research is truth seeking. Research seeks to demonstrate truth. Truth seeking is the search, or investigation, of or for a body of real things, events, or facts, or the explanation of them.

2)      Research describes or explains. To describe involves representing or giving an account of. To explain is to give the reason for or cause of. Combined, or separately, these two parts result in a contribution to knowledge.

3)      Research is conducted and governed by those who have the requisite proficiency or expertise. To be proficient or to be an expert means that one is well advanced in a branch of knowledge derived from training or experience. However, being proficient or an expert does not imply that one contributes to knowledge. It only implies that the latter is necessary, but not sufficient, for doing research.

Therefore, it may be claimed that the task or duty of researchers is truth seeking, aimed at describing or explaining phenomenon, conducted at a high level of proficiency or expertise, which results in a contribution to knowledge. Research is a process of arriving at effective solutions to problems in the society through scientific and systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of data. It is systematic because there is a planned structure or method used to reach the conclusion.  It is a careful and systematic attempt to provide answers to questions and these answers may be abstract or general or highly concrete and specific. The systematic process helps to discover, interpret, revise facts about a given subject or a problem and thereby generate a new body of knowledge. The system that a researcher follows to find out the facts determines the validity, genuineness and reliability of research. Interest in research is due to the fact that human beings possess the vital instinct of inquisitiveness which makes them probe and attain full understanding of the unknown. This is the mother of all knowledge and the method can be termed as research.  Research process has been conducted from the time immemorial.

Research relies on scientific method in the generation of new knowledge. In fact the terms research and science or scientific method are often used interchangeably. Science is distinguished from other fields of study by how knowledge is acquired rather than by what is studied. Science follows a sequence of logical and methodical steps to generate knowledge. The process of generating scientific information is known as the scientific method. Scientific method is a process for creating models of the natural world that can be verified experimentally. It involves studies of the natural world by making careful observations, formulating specific questions and hypotheses (proposed explanations of an observation or how a process works) about the observed events, testing the hypotheses through experimentation and measurements to see if they are supported or rejected, being open to new information and ideas, and being willing to submit one’s ideas to the scrutiny of others. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. It requires a systematic search for knowledge and a continual checking and re-checking to see if previous studies are still supported by new information. Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible, to reduce biased interpretations of results.

Research is based on scientific methods and involves critical analysis of existing conclusions or theories with regard to newly discovered facts. This is necessary in an ever-changing world with advances in technology continually creating new possibilities. Research, therefore, means a continued search for new knowledge and understanding of the world around us. Scientific and research ideas undergo constant re-evaluation, criticism and modification. In development, research can be undertaken in two ways including:

i)        Learning about development issues in a community by extracting information on development issues from those affected without their direct participation and involvement in planning, implementation and use of the research and its results (conventional research). The focus is on basic or fundamental research – generating knowledge for the sake of knowledge or for some other purposes without involvement of the target local groups. Knowledge-generation is the key purpose. There is a wide gap between available knowledge and its utilization. This lack of utilization of generated knowledge leads to research that cannot be used to improve our social, economic, and political systems. Research alienates respondents, or at best treats them as sources of raw information. The abilities of people to investigate their own realities are likewise not stimulated or developed.

ii)      Learning about development issues in a community from those affected through direct participation and involvement of the targeted local people in planning, implementation and use of the research and its results (participatory/beneficiary-oriented research). The focus is on application, ie to enable the targeted local people to participate in their own development. The research aims to serve a useful purpose.

1.2.2 Participatory Research

For efficient and effective development, research is supposed to be participatory and involve the targeted local community – ie it is supposed to be beneficiary-oriented research which means participatory research. Participatory research evolved as an alternative system of knowledge production challenging the premise of conventional social science research methodology. The premise is that social science researchers approach research sites in a neutral, objective, and value-free manner. Some conventional research involve limited interactions with people, others achieve a high level of in-depth participation, at certain stages, without being considered participatory. Participatory methodologies are often characterized as being reflexive, flexible and iterative, in contrast with the rigid linear designs of most conventional research.

Participatory research is defined as a systematic investigation, with the collaboration of those affected by the issue being studied, for purposes of education and taking action or effecting social change. It is an approach to conducting research where the researcher is in partnership with the intended users of the research. It is used not only to enable local people to seek their own solutions according to their priorities, but also to secure development support (funding). It occurs when members of the community are actively involved in designing and implementing the research, when they are invested in the work, when they are involved in all stages of the work from planning to implementation to results, when they are happy with what was done and how it was done, and when they feel that they were treated respectfully and as valued members of the research team. 

People engaged in participatory research do two things simultaneously. They enhance their understanding and knowledge of a particular situation and take action to change it to their benefit. Knowledge for the sake of knowing is deemphasized; knowing is linked to a concrete action. This enhances the quality of knowledge and informs the basis for action. This is the starting point of participatory research.

The goals of participatory research are to answer important questions and benefit the partners in the research process, while developing valid knowledge that is applicable to other settings. It integrates knowledge translation by involving those who need to act on the results as full partners throughout the process. It is a collaborative model that promotes the development of critical partnerships and application of research conclusions into the process of community development. The knowledge, expertise, and resources of the involved community are frequently key to effective research and problem solving. It is a tool for improving social and economic conditions, effecting change, and increasing trust for scientists and community development efforts among the members of the communities studied. Today, participatory research represents a methodology for partnering with communities to develop interventions that are acceptable to community members, for evaluating and demonstrating the effectiveness of the intervention with community members, and for sustaining the intervention beyond external funding. Its aim is to enable development practitioners, government officials and local people to collect information, learn, plan and evaluate together.

Participatory research attempts to present people as researchers themselves in pursuit of answers to the questions of their daily struggle and survival. It is research that is conducted as an equal partnership between traditionally trained "experts" and members of a community. The community participates fully in all aspects and attempts to break down the distinction between the researchers and the researched, the subjects and objects of knowledge production by the participation of the people-for-themselves in the process of gaining and creating knowledge. In the process, research is seen not only as a process of creating knowledge, but simultaneously, as education and development of consciousness, and of mobilization for action. Participatory research is primarily differentiated from conventional research in the alignment of power within the research process. It offers opportunities to engage people as active contributors in theor own development.

The underlying assumption is that ordinary people are knowledgeable about their social realities and are capable of articulating this knowledge to address their own problems. With this assumption, promoters of participatory research argue that it is a process of knowing and acting. It is used to improve the impact of development by getting the views of intended beneficiaries regarding a planned or ongoing development project or intervention. The objective is to assess the value of a development activity as perceived by project beneficiaries and to integrate findings into project activities. It is designed specifically to undertake systematic listening of the poor and other stakeholders by giving voice to their priorities and concerns. This method of systematic consultation is used by project management as a design, monitoring, and evaluation tool.

This research approach is not intended to supplant quantitative surveys and other traditional methods for data gathering. It seeks to complement these methods by providing reliable, qualitative, in-depth information on the sociocultural conditions and perceptions of the project’s target group. This information is intended to be immediate use to managers and policymakers responsible for improving people’s lives. Participatory research allows us to find the right solutions to key issues in our communities by:

i)        providing facts that will help us to analyse the problem;

ii)      testing the feasibility and the impact of programmes; and

iii)    finding better solutions to the challenges.

Research can play an important role in winning support for a programme or cause (sometimes called advocacy.) It helps make a case through strengthening arguments, providing information, and outlining cost benefits.

1.2.3 Characteristics of Participatory Research

The key features of participatory research are:

i)        People are the subjects of research: the dichotomy between subject and object is broken by creating critical and equal partnerships between the researchers and the community. Local people are treated as active subjects in their own development.

ii)      Creation of awareness: The awareness of the people of their own abilities and resources is strengthened and mobilizing or organizing is supported.

iii)    People themselves collect the data, and then process and analyse the information using methods easily understood by them

iv)    The knowledge generated is used to promote actions for change or to improve existing local actions. Research serves a useful purpose that is to address a problem in the society.

v)      The knowledge belongs to the people and they are the primary beneficiaries of the knowledge creation

vi)    Research and action are inseparable – they represent a unity. It integrates knowledge and action for the benefit of all partners.

vii)  Research is a praxis rhythm of action-reflection where knowledge creation supports action

viii)                        People function as organic intellectuals

ix)    There is an built-in mechanism to ensure authenticity and genuineness of the information that is generated because people themselves use the information for life improvement.

1.2.4 Principles and Benefits of Participatory Research

Participatory research applied in a community setting, as an attempt to address social vulnerability, provides some benefits. These benefits can only be achieved once the principles are followed. In an extensive synthesis of community-based and participatory research literature, the following key principles of community-based research widely accepted.

i)              Recognizes community as a unit of identity: This research should work explicitly with local communities for the benefit of all its members. It emphasizes more on community benefit than individual benefit.

ii)            Builds on strengths and resources within the community: This research should explicitly identify, support and reinforce social structures, processes, and knowledge already existing in the community that help them work together to improve their lives. This is done to support and reinforce traditional knowledge, skills and social structures in the community. Local knowledge, practices, ideas and assumptions are utilised to ensure sustainable development is brought about. These structures assist the community in their daily lives and encourage them to work together. Cultural and social coherence is achieved as a result and the community is able to face their difficulties as a group.

iii)          Facilitates collaborative partnerships in all phases of the research: This research should involve community members in every phase they want to participate in, including but not limited to: problem definition, data collection, interpretation of results, and application of the results to address community concerns. This may involve applying skills from outside the community, but should focus on issues identified by the community and create situations in which all parties can truly influence the entire research process.

iv)          Integrates knowledge and action for mutual benefit of all partners: Though the research project itself might not include a direct action component, all parties must have a commitment to applying the research results to a social change effort intended to benefit all partners. The community should identify the core research issues. This should be done even though it might be necessary to obtain and apply skills from outside the community. The knowledge obtained and actions taken will then provide mutual benefit for all role-players during the entire research process.

v)            Promotes a co-learning and empowering process that attends to social inequalities: This research should recognize the inherent inequalities between marginalized communities and researchers, and attempt to address these by emphasizing knowledge of community members and sharing information, resources and decision-making power. Researchers learn from the knowledge and local theories of the community members, and community members acquire further skills in how to conduct research. A systematic learning process provides information for action, typically towards improving financial and employment status and optimising resources.

vi)          Sharing of information, resources and decision-making power is vital to the process. This should be respectfully done, in an understandable language that acknowledges all partner contributions. At the same time the researcher is able to learn from the community, through sharing of knowledge and local theories. The community members, on the other hand, are given some valuable insight as to the research process. The role-players (from different walks of life) experienced difficulties at first in trusting one another, and in sharing information and knowledge.

vii)        Involves a cyclical and iterative process: Iterative is the process of returning again and again to the research questions, methods, and data, which leads to new ideas, revisions and improvements. Research should involve trust-building, partnership development and maintenance in all phases of the research. Research process promotes partnership building and the establishment of trust. Most importantly, unsustainable social practice is changed through positive change in rural communities.

viii)      Disseminate findings and knowledge gained to all partners: This research should disseminate information gained in a respectful and understandable language that acknowledges all participants contributions and ownership of the knowledge production.

Note: Development that involves the targeted community in understanding and addressing their development needs, challenges and issues is commonly referred to us community development.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

2.1 Meaning of a Community

Different people tend to understand the concept of community differently – and this can influence community participation in practice. Thus, a politician may focus on a community defined by political constituencies; an urban planner may focus on a community defined by agreed geographical boundaries; and a member of the public may focus on a community of which he or she feels to be a part – whether defined by local neighbourhood, shared use of facilities or affinity with a particular population.

A community can be broadly defined as a social unit (group of people) sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists. It can be viewed as a group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings. Simply, it refers to people grouped on the basis of geography, common interest, identity or interaction. The members have developed a more or less complete socio-cultural definition added with a collective identification by means of which they solve problems arising from living in the same area. A community therefore becomes effective when its people become conscious of their common problems and are conceptually motivated for a collective bargain and action while being responsible to formulate common objectives around these common problems.

A community is larger than a household that shares common values and has social cohesion. A community is defined by the people who live within it, their shared ideals, relationships, and common hardships. In a community, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

A fundamental characteristic of a community is that regardless of the number of its people or geographical spread, they must be binded by certain principles. The common characteristics of a community are: a shared territory, beliefs, bonds of fellowship, common culture, set standards and administration. This can be explained as;

i)           Shared Territory: A Community must exist in a territorial area that conveniently accommodates its members in order to develop their ways of life. It can be conceptualized in terms of geographical area, with a common identity and shared destiny.

ii)         Shared Beliefs: For a community to exist in unity, its people must adhere to common idea, Objectives, attitudes and values.

iii)       Common Culture: Every community has its defined custom and tradition; appreciated and jealously guided and protected by its members. Such customs and traditions are transferred from one generation to the other within the community.

iv)       Common Administration: A Community has a unique administrative leadership responsible for making laws and ensuring that such rules and regulations are followed by community members. Equal measure of discipline as a form of punishment is carried out on offenders. In the same vein, those who abide and bring glory to the community are rewarded. The administrative process is necessary to bring order to the community

There are four elements of "sense of community": 1) membership, 2) influence, 3) integration and fulfillment of needs (harmonizing individual needs), and 4) shared emotional connection. A number of ways to categorize types of community have been proposed; one such breakdown is:

i)        Geographic community: A community that is specific to a certain specific geographical location. It ranges from the local neighbourhood, suburb, village, town or city, region, nation or even the planet as a whole. These refer to communities of location. Such community groupings use physical location to define communities and assume that physical proximity provides a set of material and social conditions which result in shared interests.

ii)      Cultural community (Community of culture): A community united by common socio-cultural aspects or practices among its members. Community groupings are defined through affinity by sharing human characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, age, disablement, and sexual orientation. Occasionally, they include socially defined characteristics such as education, social class, religion and political affiliation, but this usage is less common. It is generally the case that, the greater affinity or shared characteristics present in a group, the more cohesive is its members’ sense of community.

iii)    Organizational community (Community organization): A community that develops a result of their attachment to the organization that the members belong to. It range from informal family or kinship networks, to more formal incorporated associations, school, political decision making structures, economic enterprises, or professional associations (eg LSK) at a small, national or international scale.

Communities are nested; one community can contain another—for example a geographic community may contain a number of ethnic communities. Cultural community and geographical community sometimes coexist to strengthen a community’s sense of shared interests. This is not always so, however, since many geographic communities differ markedly on many social affinity characteristics such as wealth and education. Nonetheless, geography can provide a powerful incentive for individuals to assume a shared set of interests since physical proximity increases the likelihood of social interaction. When there is positive and beneficial change in the socio-economic development of a community it is called community development.

2.2 Meaning of Community Development

Community development is defined as a structured intervention that gives a community greater control over the conditions that affect its lives by strengthening itself and developing towards its full potential. It refers to actions that helps people in a community to recognise and develop their ability and potential and organise themselves to respond to problems and needs which they share.  It is a range of practices dedicated to increasing the strength and effectiveness of community life, improving local conditions, especially for people in disadvantaged situations, and enabling people to participate in public decision-making and to achieve greater long term control over their circumstances. It supports the establishment of strong communities that control and use their assets to promote social justice and improve the quality of community life.  It works at the level of local community in groups and organisations rather than with individuals or families. 

Community development starts with the issues which people in communities identify as being important to them, rather than starting with the issues that an outside agency wants to tackle. It seeks to enable communities to grow and change according to their own needs and priorities, and at their own pace, provided this does not oppress other groups and communities, or damage the environment.

Community development is a new paradigm of development that focuses on participatory methodologies and ensures the involvement of the community in the decision making process about their own development agenda. However, this does not solve all the problems faced by a local community, but it does help to build up confidence to tackle such problems as effectively as any local action can.  It is essentially concerned with helping local people to understand how and why the issues they want to tackle have come about, and why some groups have more power or resources than others. This is so as to enable the local people analyse their situations and identify issues which can be addressed through collective action. It seeks the empowerment of individuals and communities, through using the strengths of the community to bring about desired changes.

Community development is a skilled process and part of its approach is the belief that communities cannot be helped unless they themselves agree to this process.  It looks at not only how the community is working at the grass roots, but also how responsive key institutions are to the needs of local communities. It is a long term approach of building active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect. Moreover, it is about changing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the issues that affect their lives and enabling the community itself to develop solutions to the problems that are set internally. Key issues for the success of community development activity include:

i)        Local participation

ii)      Identification of needs and response to them

iii)    Social interaction and the building of inter-group relations

iv)    On-going support

2.3 Characteristics of Community Development

Community development is a challenging process that requires the following characteristics:

i)        A long-term process which goes at local community’s pace. Community development has to take the necessary time to help communities develop themselves, including:

a)       Bringing people together to explore their lives and issues, and understanding the root causes of their concerns

b)       Helping communities to identify the changes that they would want to achieve

c)       Encouraging communities to feel they can make a difference

d)       Exploring previous attempts to change things, and what can be learnt

e)       Supporting the communities in agreeing shared visions and priorities for action

f)        Agreeing a useful way to assess their progress and evaluate their impact (outcomes and indicators)

g)       Providing user-friendly frameworks to help the communities make plans and build their own organisations

This long-term approach is essential to ensure changes are sustainable and long-lasting.

ii)         A value-based process: The key purpose of community development practice is to challenge disadvantage   and inequality, and to build communities based on the principles of social justice, equality and mutual respect. Community development has to tackle power issues to be effective in supporting communities to achieve positive social change. Community development's notion of positive social change is rooted in community development's core values: social justice, equality and anti-discrimination, collective action, community empowerment and working and learning together.

iii)       Social Change outcomes: Community development is seeking to address power imbalances in society and help communities to empower themselves without oppressing others.

2.4 Principles of Community Development

Community development does not occur in a vacuum and where it takes place, there are certain key principles central to it. The first priority of the community development process is the empowering and enabling of those who are traditionally deprived of power and control over their common affairs. It claims as important the ability of people to act together to influence the social, economic, political and environmental issues which affect them. It aims to encourage sharing, and creating structures which give genuine participation and involvement a priority. Community development:

i)              is collective - supporting groups of local people to develop knowledge, skills and confidence to engage in collective action. Through their involvement in community activities, local people learn about skills and resources which they either have or realise they can acquire - that is why the provision of training and support for members of community groups is an important aspect of community development.

ii)            is participatory - actively engaging local people in both defining, planning and taking initiatives to respond to their problems. This should pay a particular focus on those who are currently most marginalised and excluded from the decision making process.

iii)          is empowering - aiming to effect a sharing of power to create structures which provide genuine participation and involvement.

iv)          is task- and process-focused - attention paid to both task (the identified problem) and process (means to address the problem), promoting an inclusive collective process.

v)            is innovative and creative - it adopts dynamic, innovative and creative approaches on the basis of the existing conditions and context of the targeted community. Each community requires unique solutions to the identified problems due to their unique circumstances. What has worked or failed in one community may not necessarily work or fail in another community.

vi)          is focused on improving quality of life- the aim of community development is to improve the quality of life of its members. Community development gains concrete improvements in the quality of life of people by reflecting real needs as identified by local communities.

vii)        builds community sector infrastructure - it recognizes the importance of formal and informal support networks in bringing about social change, actively supporting and resourcing the development of such structures.

viii)      is committed to equality and ethnic diversity – it involves diversity of social groups (poor and rich, literate and illiterate, male and female, religion etc) and their concerns in identifying common community problems and common community solutions. The diversity in the community provides opportunity for diversity in the ideas to common community problems.

PARTICIPATION AND PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

3.1 Community Participation

The term participation is defined differently by different people in different contexts and professions as a result of the simplicity of its denotation ”take part”, “be or become actively involved”, or “share in”. In terms of community development, participation is limited to a relatively small focus within its application in development. People use different concepts when referring to participation in community development such as community participation, citizen participation, people’s participation, public participation, and popular participation. Participation, as a concept within community development, is widely and commonly used. It is a central concept in, and foundation principle of, community development.

The actual definition of the concept of community participation has a long history to it. In 1979, the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD – Rome, 1979) declared participation by rural people in the institutions that govern their lives ‘a basic human right’: If rural development was to realize its potential, disadvantaged rural people had to be organized and actively involved in designing policies and programmes and in controlling social and economic institutions. WCARRD saw a close link between participation and voluntary, autonomous and democratic organizations representing the poor. It called on development agencies to work in close cooperation with organizations of intended beneficiaries, and proposed that assistance be channelled through such local groups. However, even as participation became a ‘good thing’, there was greater diversity in the interpretations of what it really means and in the forms of its application in practice. 

In general, community participation is defined as: a process of equitable and active involvement of all stakeholders in the formulation of development policies and strategies and in the analysis, planning and implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development activities affecting their lives OR process through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives, decisions and resources that affect their lives OR a process by which people are enabled to become actively and genuinely involved  in defining the development issues of concern to them, in making decisions about factors that affect their lives, in formulating and implementing policies, in planning, developing and delivering services and in taking actions to achieve change. In practice, participation involves employing measures to: identify relevant stakeholders, share information with them, listen to their views, involve them in processes of development planning and decision-making, contribute to their capacity-building and, ultimately, empower them to initiate, manage and control their own self-development.

Participation can be considered as the involvement of the people in a community in development projects to solve their own problems. It is a process whereby the residents of a community are given a voice and a choice to participate in issues affecting their lives. It includes people's involvement in decision-making processes, in implementing programmes, sharing in the benefits of development programmes and involvement in efforts to evaluate such programmes. It empowers the community to participate in their own development agenda. It provides opportunities and experience, to allow community people to be actively involved in the decision making about the development programme. The stakeholders influence and share control over priority setting, policy-making, resource allocations and access to public goods and services. They influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect them. Participation carries potential benefits, but only if all those involved have a common understanding and set of expectations. Since social, economic, educational, and other conditions differ from one community to another, the form and degree of people's involvement in development activities also vary. This makes it difficult to define participation precisely.

The local community is involved in the creation, content and conduct of a development program or policy designed to change their lives. It requires recognition and use of local capacities and avoids the imposition of priorities from the outside. In general, participation evokes involvement of the community in the decision making process of implementation of development projects. Participation excludes the following situations: where an individual merely takes part in a group activity; where an individual is merely given information on a decision affecting him/her before it is executed; or, where an individual is present at a meeting but has no influence.

Participation thus involves a shift in power over the process of development away from those who have traditionally defined the nature of the problem and how it may be addressed (governments, outside donors) to the people immediately impacted by the issue. At its pinnacle, participation involves a transformation of the traditional development approach towards the enhancement of the capabilities of the local people and communities to define and address their own needs and aspirations.

The 4is and the 4cs Of Participation

The 4 Is

1. Integrated

2. Involving

3. Inclusion

4. Interaction

The 4Cs

1. Collaboration

2. Collegial – (Mutual, respectful, friendly)

3. Co-ordination

4. Cooperation

3.2 Characteristics and Types of Participation

In the theoretical discourse, participation is attributed two significant characteristics:

i)        Participation as a means and

ii)      Participation as an end

Participation as a means (instrumental participation) describes participation as a means of achieving a set objective or goal. In other words it is a way of using the economic and social resources of local people to achieve predetermined targets. The aim of such participation is often only to persuade the intended beneficiaries to take part in activities from which basic contents have already been decided by outsiders. The results of the participation in the shape of the predetermined targets are more important than the act of participation. Through this, those involved are to develop an interest in taking responsibility, and gain a sense of ownership of their innovations and goals. Participation is seen as a means for improving the activities’ legitimization, the stakeholders’ ownership and the solutions’ sustainability. The inclusion of local stakeholders in decision and leaning processes aims at avoiding the negative connotations of ”top-down” implementation.

The mobilization of people in this form of participation is to get things done based on a fixed quantifiable development goal which can be state-directed or externally–directed activities, the ‘top-bottom’ (or directive) approach to community development. In such phenomena participation turns into passive and static events which can then be induced or even coerced participation or a compulsory participation or manipulative participation by the government or other external bodies.

Participation as an end (transformational participation) focuses on participation as a process in which people are directly involved in shaping, deciding, and taking part in the development process from the bottom-up perspective. Here, the development goal is of secondary importance, but the process whose outcome is an increasingly meaningful participation in the development process, direct or active participation from people emerges where their confidence and competence are built up. In this situation, participation becomes a process of achieving greater individual fulfillment, personal development, self-awareness and some immediate satisfaction. The aim for participation focuses on redistributing power and control over socio-political decisions as well as natural and economical resources. These types of projects promote social inclusion, citizens’ participation, good governance, and democratisation at (mainly) low institutional levels.

Participation as an end describes an institutional framework where people are able to co-determinate political decisions which affect their life, livelihood or their social, economic or natural environment. Emphasis is laid on participation as a process in which confidence and solidarity among local people are built up. Participation as a process is a dynamic, unquantifiable and essentially unpredictable element. It is created and moulded by the participants. It is an active form of participation, responding to local needs and changing circumstance. More generally, participation as an end in itself presupposes the building-up of influence or involvement from the bottom upwards. As a result this form of participation has come to be associated with development activities outside the formal or government sector and is concerned with building up pressures from below in order to bring about change in existing institutional arrangements.

These two characteristics (participation as a means and participation as an end) describes the “mode” of participation. Yet, in most cases the applied mode is likely to be a hybrid of the two, which leads to a multiplicity of participation types. Types of participation can be categorized along a spectrum with passive participation at one end and self-mobilisation (active participation) at the other end. Passive participation is where people are told what to do. People’s control is almost non-existent while the role of the external agencies is maximum. On the other end is self-mobilisation (active participation) where the local people themselves are in total command. People have almost total control over the processes while the role of outsiders is at best minimal. So, it is concluded that participation by manipulation and passive participation can’t empower community, but both interactive participation and participation by self-mobilisation can be highly empowering. In between the two extreme, we have several types of participation. Community participation ranges from people passively receiving benefits from development programmes to people actively making decisions about the programme policies and activities. On the basis of participation as a means and participation as an end, several types of participation ordered on a normative scale from the most passive to the most active participation. These types of participation are illustrated as follows:

Types of participation	Characteristics
Manipulative/tokenism Participation (co-option)	Local community representatives are chosen but have no real power or input in decision making. Participation is simply a pretence, with “people’s” representatives on official boards but who are unelected and have no power. Participation is undertaken in a manner contrived (creatively done) by the external agencies (those who hold power) to convince the public that a predefined project or program is best.
Passive Participation (compliance)	The local community participates by being told what has already been decided or has already happened by outsiders. Involves unilateral announcements/decision making by outsiders (an administration or project management) without listening to people’s responses. It is based on information provided, shared and assessed by external “experts.” Therefore, the information being shared belongs only to external agencies/experts. It is a top-down approach to development.
Participation in information giving	The local community participate by answering questions posed by outsiders (extractive researches) using questionnaire surveys or similar approaches. Participants are informed of their rights, responsibilities and options, but are not given the opportunity to influence proceedings, as the findings of the research are neither shared nor checked for accuracy. e.g. surveys for academic research
Participation by consultation	Local people participate by being consulted, and external agents listen to views. Although participants have the opportunity to provide suggestions and express concerns, their input may or may not be used at all or as originally intended in the final decision. The external agents analyze the information provided and decide on course of action. These external agents define both problems and solutions and may modify these in the light of information provided by the participants. Such a consultative process does not concede any share in decision making, and professionals are under no obligation to take on board people's views.
Participation for material incentives	People participate by providing resources, for example labour, in return for food, cash, or other material incentives. The common form of incentive is food for work programmes. Much on-farm research falls in this category, as farmers provide the fields but are not involved in the experimentation or the process of learning. It is very common to see this called participation, yet the local people have no stake in prolonging activities when the incentives end.
Functional Participation (cooperation)	Local people participate by forming groups to meet predetermined objectives related to the project, which can involve the development or promotion of externally initiated social organization. For example, formation of groups to get access to the youth/women fund. Such involvement may be interactive and involve shared decision making and does not tend to be at early stages of project cycles or planning; but rather occurs after major decisions have already been made by external agents. The established groups are dependent on external initiators and facilitators, but over time may become more self-sufficient and self-dependent.
Interactive Participation (co-learning)	Local people and outsiders share their knowledge to create new understanding and work together to form action plans with outside facilitation. Participation is seen as a right, not just the means to achieve project goals. The process involves interdisciplinary methodologies that seek multiple perspectives and make use of systemic and structured learning processes. As groups take control over local decisions and determine how available resources are used, so they have a stake in maintaining structures or practices they have established. A common drawback is that vulnerable individuals and groups tend to remain silent or acquiesce (agree to something passively: to agree or comply with something in a passive or reserved way)
Self-mobilization/active participation (collective action)	Local people participate by taking initiative independent of external institution to change systems. Local people set the agenda and mobilize to carry it out, utilizing outsiders, NOT as initiators or facilitators, but as required by local people. They develop contacts with external institutions for resources and technical advice they need, but retain control over how resources are used. Such self-initiated mobilization and collective action may or may not challenge existing inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Example community volunteering to open up a rural access road.  Self-mobilisation can spread if governments and NGOs provide an enabling framework of support.

3.2.1 Degrees/Levels of Participation

The multitude of definitions of community participation varies mostly by the degree of participation. Community participation is best seen on a continuum, because this emphasizes the importance of the participation process, rather than just the outcome. In this continuum, "participation" ranges from negligible (passive) or "co-opted" - in which community members serve as token representatives with no part in making decisions—to "collective action" (active) - in which local people initiate action, set the agenda, and work towards a commonly defined goal. It is therefore important to recognise different degrees or levels of participation in a ladder or a continuum. A ladder of community participation thus illustrates the degree or level of participation, participants’ role and examples. Community participation can operate on several different levels. The desired level of participation – and therefore specific technique or method – may differ depending on who is included in the community and the motivation of participation. The challenge for many people working with local communities is to move up the ladder and find new approaches that promote active and genuine involvement and empowerment rather than settling for passive processes of providing information and consultation. The following is a summary of the ladder of participation.

Ladder or level of participation

Degree or level of participation	Participants’ role	Examples
High   Low	Has control	Organization asks community to identify the problem and make all key decisions on goals and means. Willing to help community at each step to accomplish goals.
	Delegated authority	Organisation identifies and presents a problem to the community. Defines limits and asks community to make a series of decisions which can be embodied in a plan which it will accept.
	Plans jointly	Organisation presents tentative plan subject to change and open to change from those affected. Expects to change plan at least slightly and perhaps more subsequently.
	Advises	Organisation presents a plan and invites questions. Prepared to change plan only if absolutely necessary.
	Is consulted	Organisation tries to promote a plan. Seeks to develop support to facilitate acceptance or give sufficient sanction to plan so that administrative compliance can be expected.
	Receives information	Organisation makes plan and announces it. Community is convened for informational purposes. Compliance is expected.
	None	Community told nothing.

Figure: Eight rungs on the ladder of citizen participation

The ladder is a simplification but helps to illustrate the significant gradation of community participation. This demonstrates the strident (loud or strongly expressed) demands for participation from the have-nots. The ladder can be seen in the form of community power, tokenism and no participation. The above table can therefore be summarized into the following three ordinal levels of participation:

i)        High degree of participation: Here, the local community is in total control in decision making. The local community identifies the development problem to be addressed and make all key decisions on the goals and means. The community decides on the kind of help from the external agencies.

ii)      Moderate degree of participation: External agencies set the objectives of the development project, present the problem to the community, define the limits and ask the community to make a series of minor decisions about the development project. This happens after the major decisions have already been made by the external agencies.

iii)    Low degree participation: This refers to decisions taken elsewhere and people merely informed beforehand or not at all, of what is intended for them, through the various steps to community ownership and control. Local community is told what has already been decided by the external agencies. The agencies make decisions, plans and unilaterally announces to the community. Community convene for informational purposes.

Note:

It can be seen that there are a multitude of levels and types of participation. It is difficult and maybe not possible to conclude if one type of participation is better than another. Each has a necessary role and it is also dependent on the context within which participation is practised. For example, education and information is necessary if active participation is to be encouraged. However, if literacy levels are low or if there is limited information, then participation can be misused by some groups for personal gains at the expense of the disadvantaged.

3.3 Principles of Participation

The ability of participatory development to fulfill its promise rests in part on the manner in which it is undertaken. Effective participation needs to be undertaken in a manner that is cognizant of:

a)      The mode of participation;

b)      The participants to be involved and the manner in which they should be involved; and

c)      The institutional structure within which local people operate.

Furthermore, effective participation rests on respecting a number of key principles, such as:

i)        Inclusion: Effective community should include all people, or representatives of all groups who will be affected by the results of a decision or a process, such as a development project.

ii)      Equal Partnership:  Effective community participation should recognize all the stakeholders are equal partners in the development project process. Every stakeholder has skill, ability and initiative and has equal right to participate in the process regardless of their status.

iii)    Transparency: Effective community participation should be open and every stakeholder must know of the interests and motives of everyone else in the development project. All stakeholders must help to create a climate conducive to open communication and building dialogue.

iv)    Sharing Power:  All stakeholders must have equal power in the decision making and treated as an equal partner. Authority and power must be balanced evenly between all stakeholders to avoid the domination of one party.

v)      Sharing responsibility: As a result of equal sharing of power, all stakeholders have equal responsibility for decisions that are made, and each should have clear responsibilities within each process.

vi)    Empowerment: effective participation should empower the local community to take control of their lives by gaining confidence and power to articulate their concerns. Participants with special skills should be encouraged to take responsibility for tasks within their specialty, but should also encourage others to also be involved to promote mutual learning and empowerment.

vii)  Cooperation:  Effective community participation should be based on adequate and effective cooperation among all the stakeholders involved. Through cooperation, participation ensures sharing of everybody’s strength reduces everybody’s weaknesses.

These principles for effective participation can be applied to all aspects of the development process or project.

3.4 Different Strategies for Community Participation

There is a diverse range of community participation strategies. These strategies range widely in creativity, complexity and the type of technology used. There is no single recipe for selecting the right combination of strategies for a particular development project process and each strategy has advantages and shortcomings. Attaining effective, efficient and equitable community participation depends largely on choosing the appropriate combination of strategies to be used. Each strategy or level of participation is characterized by a different relationship between the implementing agency and the beneficiaries. These strategies are derived from the various types of community participation.

The various strategies for community participation can be classified into a variety of groups depending on one’s interest. But the main four strategies include information sharing, consultation, decision-making and initiating action. The extent to which information is shared, people are consulted and involved in decision-making, and the methods used, are all important to the outcome of participation. In fact most of the uncertainties on participation centre on these aspects.

3.4.1 Information-Sharing Strategy

This strategy entails sharing information about the development project and its objectives and goals with whole community. Informa­tion sharing participation refers to a process where the agency informs intended beneficiaries about the proj­ect, and so flows of information and control are both in downward direction (top-down approach). The local community is put in a position to decide on their involvement in a project by being informed about it. The strategy considers how information about the development project is provided and shared among the various stakeholders (between the local community and the external agency). The external agency should learn things about the community it wishes to assist as well as the community learning more about the agency. Information gathering and sharing fills a knowledge gap, facilitate an action already in process or even legitimize an action. Information sharing occurs when the information about the aims of the development project and the way it will affect the local community is shared with the beneficiaries. This puts people in the picture and can help facilitate individual and collective action. Community participation brings stakeholders together to share and discuss project goals and objectives so that they eventually make combined project or policy decisions, depending on the interests and needs of each.

Very often, only the external agency learns about the local community, i.e. the agency only gathers the information it perceives necessary for its pre-conceived purposes. The strategy is most commonly done through community meetings or information pamphlets. Community participation is passive rather than active, with no empowerment of local people or ownership of the planned activities. The agency rarely tells the community about itself, for example, the policy framework within which it operate, its operational procedures, resource as well as staffing limitations, entitlements etc. Perhaps these bits of information are regarded as irrelevant for the community to have. Sometimes, agency staff may fail to share this information because they believe their beneficiaries to be incapable of comprehending such information. However, a correct beneficiary-picture of the agency can go a long way in preventing the creation of “wrong” expectations in the community.

Therefore, information-sharing strategies do not constitute community participation because they merely require the community to judge a finished or almost finished product. The information-sharing strategies are referred to as “participation as a means to an end”, because participation is generally short-term. Emphasis is placed on achieving the objective and not so much on the act of participation itself. There is no channel provided for feedback. The primary concern is not about gaining long-term social advantages and sustainable development, but rather what community participation contributes to the end product.

3.4.2 Consultation Strategy

This strategy is concerned with the consultations made between the local community and external agencies for opinions, views and suggestions about the development project. The strategy emphasizes on consultation for better understanding. The local community is consulted on key issues for them to provide feedback to the external agencies. The external agencies not only inform clients but also seek their opinions on key issues, a two-way flow of information develops. This presents opportunities for the local community to give feedback to external agencies, who can then use the information about preferences, desires, and tastes to develop designs and policies that achieve a better fit between agency programs and community demand. The external agency offers a number of options and listens to the feedback (views and suggestions) from the local community. This is most commonly done through focus groups or interviews. This is an initial step to involving people and benefiting from their greater knowledge of local conditions and opinions. However, the external agency still retains power and control over decision making. In a process involving consulta­tion information flows are more equal, with the agency often making use of local knowledge; however control is still from the top down. The local community - project beneficiaries respond to project management at various stages by giving their suggestions and views, which is why they are more reactive in their action. There is no share in decision-making by the community.

3.4.3 Decision-Making Strategy

This strategy is concerned with who and how decisions about the various stages of development project are made. It emphasizes on participation in decision making. Information sharing and consultation strategies generally do not lead to increased local capacity or empowerment of local people and institutions, although they can lead to more effective programs. In decision-making partici­pation beneficiaries have some control over the pro­cess. Local community involvement in decision-making, however, either exclusively or jointly with the external agency, is a much more intense level of participation which often promotes capacity building. Decision making may be about policy objectives, project design, implementation, or maintenance, and different actors may be involved at different stages of the project. Thus, the decision to participate in a project may be made by the community, and the choice of technology may be made jointly, after the costs and benefits of the various technological options have been explained by the agency and understood by the community.

Decision making strategy entails encouraging all stakeholders to provide their own ideas and join in deciding the best way forward.  It is vital to recognize that by involving communities in the decision-making process around a project, and giving them responsibility for the ongoing management of the project, a sense of ownership is instilled, opportunities for wider community contributions are opened up and the likelihood of long term success for the project is enhanced.  This is done through project committees or through community initiatives using participatory activities to encourage joint analysis, planning and decision-making. A range of stakeholders have the opportunity to empower themselves and take ownership of the process. Examples of this include public meetings and hearings. Decision-making strategies very often involve a two-way flow of information between stakeholders and external agencies. The beneficiaries are considered as partners in the project because the decisions made by the beneficiaries can effect the course of the project.

3.4.4 Initiating Action Strategy

This strategy is concerned with who takes the initiative of the development project. It emphasizes on initiating actions for better proactive development. Here, participation is more advanced as the beneficiaries initiate action and both infor­mation and control flows are primarily upward (bottom-up approach), from the beneficiary group to the agency, but the donor agency retains some degree of control. In this strategy, people spontaneously organize themselves to take action because of a shared problem or area of interest, rather than respond to inducement from outside agencies. It is true that communities may spontaneously initiate action in order to respond to certain environmental or social changes. Initiating action, within parameters defined by agencies, represents a high level of participation that surpasses involvement in the decision making process. Self-initiated actions are a clear sign of empowerment. Once the local community is empowered, it is more likely to be proactive, to take initiative, and to display confidence for undertaking other actions to solve problems beyond those defined by the project. This level of participation is qualitatively different from that achieved when clients merely carry out assigned tasks.

The local community is encouraged to take the initiative and lead in determining their development agenda. Power and control rests with local community: they are self-mobilised. Local community set the agenda and mobilize to carry it out, utilizing external agencies not as initiators or facilitators, but as required by the local community. External agencies play a consultation or facilitation role as requested by the local community. The local community form groups through the workshop approach in order to assess specific problems. Planning teams are established to deal with a specific planning problem, and problems may include the responsibility for resolving upcoming conflicts. Community participation is not just the means to achieve project goals, but it is seen as a right.

Note:

All stakeholders should understand the different strategies for community participation. They should take the context in which community participation takes place into account in order to assess which strategies indicate very good community participation and to determine how these strategies should be applied. It is crucial to know which combination of community participation strategies works best for a development project. Because each development project is unique and faces different challenges, a strategy that was a success in one community could fail in another.

3.5 Participatory Development

The failure of the top-down approaches to development to solve development problems in the local communities resulted in a shift from imported technical professional solutions to community development based on valuing the ability of the local people, and making efforts to engage them in new and more participatory programmes. Participatory development is viewed as emerging out of the realisation of the shortcomings of the top-down development approaches which became increasingly evident in the 1980s. During this period, the major donors and development organisations began to adopt participatory research and planning methods, with the recognition that the externally imposed and expert-oriented forms of research and planning were ineffective. This, therefore, marked the birth of the bottom-up approaches to development as opposed to top-down blue print. Thus, participatory development.

Participatory development is the active involvement of the stakeholders in influencing and sharing control over development initiatives, decisions and resources that affect their lives. It is broadly understood as an active involvement of people in making decisions about implementation of processes, programs and projects that affect them. This definition stresses dialogue and negotiation among the stakeholders (local communities and external agencies), as well as the fact that through participation people become actors in their own development rather than just passive beneficiaries. Communities are no longer seen as recipients of development programmes; rather, they have become critical stakeholders that have an important role to play in the management of programmes and projects in their areas. Participatory development is driven by a belief in the importance of entrusting local community with the responsibility to shape their own future.

The basic element of participatory development is to view the term participation as the exercise of people’s power in thinking and acting, and controlling their action in a collaborative framework. Accordingly, the key concept of participatory development includes the collaborative effort of people, taking initiatives by themselves in terms of their own thinking and deliberations. It focuses on the importance of local knowledge and understanding as a basis of local action, and direct form of participation at every level of the project cycle. It stands for partnership which is built upon the basis of dialogue among the various actors, during which the agenda is jointly set, and local views and indigenous knowledge are deliberately sought and respected. This implies negotiation rather than the dominance of an externally set project agenda. Thus people become actors instead of being beneficiaries.

Participatory development is the most important approach towards enabling communities to help themselves and sustain efforts in development work. It seeks to engage local populations in development projects. It has taken a variety of forms since it emerged in the 1970s, when it was introduced as an important part of the "basic needs approach" to development. Most manifestations of participatory development seek “to give the poor a part in initiatives designed for their benefit” in the hopes that development projects will be more sustainable and successful if local populations are engaged in the development process. It has become an increasingly accepted method of development practice and is employed by a variety of organizations. It is often presented as an alternative to mainstream “top-down” development. 

Participatory development approach stresses the participation of the majority of the population in the process of development program. This approach views development as a process which focuses on community’s involvement in their own development using available resources and guiding the future development of their own community. The wishes of an individual never superimposes on those of a group. This approach emphasis concept such as: capacity building, empowerment, sustainability and self-reliance.

Advocates of participatory development emphasize a difference between participation as “an end in itself”, and participatory development as a “process of empowerment” for marginalized populations. This has also been described as the contrast between valuing participation for intrinsic rather than purely instrumental reasons. In the former manifestation, participants may be asked to give opinions without assurance that these opinions will have an effect or may be informed of decisions after they have been made. In the latter form, proponents assert that participatory development tries to “foster and enhance people’s capability to have a role in their society’s development”.

3.6 Importance of Community Participation and Participatory Development

Community participation and participatory development are important for many different reasons and offers a range of benefits to individuals, communities, organizations and society as a whole. Positioning the local community as a development actor is important because of the following reasons:

i)        Empowerment: community participation can be both an outcome of empowerment and an effective empowerment strategy. The actual process of participation can inherently empower individuals and communities to understand their own situations and to gain increased control of the factors affecting their lives. This in turn enhances people’s sense of well-being and quality of life. Community participation allows development of skills and builds competencies and capacities within the local community. Involving local people can help them to develop technical and managerial skills and thereby increase their opportunities for employment. Involving local people is a way to bring about ‘social learning’ for both planners and beneficiaries. ‘Social learning’ means the development of partnerships between professionals and local people, in which, each group learns from the other.

ii)      Self-control and self-respect: Literature shows that active participation of the people in activities that affect them is crucial because their involvement in the appraisal, decision-making, planning, implementation and evaluation of their own development projects gives them the sense of ownership and control. Community participation increases people’s sense of control over issues that affect their lives and also promotes self-confidence and self-awareness. This heightened consciousness makes people continuously aware of the reality about them and of their own capacity to transform it. When people have the freedom to participate in activities, it gives them dignity and self-respect.

iii)    Source of information: The local community is the source for information on the conditions, needs and attitude of the local community. The local people have better knowledge of local conditions and constraints (environmental, social, and economic) that it possess as well as the dense network of continuous inter-individual interactions that constitute community life (often labeled ‘social capital’). The community knows more about itself, what it want, and what is best for it than do people working with organizations from outside. Community members are a rich source of knowledge about their community and of energy and commitment to that community. Without them, development programmes and projects will fail because of inaccuracy. The community will trust a development project or programme if they know the twist and turns of it. Participation ensures that local perceptions, attitudes, values and knowledge are taken into account as fully as possible in the development process. It also makes more continuous and comprehensive feedback an integral part of all development activities.

iv)    Contextualized development: The premise of participation is that development should be situated in the social, political, and economic contexts of the people involved. This assumes that poverty results from factors embedded in structural conditions that shape people’s lives. Community participation therefore helps to target resources more effectively and efficiently.

v)      Mobilizing resources and energy: Communities have a wealth of untapped resources and energy that can be harnessed and mobilized through community participation. Involving local people help to increase the resources available for the programme. The local community has something to contribute – and its ideas and views are as valid as anyone else’s.

vi)    Responsibility and commitment: Community participation encourages community responsibility for projects and decisions that are made and individuals are more likely to be committed to plans if they have been participating in the preparation of these plans. Involving local people in planning and implementation of development allows a sense of ownership and make development partners more responsive to the needs of the local community. This increases commitment and uptake.

vii)  Internal assessment: As a result of the better knowledge of itself, communities are assumed to be better able than a central government or an external donor not only to set up priorities, identify deserving beneficiaries, design projects, select techniques and inputs, but also to enforce rules, monitor behaviour, and verify actions. Local people have a great amount of experience and insight into what works, what does not work and why. Development agencies and partners therefore need to learn from the local people.

viii)            Increasing democracy: Community participation is a way of extending the democratic process, of opening up governance and of redressing inequality in powers. Community participation in decision making, planning and action is a human right. It is the right of the community to be involved in any development that targets or affects them. The community has a right to have a say about decision that affect its lives. Participatory approaches are particularly useful in achieving this since they enable vulnerable groups to have a voice and impart their views on issues which they are most often excluded. Hence, from participation by different marginalized groups, development agencies are able to paint a realistic picture of community life. This helps to gather information on community resources and needs for use in development programmes. Due to a diversity of opinions and perspectives from different role players, community participation helps to obtain a balanced perspective of key issues and to identify creative solutions to problems like, for example, the partnership-in-planning approach.

ix)    Effective decisions: Community decisions that involve citizens are more likely to be acceptable to the local people. Better community decisions, by definition, should be beneficial to the local people. Involving local people in identifying needs, planning and taking actions result in better and more creative decisions being taken and more responsive and appropriate services provided. Also, people’s motivation to apply effort and to contribute resources is expected to be stronger when they are let free to choose their objectives and their ways to achieve them rather than being told from above what to do and how to do it By giving communities a voice in decision making, community participation plays an important role in combating social exclusion in a community.

3.7 Capacity Building and Community Participation

Capacity is defined as the ability of individuals and organizations to perform functions effectively, efficiently and sustainably. Capacity is the power of something (a system, an organization, a person) to perform or to produce.  Capacity is the ability to solve a problem, to achieve or sustain a mission, to reach a set of objectives.

Capacity building (also referred to as capacity development) is a conceptual approach to development that focuses on identifying constraints and helping those in need to improve their competencies to overcome such constraints and achieve desired goals. It focuses on understanding the obstacles that inhibit people from realizing their developmental goals while enhancing the abilities that will allow them to achieve measurable and sustainable results. It is strengthening local institutions, transferring technical skills, and promoting appropriate policies. The term capacity building in community development refers to the process of enabling a local community to identify its obstacles to development and overcome them so as to be more effective and efficient in the process of identifying, implementing, monitoring and the evaluation of development projects. It is a mechanism of enabling local people to determine their own values, priorities and act on their decisions. It is the process by which the local community and its stakeholders increase their abilities to:  perform core functions, solve problems, define and achieve objectives; and understand and deal with their development needs in a broad context and in a sustainable manner.

Capacity building raises people’s knowledge, awareness and skills to use their own capacity and, using available support systems, to resolve the more underlying causes of underdevelopment. It includes strengthening the skills, competencies and abilities of people and communities so that they can overcome the causes of their underdevelopment. It involves training and providing access to support and resources that recognizes existing capabilities and strengthens the ability of community organizations and groups to build structures, systems and skills that enable them to participate and take community action.

Capacity building can be seen as transforming the culture and structural designs of communities to become real learning communities. It is a continuous and reciprocal process of adjusting people’s attitudes, values and community practices while building up appropriate knowledge and skills among various stakeholders in a partnership – to strengthen each partner’s ability to make effective decisions about their own lives and to take full responsibility of the consequences of such decisions. Capacity building should respond to the particular needs of individual communities and it may take several different forms:

i)        Confidence building, personal development programmes and community education programmes which enhance skills, self confidence and community morale

ii)      Community development and community leadership training

iii)    Training to assist the development of organizations

iv)    Provision of resources

v)      Training and support

vi)    Design of an accessible information service

vii)  Allocation of resource allocation of resources for the creation of networks and community infrastructures to sustain the development work

3.8 Participation as a Medium of Empowerment

One of the important goals of community development is empowering the people to improve the quality of their lives. Community empowerment can be defined as the process of building up the capacity of individuals, groups, and/or communities to become able to take control of their circumstances to achieve their development goals and improve the quality of lives. It will also imply building up people’s capacity to take active responsibility over their own decisions.  It is the process of enabling people to assume the responsibility to shape their own destiny/development. It is a continual process whereby individuals and/or communities gain in confidence, self-esteem, understanding and power necessary to articulate their concerns, ensure that action is taken to address them and, more broadly, gain control over their lives. The principle of empowerment suggests that people participate because it is their right to do so and participation is the natural result of empowerment.

Empowerment has also been understood as essentially a political process that seeks to redistribute power in favour of the poor and the disadvantaged. The process is marked by an effort by the grass roots to develop new knowledge and skills, which serve people’s specific needs. This will include appropriation and adaptation of technology/skills in extension services so that it serves the people in response to their development priorities and in context of the people’s specific cultural settings and experiences. At the community level, empowerment entails building people’s organization e.g. Lobby groups, Marketing federations, associations, networking, collaborations, linkages

Community participation can be both an outcome of empowerment and an effective empowerment strategy. The actual process of participation can inherently empower individuals and communities to understand their own situations and to gain increased control of the factors affecting their lives. This in turn enhances people’s sense of well-being and quality of life. At the core of the concept of empowerment is the idea of power. Empowerment entails the acquisition of power to actively make decisions about development projects affecting their lives. Empowerment requires power to change (not to be constant and inherent in certain positions) expand. Empowerment equates participation with achieving power in terms of access to, and control of, the resources necessary to protect livelihood.

Community empowerment provides opportunities and experience, to allow community people to be actively involved in the decision making about the programme. This view is based on the recognition of differences in political and economic power among different social groups and classes in a community. Empowerment can be done through: access to information, knowledge, and skills; decision making; and individual self-efficacy, community participation, and perceived control.

The benefits of empowerment

i)        Increased self respect and sense of dignity among people

ii)      Increased access to resources and opportunities for self advancement

iii)    Increased scope for self decision making, with the ability to take responsibility over the consequences of those decisions

iv)    Peoples greater control over their own lives and greater autonomy

v)      Ability to challenge/change the structures and cultures and ideologies which keep people subordinate

STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

4.1 Who is a Stakeholder?

The traditional definition of a stakeholder refers to “those groups without whose support the organization or a development project would fail or cease to exist”. Broadly in community development, a stakeholder is a person, group of persons, or institution that have direct or indirect stake (share or interest) in a development project because they can affect or be affected by the project’s actions, objectives, and policies. Simply, a stakeholder is defined as any group or individual who can affect or is affected (positively or negatively) by the achievement of the development project objectives. It is any person, or group, who has an interest in the project or could be potentially affected by its delivery or outputs. Therefore, stakeholders include any institution or individual that has a latent (hidden) or expressed interest in the development project accomplishing its mission and goals. They are those groups who are vital to the survival and success of a development project. In community development, stakeholders may include project donors, partner NGOs, government agencies, community participants and others.

These stakeholders can be distinguished in terms of the immediacy of their effect and their location. In terms of the immediacy of effect, stakeholders are categorized according to whether they are directly or indirectly affected or affect the development project. There are two categories which are primary and secondary stakeholders. Primary stakeholders are those individuals, groups or institutions who are directly affected by or can directly affect (either positively or negatively) a development project's actions and objectives. As such, the primary stakeholders include the intended users of the improved facilities; in other words the intended beneficiaries of the development intervention or project. They are those groups whose continuing participation is necessary for the survival of the development project. They include local populations (individuals and community-based organizations) in the project/program area, in particular, poor and marginalized groups who have traditionally been excluded from participating in development efforts. For example, the local community residents are the most important primary stakeholders in any community development project. In fact, the hallmark value of community development has been, and remains, resident participation and leadership in the development process.

Secondary stakeholders are those individuals, groups or organizations who are indirectly affected by or can indirectly affect (either positively or negatively) a development project's actions and objectives. They are stakeholders, which play some intermediary role that has an important effect on the project outcome. In other words, they are those who influence a development intervention or are indirectly affected by it. They are not essential to the operations of the organization although their actions can significantly damage (or benefit) the project. These may include the public groups such as the government (provincial administration and line ministries), donors, NGOs (local and international), utilities, private sector, clergy, etc. The primary and secondary stakeholders can further be categorized as key stakeholders because of their significant influence upon or importance within a development project.

Another distinction of stakeholders is in terms of their location where the stakeholders are categorized depending on whether they are internally or externally located in the targeted community. Here, we have internal and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders are those stakeholders who are actively and directly involved in the project execution. They are the stakeholders who are formally members of the project coalition and hence usually support the project. They work within the organization that is promoting or implementing the policy. They are as project owners in the sense that they have overall managerial responsibility and power in the project. For example, owners, users, client, project managers, facilities managers, designers, subcontractors, suppliers, process and service providers, banks, insurance companies, etc

External stakeholders are those stakeholders positively or negatively affected by the project in a significant way, but not directly involved in execution of the project. They are not formal members of the project coalition, but may affect or be affected by the project. They may seek to influence the project through political lobbying, regulation, campaigning or direct action. External stakeholders can be further broken down into private and public actors. Examples of private actors are local residents, local landowners, environmentalist and conservationists; examples of public actors are regulatory agencies, local governments and national governments. Therefore, external stakeholders may have a direct legal authority over the project. For example, neighbours, the local community, local government, potential users, regulators, environment groups, the media, legal authorities, community representatives, general public, government establishments, regional development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, universities, research institutes, land owners, etc. Sometimes, internal stakeholders are regarded to be equivalent to primary stakeholders and external stakeholders to be equivalent to secondary stakeholders.

Stakeholders are socially constructed (constructed by the surrounding society) but with recognizable powers. Although stakeholding is usually self-legitimizing (those who judge themselves to be stakeholders are stakeholder), all stakeholders are not equal and different stakeholders are entitled to different considerations. Different stakeholders may have commonality of purpose at a very general level, but at a more detailed level, they would wish to impose different purposes and priorities. The purposes and priorities emerge from the political interplay between the different stakeholder groups.

Stakeholder engagement is the process by which an organization involves people who may be affected by the decisions it makes or can influence the implementation of its decisions. It is the art or science of engaging and managing stakeholders to ensure they best support to the project. It is premised on the notion that ‘those groups who can affect or are affected by the achievements of an organization’s purpose should be given the opportunity to comment and input into the development of decisions that affect them. The stakeholders may support or oppose the decisions, be influential in the organization or within the community in which it operates, holds relevant official positions or be affected in the long term. It is extremely difficult to do well and the success of the project depends on it. Stakeholder involvement is more than just holding a public hearing or seeking public comment on a new regulation. Effective stakeholder involvement provides a method for identifying public concerns and values, developing consensus among affected parties, and producing efficient and effective solutions through an open, inclusive process. Managing that process requires some attention to the logistics and synergies of creating and operating a team of diverse people pursuing a common goal. It is vital to community development planning, implementation, and evaluation, ensuring that development projects are appropriate, effective, and sustainable. The process of stakeholder engagement starts with stakeholder analysis.

4.2 Stakeholder Analysis

A key element in participatory development is the ability to identify stakeholders, their needs, interests, relative power and potential impact on project outcomes. Various stakeholders have different motives and interests in a community development project. Different stakeholders are involved, each with different aims and capabilities. Stakeholders participate at different levels, from passive involvement to active empowerment. The level of participation of each stakeholder may change at different phases of a development process (analysis, planning, doing and reviewing). Development tends to work best when all stakeholders can participate to their desired level throughout the development process. It is therefore crucial to analyze these interests and expectations both early in the planning process and again when the project is being carried out. This is done in a process known as stakeholder analysis.

Stakeholder analysis in community development is the process of identifying the individuals or groups that are likely to affect or be affected by a proposed development action, and sorting them according to their impact on the action and the impact the action will have on them. It is a process of systematically gathering and analyzing qualitative information to determine whose interests should be taken into account when developing and/or implementing a policy or program. It is a methodology for identifying and analyzing the key stakeholders in a project and planning for their participation. It is used to identify and assess the importance of key stakeholders that may significantly influence the success or failure of a development project. After identification, it then considers the stakeholders’ expected support for or opposition to the project. This is done by analyzing the attitudes of stakeholders towards a community development project. It is, therefore, the starting point of most participatory processes and provides the foundation for the design of subsequent stakeholder activities throughout the project cycle. A thorough stakeholder analysis should be carried out in the early planning stages of all Bank-supported projects, and reviewed and refined from time to time as the details of project design become more detailed and definite.

Stakeholder analysis seeks answers to the following fundamental questions:

i)        Who are the key stakeholders (primary/secondary) of the proposed project?

ii)      What are the interests of these stakeholders?

iii)    How will they be affected (positively/negatively) by the project?

iv)    Which stakeholders are most important for the success of the project?

v)      How will various stakeholder groups participate throughout the life of the project?

vi)    Whose capacity needs to be built to enable them to participate?

A fundamental requirement of all community development projects is that the objectives reflect the needs of the stakeholders and not merely the needs of institutions. All parties that are likely to be affected by a community development project--positively or negatively, directly or indirectly--should be included in a process of sharing their views on the issues, potential for changes or improvements, results, and repercussions of changes. This procedure is generally carried out in a workshop setting, with representatives of key stakeholders.

The objectives of stakeholder analysis are to:

i)           Identify people, groups, and institutions that will influence the development initiative (either positively or negatively).

ii)         Anticipate the kind of influence, positive or negative, these groups will have on the development initiative.

iii)       Develop strategies to get the most effective support possible for development initiative and reduce any obstacles to successful implementation of the development program.

iv)       Develop cooperation between the stakeholder and the project team and, ultimately, assuring successful outcomes for the project. Stakeholder support is needed to create and sustain winning coalitions and to ensure the long-term viability of a community development.

This analysis is used at the preliminary stages of a project in order to incorporate interests and expectations of people and groups significant to a project. Stakeholder analysis is frequently used during the preparation phase of a project to assess the attitudes of the stakeholders regarding the potential changes. It can be done once or on a regular basis to track changes in stakeholder attitudes over time. This information is used to assess how the interests of those stakeholders should be addressed in a project plan, policy, program, or other action. It is performed when there is a need to clarify the consequences of envisaged changes or at the start of new projects and in connection with organizational changes generally. It is important to identify all stakeholders for the purpose of identifying their success criteria and turning these into quality goals.

Conducting stakeholder analysis

A stakeholder analysis is conducted by developing a Stakeholder Analysis Matrix. In order to get a clear overview of the stakeholders and their interests, influence and importance it is useful to use so-called stakeholder analysis matrices. The first matrix gives an overview of the different stakeholders, their interests and their importance and influence. The following are the main steps in stakeholder analysis:

Stakeholder	Stakeholder Interest(s) in the Project	Impact of the project on interest	Importance of Stakeholder for Success of Project	Degree of Influence of Stakeholder over Project	Potential Strategies for Obtaining Support or Reducing Obstacles

1)      Identification of stakeholders: The first step in involving stakeholders in community development projects is stakeholder identification of the relevant stakeholder groups- determining who your project stakeholders are, and their key groupings and sub-groupings. Organize group brainstorming to identify stakeholders. Create a list of your stakeholders. Identify the key stakeholders from the large array of people, groups, and institutions that could potentially affect or be affected by the proposed development initiative/project. In identifying stakeholders consider the following questions:

i)        Who is responsible for the project?

ii)      Who makes the decisions?

iii)    Who can influence decisions?

iv)    Who are the project partners?

v)      Who owns related projects?

vi)    Who will be impacted by project outcomes?

vii)  Who are the targeted beneficiaries?

viii)                        Who can slow or stop the project?

ix)    Who can make the project more effective?

x)      Who can contribute resources?

xi)    Who may be excluded from participating?

xii)  Who is it critical to engage with first, and why?

An initial list of stakeholders can be drawn up on the basis of a desk review of secondary data (publications and documents) and existing staff knowledge of the project, sector and country. This preliminary list must then be verified, modified and enhanced at the country level through: interviews with key informants (government officials, donor representatives, sectoral experts, NGO staff, community leaders); consultations with already identified stakeholders, and; site visits (during which methods of participatory research/data collection may be used as necessary) Special care must be taken at this stage to ensure that the scooping exercise is wide-sweeping and that no marginal groups are inadvertently excluded.

2)      Identify stakeholder interest in the project: Once relevant stakeholder groups have been identified, the next step is to analyze their interests (overt and hidden). Assess stakeholder interests and the potential impact of the project on these interests. Different stakeholders will have different levels of interest and influence over community development projects, depending on a range of issues. These may include their contributions to the project, decision-making power, ability to slow or halt the project and the ability to impact on the effectiveness of outcomes. Therefore, once you have a list of all potential stakeholders, review the list and identify and analyze the specific interests these stakeholders have in the development project. Consider issues like: the project's benefit(s) to the stakeholder; the changes that the project might require the stakeholder to make; and the project activities that might cause damage or conflict for the stakeholder. Key questions to be answered include:

i)        How does each group of stakeholders perceive the problem at hand and proposed solutions? What are their key concerns and interests with respect to the project?

ii)      What are stakeholders’ expectations of the project?

iii)    What does each group of stakeholders stand to gain/lose as a result of the project?

iv)    What conflicts might a group of stakeholders have with a particular project strategy?

v)      How do different groups of stakeholders relate to each other?

vi)    Where is there convergence/divergence between their interests and expectations?

These questions are best answered by stakeholders themselves in the context of a stakeholder workshop. Such a workshop requires careful preparation and could require a full day (depending on the complexity of the project and stakeholder interests).

3)      Assessment of impact: After analyzing the interests (overt and hidden), the next step is to assess the potential influence and importance of the identified stakeholders and the impact of the proposed project on their interests. Now review each stakeholder by asking: how important are the stakeholder's interests to the success of the proposed project? Consider:

a)      The role the key stakeholder must play for the project to be successful, and the likelihood that the stakeholder will play this role

b)      The likelihood and impact of a stakeholder's negative response to the project

Assign A for extremely important, B for fairly important, and C for not very important. This analysis should allow the project team to categorize different groups of stakeholders and to determine the relative priority that the project should give to each stakeholder group's interest. Key questions are:

i)        Who is the project’s targeted primary beneficiaries?

ii)      What is the importance of each stakeholder group to the success of the project?

iii)    What is the degree of influence of each stakeholder group over the project?

iv)    Are special measures needed to protect the interests of primary stakeholder groups that are weak or vulnerable?

The results of the first three steps of stakeholder analysis can be represented in table to provide a clear and comprehensive picture of stakeholder interests, importance and influence. An assessment and comparison of the importance and influence of various stakeholders can be done during the workshop or completed later by the project team.

4)   Stakeholder Prioritization: Outline a stakeholder participation strategy (a plan to involve the stakeholders in different stages of the project preparation and implementation process). The analysis of stakeholder interests and project impacts should allow the project team to categorize different groups of stakeholders and to determine the relative priority that the project should give to each stakeholder group's interest. Key questions are:

a) Who is the project’s targeted primary beneficiaries?

b) What is the importance of each stakeholder group to the success of the project?

c) What is the degree of influence of each stakeholder group over the project?

d) Are special measures needed to protect the interests of primary stakeholder groups that are weak or vulnerable?

The results of the first four steps of stakeholder analysis can be represented in table form (See Table II) to provide a clear and comprehensive picture of stakeholder interests, importance and influence. The first three columns can, ideally, be completed during the first stakeholder workshop. An assessment and comparison of the importance and influence of various stakeholders can be done during the workshop or completed later by the project team.

5)      Stakeholder Action Planning: The ultimate goal of stakeholder analysis is the definition and development of a stakeholder  action plan that outlines the specific activities to be carried out by each stakeholder group (including agreed timelines, inputs and resources, progress indicators, etc.). Some stakeholder groups will have active and continuous roles to play, while others may only need to be kept informed of progress or be involved at certain key moments of planning/implementation. A stakeholder action plan is best drawn up in direct collaboration with those concerned. Again, a participatory workshop (or series of workshops) is often the best way to proceed.

6)      Potential strategies for obtaining support or reducing opposition: The final step is to consider the kinds of things that can be done to get stakeholder support and reduce opposition. Consider how to approach each of the stakeholders. What kind of information will they need? How important is it to involve the stakeholder in the planning process? Are there other groups or individuals that might influence the stakeholder to support the development initiative?

Stakeholder Analysis Table for a Hypothetical Girls’ Education Project Identification of Stakeholder Groups, Their Interests, Importance and Influence

Stakeholder	Stakeholder Interest(s) in the Project	Impact/effect of the project on interest	Importance of Stakeholder for Success of Project U=Unknown 1=Little/No Importance 2=Some Importance 3=Moderate Importance 4=Very Important 5=Critical player	Degree of Influence of Stakeholder over Project	Potential Strategies for Obtaining Support or Reducing Obstacles U=Unknown 1=Little/No Influence 2=Some influence 3=Moderate Influence 4=Significant Influence 5=Very Influential
Ministry of education	Achievement of target	+	4	5
	Control over resources, activities	-
Teachers	Job security	?	3	2
	Support from community	+
	Preference for urban posting	-
Parents	School available in community	+	5	1
	Accountability of teachers	+
	Girls’ help with housework	-
School-age girls	Employment opportunities	+	5	1
	Socializing with peers	+
	Free time	-
Traditional religious leaders	Concern over erosion of traditional values	(?)	2	4
	Attendance at religious schools	(?)
Adult literacy NGOs	Increased literacy	+	1	1
	Financial viability	0
	Improved links with MOE	?

4.3 Approaches for Involving Stakeholders

As a rule of thumb, the appropriate approaches for involving stakeholders of differing levels of influence and importance can be as follows:

i)        Stakeholders of high influence and high importance should be closely involved throughout the preparation and implementation of the project to ensure their support for the project.

ii)      Stakeholders of high influence but low importance are not the target of the project but could possibly oppose the project that you propose. Therefore, you would want to keep them informed and acknowledge their views on the project in order to avoid disruption or hindrance of the project’s preparation and implementation.

iii)    Stakeholders of low influence and high importance require special efforts to ensure that their needs are met and that their participation is meaningful.

iv)    Stakeholders of low influence and low importance are unlikely to be closely involved in the project and require no special participation strategies (beyond information-sharing to the general public).

4.4 Methods for Stakeholder Participation

In principle, different methods can be employed to gather the information required for a stakeholder analysis. Although it is possible to do an entire analysis on the basis of a desk study, it is strongly recommended that other methods of gathering information be employed. Among the possible forms that you could think of are:

i)        Stakeholder workshops, in which selected stakeholders are to discuss the project.

ii)      Local consultations ‘on the ground’.

iii)    Surveys.

iv)    Consultations with collaborating organizations (such as NGOs, academic institutions, etc.).

Using multiple sources of information not only has the advantage that the information obtained is likely to be more accurate, but especially the participatory methods of information gathering (stakeholder workshops, local consultations, etc.) can also contribute to creating a sense of local ownership of the project and consensus about the project objectives. Stakeholder participation techniques range from a low level of involvement to a high level of involvement.

It is important to recognise that a stakeholder analysis is not just a one-time activity, after which you return to the normal ‘order of the day’. As the society in which the project will be implemented is not static but continuously evolving, so will the views, interests and importance of the different stakeholders. As such, it is important to keep analysing the different stakeholders during the different stages of the project.

COMMUNITY NEEDS ASSESSMENT

5.1 What is a Needs Assessment?

Needs assessment is a systematic process for determining and addressing needs, or "gaps" between current conditions and desired conditions or "wants". The discrepancy between the current condition and wanted condition must be measured to appropriately identify the need. The need can be a desire to improve current performance or to correct a deficiency. A needs assessment is an important part of the planning process, often used for improvement in individuals, education/training, organizations, or communities. It can refine and improve a product such as a training or service a client receives. It can be an effective tool to clarify problems and identify appropriate interventions or solutions. By clearly identifying the problem finite resources can be directed towards developing and implementing a feasible and applicable solution. Gathering appropriate and sufficient data informs the process of developing an effective product that will address the groups needs and wants.

Roger Kaufman is considered as the "father of needs assessment". He first developed a model for determining needs defined as a gap in results. This particular emphasis in results focuses on the outcomes (or ends) that result from an organization's products, processes, or inputs (the means to the ends). Kaufman argues that an actual need can only be identified independent of premature selection of a solution (wherein processes are defined as means to an end, not an end unto themselves). To conduct a quality needs assessment, first determine the current results, articulate the desired results, and the distance between the desired results and the actual need. Once a need is identified, then a solution can be selected that is targeted to closing the gap.

Needs assessment can be categorized into two including: extensive needs assessment and intensive needs assessment. The broad difference between extensive and intensive needs assessment is that extensive research uses a large number of cases to determine the characteristics of a population, while intensive research examines one or a few cases in depth to understand cause and effect. One example of extensive needs assessment is SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The objective of SWOT analysis is to identify “strengths” and “weaknesses” (positive and negative attributes of the group, activity, or site) and “opportunities” and “threats” (favorable and negative external factors affecting the organization, community, activity, or site in question). SWOT analysis results in valuable information that can be used, for example, to: define project strategy; assess the relevance of a proposed project or activity; assess the capability of a group (community or organization) to carry out a particular project or activity, or; assess the suitability of a proposed project site (or choose between alternative sites). SWOT analysis can also be used in the context of conducting a stakeholder analysis and in participatory monitoring and evaluation.

The SWOT analysis provides a systematic approach for analyzing options, prioritizing actions, making decisions, and focusing efforts for the greatest impact. Strengths (positives) and weaknesses (negatives) assess the internal and direct factors impacting a community, while opportunities and threats assess the factors that lie outside of the control of the community and local leaders but that can impact community development efforts. Developing a full awareness of your situation can help with both strategic planning and decision-making. The basic process involves gathering information about an organization’s activities and outcomes within a set time period. The figure below lists a simplified version of the SWOT process.

Strengths – List the physical, social, and regulatory assets of the community.

i)        What makes this community unique?

ii)      What do I like about this community?

iii)    What is contributing to a positive community image?

Weaknesses – List the physical, social, and regulatory shortcomings of the community.

i)        What do I dislike about this community?

ii)      What would I like to see less of in this community?

iii)    What is contributing to a poor community image?

Opportunities – List the physical and social entities or assets of the community that are underutilizes or undeveloped.

i)        Where are opportunities for change?

ii)      What would I like to see more of in this community?

iii)    What could change the image of this community?

Threats – List the physical and social entities or assets and regulations that detract from the community or if left unchecked could diminish quality of life for residents and businesses in the community.

i)        What prevents this community from flourishing?

ii)      What are obstacles to community development and or preservation?

iii)    What detracts from a positive community image?

A model SWOT analysis

i)           Recruit research group of 10-20 stakeholders or core group members for one to three meetings lasting approximately two hours each.

ii)         Generate a list of successes and failures of the group or organization over the past year. Allow for some limited discussion of each, without dwelling on any.

iii)       Generate a list of the group’s or organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and the external environment’s opportunities and threats, based on the understanding of successes and failures.

iv)       Brainstorm ideas for maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses while taking advantage of the environment’s opportunities and neutralizing its threats.

Once the group has identified needs, they then generally turn to intensive needs assessment in order to rank the identified needs so they can choose what they will address. An important thing to note is that while the ambitious may want to dive right into their list of needs, generally money and time constraints do not allow for all needs to be addressed and that is where an intensive needs assessment is useful.

As mentioned earlier, intensive needs assessment requires the ranking of priorities. While there are many methods to rank needs, it is important to develop ranking criteria. Feasibility is often used as criteria, but it is often useful for a group to identify their own set of criteria. This part of the research is not so much concerned with developing a detailed plan for solving the needs situation, but rather for examining the depth of the need and potentially required resources. Force field analysis, developed by Kurt Lewin, is one method for facilitating determining needs feasibility. An example taken from Stoecker states that if, “for example, feasibility is defined as degree of staff expertise and time, or funds to buy expertise and time, the force field analysis can look for data indicating available staff expertise and time and/or available external funds and expertise.” The illustration below displays a model force field analysis.

A model force field analysis

i)        Recruit research group of 10-20 stakeholders or core group members for one or more meetings lasting approximately two hours each.

ii)      Review the list of needs developed through a SWOT analysis or other procedure. Allow for some limited discussions of each without dwelling on any.

iii)    Develop criteria for rating the feasibility of meetings needs.

iv)    Using the feasibility criteria, collect information on facilitating and impending forces inside the group or organization and outside it. This can be done through separate data collection or in a meeting if the stakeholders are well informed.

v)      Apply the data to determine the feasibility of meeting each need

5.2 What is a Community Need Assessment?

A community needs assessment is a systematic process for determining and addressing needs, or "gaps" between current conditions and desired conditions or "wants" of a community. The goal is to identify the assets of a community and determine the concern that is faces. In other words, it is used to determine the development needs of a community, justify them and design for ways to fulfill the needs. It is conducted to establish the gap between what the target community or should have and what it already has. It determines the need, how great the need is, and what might work to meet the need. Needs assessments also provide an early opportunity to involve the local community through a process of consultation.

A comprehensive picture of the conditions combined with a good understanding of the causes is indispensable to the achievement of strategic community goals. To obtain accurate information, a needs assessment should be participatory. It provides information that informs the funding agencies on the most pressing needs of a community. It is important because the results of a needs assessment study provide the foundation for the development of new programs and for making changes in existing ones. It is a combination of information gathering, community engagement and focused action with the goal of community improvement. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses (needs) within a community. Community leaders, local government, advocacy groups or a combination of these then address these identified needs through policy change or development.

Community assessments can and should be more than just a gathering and analyzing of data, they can also be a basis for creating change. A community based needs assessment can help the agency address families by providing a snapshot of families in the service area and their economic well being, educational status, health and welfare. Agencies can begin to create change either by setting a framework for programs and plans that work toward ending poverty (or helping individuals and families to move up and out) or family stabilization (helping individuals and families to stop moving down). It can provide important community information as to who may be working on issues and where gaps in community services lie. It provides an opportunity to meet and develop partnerships strengthening services for citizens in the area. A straightforward way to estimate the needs of a community is to simply ask residents their opinions about the development of services within their community, their satisfaction with the services, and what particular services are needed. Their opinions can be used in building an agenda aimed at community change that can build the capacity of community-based organizations that are designed to provide its residents’ services and development opportunities.

There are four key steps in conducting a needs assessment: determine the target community, the kind of information that needs to be collected, the people who will provide the information and how the information will be collected. To obtain accurate information, the assessment should be participatory. It provides information that informs the funding agencies on the most pressing needs of a community. It is important because the results of a needs assessment study provide the foundation for the development of new programs and for making changes in existing ones.

Community assessments can and should be more than just a gathering and analyzing of data, they can also be a basis for creating community change. It can help the agency address families by providing a snapshot of families in the service area and their economic well being, educational status, health and welfare. Agencies can begin to create change either by setting a framework for programs and plans that work toward ending poverty (or helping individuals and families to move up and out) or family stabilization (helping individuals and families to stop moving down). It can provide important community information as to who may be working on issues and where gaps in community services lie. It provides an opportunity to meet and develop partnerships strengthening services for citizens in the area. Finally a community needs assessment helps the agency in its planning process by providing the foundation for strategic operational planning, assessing if the agency is meeting the needs of the community and determining what programs or projects may have become obsolete and what programs or projects may provide new opportunities for the agency. It is the beginning of a comprehensive strategic planning process.

5.3 Objectives of a community needs assessment

A needs assessment should achieve the following:

i)        Enable a programme’s aims and objectives to be specified more clearly.

ii)      Ensure the programme addresses the issues and priorities identified by the community itself.

iii)    Provide an initial check that issues thought to be important by outsiders reflect the priorities of the community.

iv)    Determine which problems/issues identified by a group within the community represent wider concerns.

v)      Provide information on the major stakeholders in the community.

vi)    Indicate the extent to which the community concerned may be mobilised and a community development approach, if appropriate, be adopted. In doing this, it is important to assess community strengths. If the community is cohesive, displaying high levels of integration and involvement, pre-existing networks will be worth tapping into.

vii)  Check on perceptions, interpretations and acceptability of promotion materials, messages, or other interventions.

viii)            Test the appropriateness of implementation approaches and procedures.

5.4 Types of Community Needs Assessment

A community needs assessment can be broadly categorized into three types based on their respective starting points:

i)        Needs assessments which aim to discover weaknesses within the community and create a solution (Community Needs Assessment I).

ii)      Needs assessments which are structured around and seek to address an already known problem or potential problem facing the community (Community Needs Assessment II).

iii)    Needs assessments of an organization which serves the community (domestic violence centers, community health clinics etc.) (Community Needs Assessment III).

Community needs assessments are generally executed in four steps:

i)        Planning and organizing. A needs assessment process begins with planning and organizing phase where stakeholders are identified, local organizations and/or local government begin to collaborate. The planning phase begins with establishing a partnership between those organizations that are likely to be involved in the needs assessment. Depending on the type of needs assessment being conducted one can tailor their approach.

ii)      Data collection,

iii)    Coding and summarizing the needs assessment results, and

iv)    Sharing the results with the community to facilitate action planning.

Strategies for planning and organizing of community needs assessment

1)      Community Needs Assessment I: This type of needs assessment seeks evaluate the strengths and weaknesses within a community and create or improve services based on the identified weaknesses. Organizing this type of needs assessment is primarily structured around how to best obtain information, opinions, and input from the community and then what to do with that information. This process may be broken into targeted questions which can direct the project overall. The following are sample questions taken from “A Community Needs Assessment Guide”:

i)        Define goals for the needs assessment

ii)      What is the specific purpose of the needs assessment?

iii)       How will the data from the community be used; to set a new agenda, support a new program or support new changes in service delivery or policies?

iv)       What is the timeline for the needs assessment?

v)         If applicable, identify the target population. How will a sample from the population be chosen? Are there any special considerations which need to be considered in the most effective way to approach/obtain information and cooperation from said population?

2)      Community needs assessment II: This type of needs assessment is constructed around a known problem or potential problem facing the community for example, disaster preparedness, how to address an increase in violent crime etc. This type of community needs assessment centers less around the direct involvement of the community but rather the governing entities, stakeholders, businesses, advocacy groups and organizations which will be potentially affected or can contribute to the community need. Potential organization questions could include:

i)        Identifying relevant stakeholders. This includes stakeholders affected by the problem or stakeholders of the program/or solution being addressed. The program staff, the funders, the consumers of the program.

ii)      Learn more about the community and its residents

iii)    Review already existing material regarding the community problem or potential problem

iv)    Share your expectations, goals, and approach regarding the needs assessment with the other partners.

v)      Discuss and identify potential users of the agenda/solution likely to be generated by the needs assessment process

3)      Community needs assessment III - This final type of needs assessment is based within an organization which either serves the community at large, is currently addressing a need within the community, or is dedicated to an underserved population within the community. This type of needs assessment centers around improving the efficiency or effectiveness of such organizations. Potential organization questions could include:

i)            Learn about the organizational culture and its philosophy by interviewing staff, including the executive director

ii)          Review existing materials regarding the community need and the organization

iii)         Tour the community and learn more about the target population or problem the organization serves

iv)        Conduct a literature review to see what the recent research has to offer, review relevant archival information and what previous needs assessments by the organization have found

v)          Where is the program in terms of the implementation and development of service delivery?

vi)        What current resources do the organization and its programs offer?

vii)       Identify and learn about the program that would most benefit from a needs assessment.

5.5 Implementing a Community Needs Assessment

The exact methodology to implementing a community needs assessment is partially determined by the type of assessment you are performing (discussed above). However, general guidelines can be proposed:

i)        Use of focus groups

ii)      Creating a needs assessment survey

iii)    Collecting and analyzing data

iv)    Community public forums

v)      Producing a final report and planning action committees

Selecting members of a focus group first requires that you choose a target community, population, or demographic which you will structure your community needs assessment around. This information guides the selection process for a focus group. The principle of the focus group is to select members who are diverse yet share a degree of commonality. This may sound paradoxical yet it isn’t necessarily. Generally speaking the commonality between focus group members is a vested interest and stake in their community. Thus, focus group members might include: “local politicians, business owners, block club leaders and community activists. Another focus group would consist of adult resident of the community; and a third consisting of youth residents of the community”.

Focus groups solicit input from community members on broad, open-ended questions such as:

i)           What do you like about your community?

ii)         What concerns you within your community?

iii)       How would you improve your community?

iv)       What changes do you foresee/fear/want to see in your community within the next 10 years?

Questions such as these can help target potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and needs for change or growth. With the targeted objectives discovered in the focus group, the community needs assessment survey can be created and dispersed. Leaders of the community needs assessment can then summarize the data through computer analysis programs such as Access or SPSS. The results are then brought to the community through a public forum. Public forums are the place where the information collected through the survey, the identified strengths, weaknesses, and concerns of the community are presented for open public discussion. Finally, the results of the focus groups, survey, and public forum present a direction which the final report can detail. Action groups are formed and solutions and guidelines are enacted to ensure the changes desire are realized.

5.6 Conducting a Community Level Needs Assessment

According to Sharma, Lanum and Saurez-Balcazar (2000) “the goals of a 'needs assessment' is to identify the assets of a community and determine potential concerns that it faces”. A needs assessment therefore becomes crucial in the initial stages of an intervention. A needs analysis is focused on identifying the possible barriers to successful program intervention in a community and possibly finding solutions to these challenges. Service providers in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) work are also concerned with assessment and provision of services to different stakeholders. Such services may include an assessment closely related to a needs assessment that focuses on whether current services are effective or not, and if not, identifying the gaps in implementation; or an assessment of whether potential services are likely to be effective once they have been implemented. These assessments highlight the close relationship between needs assessment, monitoring, and evaluation; while each applies similar tools, each also has independent objectives and requires unique skills.

In community development work practitioners are concerned with identifying barriers that stand in the ways of positive community progress. In many cases, an organization or community is faced by challenges with regards to some social issue, provision or access to services and it is the job of the practitioner, in consultation with stakeholders, to decide about how best to go about finding helpful interventions and implementing solutions to this.

A community level needs assessment is beneficial and crucial to any planned intervention on behalf of communities facing difficulties with regard to some community issue. A community level needs assessment will assist the practitioner to determine the nature and scope of a problem at which an intervention might be aimed, with the aim of finding out what possible interventions might be successful in alleviating the problem. A community needs assessment will also uncover which members of the community are most likely to benefit from a planned intervention and who might not be. Community level needs assessment will also give direction to planners in terms of where resources need to be allocated for the intervention so that they are not wasted. Community level needs assessments should include the community at all stages of planning, and should consider all people that might be affected by the planned intervention, including children, the elderly and the mentally ill.

5.7 Tools for an Effective CLNA Project

There are a number of components in a community level needs assessment, all of which are aimed at gathering data that will answer what the practitioner needs to know and inform the decisions that he or she makes. The following are crucial components of a community level needs assessment.

a)      Assessment

Community demographics:

Community demographics assist the practitioner to get a feel of the field that they are working in. Demographics include things like age ranges, the number of people living in a certain area within the community, the number or percentage of people within a certain socio economic status and gender characteristics.

b)      Consumer leadership

Consumer leadership assessment is an assessment of the frequency with which community members use or are likely to use an existing or planned service. This assessment is meant to give an indication of the need for the existing or proposed intervention or service. Consumer leadership assessment is meant to give an indication of the different types of leadership activities and roles that are related to transformation in relation to some health or social issue that is being addressed. This may give an indication as to the degree of the need for an intervention or not.

c)      Service gaps

An assessment of service gaps is meant to give an indication of the types of services that are needed the most at the particular point of time in which the assessment is being conducted. A scale measuring the availability, accessibility, provider choice and cultural responsiveness of services, rated on a scale from 0-no availability/non-existent, to 3-outstanding and responsive is provided. The scale also assesses the availability of other services in the community such as support groups, education and employment services that may be of interest to the practitioner.

5.8 Community Needs Assessment Techniques

There are multitudes of ways to conduct needs assessments - gathering data through conduction of focus groups, surveying, examination of federal, state and local statistics; focusing on target groups’ needs, and assessing the assets in a community to name a few. But the collection of all the information is meaningless unless it is framed within the agency’s mission and vision. The following are the actual tools that can be involved in the process of gathering data to be used in the community needs assessment.

a)      Community/Social Survey

Information is gathered from a representative sample of community residents about issues pertaining to their well-being. Data is collected by personal interviews, telephone surveys, hand-delivered questionnaires or mail questionnaires. Responses are generally representative of the whole community. Surveys can be used especially in relation to the gathering of community demographics where a large number of people may be involved, and also in which multiple variables such socioeconomic status, education levels and employment are being measured in relation to the planned intervention. Large scale surveys involving many people can reveal useful information, while smaller surveys may be less generalizable and used only in the context within which they are conducted. Survey design will vary depending on context, such as internet and phone surveys for well resourced communities or face to face surveys for less resourced communities.

b)      Community mapping

Often, a practitioner may be wanting to implement a service that they think will be of benefit to the community. The problem facing the practitioner will be where and how to place the service at a particular point in the community, and whether that service is likely to be used. Community mapping is where the practitioner gets people in the community to draw a map of the community of the places that they visit the most and how often they go there. This will give an indication of where to locate a service so that it is conveniently placed and accessible to community participants whom it is intended to service. The problem may arise where there are differences between the places that people visit.

c)      Community Forum

A public meeting(s) is held during which time the participants discuss what some of the needs facing the community are, what some of the priority needs are, and what can be done about these priority needs. All members of the community are encouraged to attend and express their concerns pertaining to their well-being and perceived needs.

d)     Seasonal calendar

A seasonal calendar allows the practitioner to look at seasonal trends that may affect the use or implementation of a service in a community. Seasonal trends may reveal decreases in the supply of labour, periods of hunger that may affect for example school children’s performance at school and so on. Seasonal calendars may reveal important reasons for the gaps between service utilization and intervention outcomes. This will allow the practitioner to plan for other things that may not have been considered as part of the intervention but which will greatly improve the quality of the intervention and make life better for the community members. To use the seasonal calendar as a data collection tool, the practitioner gets community members to write a list of the things that they have to do throughout the year. These things are related to work, cultural activities, certain times of the year in which participants are unavailable at all and so on, and to plot how they share them with other members of the community.

e)      Focus group sessions

Using small focus groups to discuss and reflect on issues surrounding the community is a way to start compiling a list of issues that will be included in the needs assessment. Focus groups are sessions in which community members can be answer questions about different aspects of the intervention in the form of planned discussions. The focus groups consists of people who share a common situation to some degree. A group of people selected for their particular skills, experience, views, or position are asked a series of questions about a topic or issue to gather their opinions. Group interaction is used to obtain detailed information about a particular issue. This is a good opportunity to actually find out about the needs and concerns of the community. It is also a good opportunity for addressing service gaps and what needs to be done about them.

Responses in a focus group are typically spoken, open-ended, relatively broad, and qualitative. They have more depth, nuance, and variety. Nonverbal communications and group interactions can also be observed. Focus groups can therefore get closer to what people are really thinking and feeling, even though their responses may be harder -- or impossible -- to score on a scale.” Keep in mind how to arrange the focus groups for maximum openness and encouraging participation.

f)       Key Informant Approach

The Key Informant Approach identifies community leaders and decision makers who are knowledgeable about the community and can accurately identify priority needs and concerns. Key informants complete a questionnaire or are interviewed to obtain their impressions of community needs. The information is then analyzed and reported to the community.

g)      Existing Data Approach

Already existing statistical data is used to obtain insights about the well-being of people. This approach uses descriptive statistics such as census data, labor surveys, bank deposit data, sales tax reports, police reports, school and hospital information to prepare an assessment report for the community.

PARTICIPATORY APPROACHES IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

6.1 Introduction

Chinese Philosopher Lau Tse embodies the essence of the participatory approach to community development in the following poem.

"Go and meet your people, live and stay with them, love them, work with them. Begin with what they have, plan and develop from what they know, and in the end, when the work is over, they will say: "we did it ourselves"( Burkey Dennis, 1977).

This ironic description of Chinese Philosopher Lau Tse has a direct linkage with the theories, concept, principles and approaches of participatory community development.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, a desire by decision-makers to more effectively incorporate the perspectives and priorities of the local people in decision-making, policy development and project implementation led to the emergence of a number of “participatory approaches” to development. This re-orientation towards greater participation in development by individuals was motivated by the desire to move from an emphasis on top-down, technocratic and economic interventions towards greater attention to bottom-up, community-level interventions. Since their introduction in the 1970s, participatory methods and techniques have become central tools for community development. These methods have been applied in a variety of contexts and sectors, including livestock management, village health promotion, watershed management, urban sanitation provision, impact assessments, gender awareness and building micro-credit organizations. Participatory approaches to development are promoted on the basis that they support effective project implementation and enhance the well-being of the poor. They are based on shared ownership of decision-making. This approach is a response to ‘top-down’ approaches to development, in which power and decision-making is largely in the hands of external development professionals. The top-down approach used to be the conventional style of development. However, this had many flaws and was not effective. It also raised questions about whether ‘outsiders’ had the right or the knowledge to set the development agenda of local people.

A participatory approach encourages all members of the community regardless of their difference (including gender, age, social status, etc) to participate in a process which allows them to express their needs and to decide their own future with a view to their empowerment and sustainability. This approach believes that local needs and vulnerabilities often have local roots and context. Through engaging the local members of a community in a development project, it would be easier to understand what the actual issues are on the ground, and what the real local priorities really are. A participatory approach basically motivates community members to take on the challenge of solving their own local problems and issues through participation, rather than through centralization of leadership.

Participatory approach encourages legitimacy, credibility and accountability of development. When the members of the community are involved in the decision making process, they develop a sense of ownership towards the project at hand. The sense of local ownership generates legitimacy, which when combined with credibility create a strong social capital that allows any development project to be carried through. This makes the development credible and sustainable. When a project is designed and implemented with the locals, there is always a better chance that it will be sustained and cared for by these same people, thus it gains more credibility.

Accountability plays a central role in ensuring the maintenance of solid relations between the different stakeholders involved in a development project. There are two types of accountability. The first is the upward accountability which is "associated with relationships that face up the aid chain" (from NGO to donor). The second is the downward accountability which is to the contrary "associated with relationships that face down the aid chain" (from NGO to local beneficiaries). While it is important to build a strong upward accountability, the participatory approach is mainly directly associated with the downward accountability. This is used to describe the level of accountability of NGOs and community development leaders to those who are benefitting from the aid offered. Making development organizations accountable to their beneficiaries encourages for an involvement of the community in order to strengthen both the organizations' and the community's commitment to the local development. it can therefore be said, "involvement begets commitment".

Participatory approaches to development quickly evolved throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Throughout this period, researchers and community organizers sought to improve their understanding of “insider/local knowledge as a balance to the dominance of outsider/western scientific knowledge”. By the 1990s, and continuing to the present, participation had become a mainstream, expected component of development. Engagement of local stakeholders, involvement of poor members of communities, responsiveness to the outcomes of consultations - these have become central tenets of development and (typically) conditions for funding. This is especially true for the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). The growing adoption of a participatory approach to development reflects a continuing belief in a bottom-up approach in which participants becoming agents of change and decision-making. Participation is seen as providing a means through which to enable meaningful involvement of the poor and voiceless in the development process, allowing them to exert greater influence and have more control over the decisions and institutions that affect their lives.

There are many models for participatory research, all of which value democratic participation, community involvement and follow-up action. However, there are a number of ways in which these goals can be achieved. Over the years, a large number of participatory approaches have been developed to meet the needs of different disciplines, settings and objectives. Together, the participatory approaches are commonly referred to as Participatory Learning and Action (PLA). PLA  is an approach for learning about and engaging with communities. It is a practical, adaptive research strategy that enables diverse groups and individuals to learn, work and act together in a co-operative manner, to focus on issues of joint concern, identify challenges and generate positive responses in a collaborative and democratic manner. It combines an ever-growing toolkit of participatory and visual methods with natural interviewing techniques and is intended to facilitate a process of collective analysis and learning. The approach can be used in identifying needs, planning, monitoring or evaluating projects and programmes.

PLA is an umbrella term for a wide range of similar participatory approaches and methodologies, including Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), Participatory Learning Methods (PALM), Participatory Action Research (PAR), Farming Systems Research (FSR), and many others. The common theme to all these approaches is the full participation of people in the processes of learning about their needs and opportunities, and in the action required to address them.

Participatory approaches offer a creative approach to investigating issues of concern to poor people, and to planning, implementing, and evaluating development activities. They challenge prevailing biases and preconceptions about people's knowledge. The methods used range from visualisation, to interviewing and group work. The common theme is the promotion of interactive learning, shared knowledge, and flexible, yet structured analysis. These methods have proven valuable in a wide range of sectors and situations. Participatory approaches can also bring together different disciplines, such as agriculture, health and community development, to enable an integrated vision of livelihoods and well-being. They offer opportunities for mobilising local people for joint action. The common five participatory approaches or research methods used include:

i)        Rapid Rural Appraisal – used to obtain information in a timely, cost-effective, accurate and insightful manner as a basis for development planning and action.

ii)      Participatory Rural Appraisal – a series of exercises that emphasizes local knowledge for rural planning.

iii)    Participatory Poverty Assessments – used to understand poverty from the perspective of a range of stakeholders, particularly the poor.

iv)    Participatory Action Research – used to empower participants and enhance collaboration and expedites knowledge acquisition and social change.

v)      Appreciative Inquiry – a philosophy that the past successes of individuals, communities, organizations are the basis for future success.

Of critical relevance of these methods is community needs assessment which seeking to understand the needs of the community. Each of these participatory approaches or research methods is described in greater detail, highlighting their origin, theoretical underpinnings, implementation techniques and potential barriers.

6.2 Rapid Rural Appraisal

Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) is an effective information gathering approach used by external agencies to learn about the local community and conditions. RRA is used in the identification of community problems, and for monitoring and evaluation of on-going activities. It is useful in gathering information on a broad range of community activities, to develop a better understanding and appreciate interlinked factors. The information (about the community, livelihoods, beliefs and physical environment) collected is used to formulate new hypotheses about the local community. It is conducted by a multidisciplinary team looks at a set of issues that are clearly defined by the study objectives. The multidisciplinary team comprise of members drawn from a variety of appropriate disciplines; with some members having relevant technical backgrounds and others with social science skills. This is so as to provide varying perspectives of the local community and gain a more balanced picture.

These RRA studies typically take only a short time to complete lasting from four to eight days. During this period a multidisciplinary team of researchers looks at a set of issues that are clearly defined by the study objectives. The team works in close collaboration with community members, involving them in all aspects of the collection and analysis of information. Information is collected using a diverse set of tools and techniques that facilitate the participation of community members. The focus is generally on gathering information and ensuring that the information is as rich and as accurate as possible. An RRA generally results in a report that summarizes the research findings. This information can then be used in a variety of ways including project design, improvement of an ongoing project, revision of national policies, etc.

The approach emerged in the 1970s as a more efficient and cost-effective way for outsiders to learn about communities, and particularly about agricultural systems. In RRA, information is elicited and extracted by outsiders as part of a process of data gathering. In other words, data gathering is dominated by outsiders. This assist the external agency to learn about the targeted local community it wishes to assist. It facilitates an action already in process or even legitimizes an action. The external agencies use this information determine the development agenda of the local community. In most cases, the agency only gathers the information it perceives necessary for its pre-conceived purposes. The agency appropriates and come to own the information.  The activities promoted are based on what the outsiders (“experts”) feel the rural people need for development. The local people do not decide for themselves important matters affecting their livelihood.

6.2.1 Theoretical Background and Guiding Principles

Rapid Rural Appraisal is guided by a refined set of principles that require knowledge and skill to apply:

i)        Optimizing trade-offs: The RRA should optimize its activities and focus on things that are most important by balancing the cost of learning and the usefulness of the information provided. It should carefully balance the quantity, relevance, accuracy and timeliness of the information acquired, as well as optimize actual use of the data collected. To be efficient in terms of both time and money, RRA work intends to gather just enough information to make the necessary recommendations and decisions. Avoid the principle of optimal ignorance - knowing what it is not worth knowing, and then not trying to find it out, and principle 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. Not finding out more than is needed nor measuring more accurately than is needed, and so on. It avoids unnecessary details and irrelevant data.

ii)      Triangulation: Triangulation refers to the diversification of perspectives that comes about when a set of issues is investigated by a diverse, multidisciplinary team, using multiple tools and techniques, with individuals and groups of people who represent the diversity of the community. This reduces bias and enhances the quality of information collected. It offset the biases that may result from looking at an issue from a limited viewpoint. This means combining several approaches and sources of information in order to increase the effectiveness, validity and reliability of data gathering and analysis process. In order to get information that is reliable, use triangulation method, this is a form of check and recheck. Triangulation can be done by:

a)      Having a multidisciplinary team to bring different types of experiences and perspectives. At the respondent level, gather information from all gender, ages, ethnic groups and social status.

b)      Utilizing a variety and combination of various techniques. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages. Not all the information needed can be attained, discussed and used with one or two techniques. One technique will complement another.

c)      Identify the various types and sources of information. The validity of each       type of information must be carefully studied with other sources and techniques. For example, the official statistic report on the area of various types of land use in the community must be cross-checked with the community/village map made by the community. Problems suggested by community government officials and community personage, can be cross-checked with statements from the community during the discussion. Different views from team members with different    education background will provide a more complete picture of the information  and also provide deeper examination from various aspects.

Therefore, triangulation, involves cross-checking and progressive learning and approximation through plural (multiple) investigation. This is done using more than one, and often three, sources of information to cross-check answers. To ensure that information is valid and reliable, RRA follow the rule of thumb that at least three sources must be consulted or techniques must be used to investigate the same topics. This is achieved by the use of the multi-disciplinary teams so as to increase the range of information collected.

iii)    Learning rapidly and progressively: Many new issues are raised along with better insights into the problems. It is these new issues and insights that lead to an understanding of the real problems and their solutions. This is done with conscious exploration, flexible use of methods, opportunism, improvisation, iteration, and cross-checking, not following a blueprint program but adapting through a learning process. This involves learning from local people, directly, on the site, and face-to-face, gaining, insight from their local physical, technical and social knowledge. RRA should be conducted in a relaxed manner that emphasizes creativity, curiosity, and conscious exploration. 

iv)    Learning from and with local people: This involves learning from, with and by local people, eliciting and using their symbols, criteria, categories and indicators; and finding, understanding and appreciating local people's knowledge. Local perceptions and comprehensions of situations and problems are essential to learn and understand, since the intention is to plan programmes that are viable and acceptable to the local community. The knowledge base of the local community must be tapped in order to avoid misconceptions about the lives and constraints of this population. The most fundamental principle in RRA is the idea that the information is from, by and for the community. Local people’s perceptions and understanding of resource situations and problems are important to learn and comprehend because solutions must be viable and acceptable in the local context, and because local inhabitants possess extensive knowledge about their resource setting. This means that RRA is built on the recognition and belief of the norms, relevance of the traditional community knowledge and the community’s ability to solve their own problems. This principle is the reversal of the conventional method that ‘teaches’ the community. This involves learning from local people, directly, on the site, and face-to-face, gaining, insight from their local physical, technical and social knowledge.

6.2.2 Techniques for Rapid Rural Appraisal

As with all participatory approaches, there is no one recipe by which RRA may be applied. Rather, RRA responds to the different contexts in which it is used, enabling researchers to take a systematic rather than a standardized approach to understanding problems and identifying opportunities for improvement.

A common design for a RRA, however, may be identified. Often implementation of this approach involves moving through the following series of activities:

i)        Selection of a multi-disciplinary research team;

ii)      Training of research team members in the techniques to be used as part of the research—this step is essential for achieving a consistent set of approaches to data collection;

iii)    Development of a checklist of issues to serve as the basis for questions;

iv)    Random selection of interviewees from various households/farmers and key informants;

v)      Recording data in a form that will be useful to subsequent surveys over the longer term;

vi)    Discussing and analyzing data with team members in order to reach a consensus on what has been learned and what remains unclear; and

vii)  Rapid report writing in the field, as any delay may result in loss of valuable information and insight.

In undertaking these steps, researchers may select from a variety of tools including:

i)        Review of secondary sources, such as aerial photos;

ii)      Direct observation, foot transects, familiarization, participation in activities;

iii)    Interviews with key informants, group interviews, workshops;

iv)    Mapping, diagramming, brief aerial observation;

v)      Biographies, local histories, case studies;

vi)    Ranking and scoring, as a quick means of finding out an individual’s or a group’s list of preferences and priorities, identifying wealth distribution and understanding seasonal changes;

vii)  Time lines; and

viii)                        Short simple questionnaires, towards the end of the process.

In undertaking RRA, as with other participatory and research processes, it is essential that the researcher works to minimize the influence of his/her own biases on the information collected and the conclusions drawn. To offset these biases, individuals undertaking a RRA should seek to undertake this work in a relaxed manner, and focus on listening to the information being provided by participants as opposed to lecturing. Researchers are encouraged to probe issues raised by participants instead of passing to the next topic, and to ensure that they seek out poorer and less powerful people to identify their concerns and ideas.

6.2.3 Advantages

RRA provides researchers with a quick, efficient and cost-effective approach for quantitative and qualitative data collection, analysis and interpretation that helps to cope with the complexity, diversity and interdependency of factors influencing various development issues. As an iterative process, it provides researchers with an opportunity to ask relevant questions as an interview progresses. As well, the use of triangulation allow researchers to: use a variety of tools and techniques to understand a common issue; integrate different disciplines within the same team; and draw information from a range of people representing different segments of a population.

6.2.4 Dangers and Drawbacks

The range of techniques used as part of a RRA can be effective in collecting timely and relevant information, but fundamentally this remains an extractive, externally-driven process with no active community participation. The information collected is retained, assessed and used by the outsiders rather than by the individuals and communities involved in the research. “Participation” is restricted to provision of information to the researcher by the community. The simple test is to examine what value added participation is providing and who owns the product. If the community draws a map because you ask them to, it’s RRA. If they realize that the map belongs to them, and want to keep it for their own use, then it’s PRA.

6.3 Participatory Rural Appraisal

As discussed in RRA, information about the local community is elicited and extracted by external agencies to assist in learning about the targeted local community. The external agencies using this information determine the development agenda of the local community. In most cases the agency only gathers the information it perceives necessary for its pre-conceived purposes. Community participation is passive rather than active, with no empowerment of local people or ownership of the planned activities. Therefore, an alternative approach was developed to encourage local community participation and control of their development agenda known as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA).

PRA has been defined as a family of participatory approaches, methods and tools designed to enable local people to express, formulate and analyze their situation (lives and conditions) in order to plan, make decisions, monitor and evaluate their actions towards improving their situations. That is, it emphasizes local knowledge and is intended to enable local communities to conduct their own appraisal and analysis and to plan and take action. The emphasis in PRA is often not so much on the information as it is on the process and seeking ways to involve the community in planning and decision making. Participatory decision making reflects respect for human dignity by affirming the right of each person to “participate in the making of all decisions which affect [his or her] life and the life of the community” and by creating the opportunity for individuals to fulfill their responsibility to exercise that right.

PRA has a background of the long experience from an expert in, Robert Chambers (1983), in the field of community development working in various developing countries. Based on his experience, the community, especially the marginal class, such as the poor, women, farmers, and children, must be involved in every development process. We must listen to their opinions, complaints, life experiences, hopes and their analysis ability, before we can facilitate them to enable them to create a plan. They are not merely the object of development; we must also help to position them to be development actors.

According to Conyers (1984), positioning a community as the development actor is important because of three reasons. The first reason is: the community is the source for information on the conditions, needs and attitude of the local community. Without them development programs and projects will fail because of inaccuracy. The second reason is: the community will trust a development project or program if they know the twist and turns of it. The third reason is that it is the right of the community to be involved in the community development that targets themselves.

PRA involves learning together with local people about the local community. It provides information about the community (social structures, population, social safety nets, etc), about livelihoods (economic structures and basic human needs), about beliefs (cultural identities that affect decisions and choices), about the physical environment (resources and their locations), etc. The aim is to help strengthen the capacity of local communities to plan, make decisions and take action towards improving their own situation. PRA enables communities to identify and define their own way of sustainable development, a development strategy that is based on real needs, within the skills, capacities and capabilities of their local institutions. PRA helps local communities mobilize their human and natural resources to define problems, consider previous successes, evaluate local institutional capacities, prioritize opportunities and prepare a systematic and site specific plan of action. It places a premium on community articulation and ranking of their development priorities.

Rather than importing and imposing foreign technologies, PRA utilizes and enhances locally conceived sustainable approaches. The underlying concept is that local people are capable of analyzing their own realities and that the outsiders “do not dominate and lecture; they facilitate, sit down, listen and learn…they do not transfer technology; they share methods which local people can use for their own appraisal, analysis, planning action and evaluation”. In other words, external experts are “mere” facilitators of the development process. This means that the local community is facilitated by an outside party - such as researchers, donor or officials - to analyze their life conditions that consist of existing potentials and problems in their community. The community is facilitated to develop a program based on those existing potentials - and also the potentials available outside of their community that are possible to be used by the community - to solve the problems of that community. A PRA exercise devises a management plan known as a Community Action Plan (CAP) or Resource Management Plan (RMP) which helps to guide the community as it implements various programs. It focuses more explicitly on the role of the community institutions and practices, in an effort to identify development plans that community organizations can sustain. Sustainable development is possible only if development projects and programs are built on the priorities and capacities that communities themselves identify.

PRA emerged in the 1980s in response to the too mechanistic and extractive implementation of RRAs. In PRAs the target group is encouraged to learn and the role of outsiders is reduced to a facilitator of the learning process. It involves the direct participation of community members in rural planning using different techniques such as diagrams and maps. It evolved from Rapid Rural Appraisal in both principle and techniques. PRA builds on RRA, but moves much further towards a more holistic approach to participatory development, adding some more radical, activist perspectives. The difference between PRA and RRA is that PRA emphasizes processes that empower local people, whereas RRA is mainly seen as a means for outsiders to gather information about the local community. RRA is a discrete study that last for 4 to 8 days, which a PRA is an extended process that can last for months or years as communities develop their own skills needed to address issues, analyze options, and carry out activities.

Information is more generated, analyzed, owned and shared by local people as part of a process of their empowerment. Outsiders (professionals) only encourage and allow local people to dominate, to determine much of the agenda, to gather, express and analyze information, and to plan.  Outsiders are facilitators, learners and consultants.  Their activities are to establish rapport, to convene and catalyze, to enquire, to help in the use of methods, and to encourage local people to choose and improvise methods for themselves. Outsiders watch, listen and learn.  Metaphorically, and sometimes actually, they “hand over the stick” of authority. Instead of outsiders trying to understand the knowledge of the local people, PRA tries to facilitate local people to develop their capabilities. They collect and analyse the data and propose actions to be undertaken. Participation then generates diversity; local people play a part in interpreting, applying, and, sometimes inventing methods themselves.  Local people and outsiders alike are encouraged to improvise in a spirit of play.  The PRA approach is therefore particularly useful as it enables vulnerable groups in a community to have a voice and impart their views on issues which they are most often excluded. Hence, participation by different groups such as women, the elderly, disabled and even school children, researchers, other professionals and development agencies are able to paint a realistic picture of community life through use of the different PRA techniques

In summary, PRA entails shifts of emphasis from:

                        dominating                  to                     empowering

                        closed                          to                     open

                        individual                    to                     group

                        verbal                          to                     visual

                        measuring                    to                     comparing, ranking and scoring

and of experience (if things go well) from:

                        reserve                         to                     rapport

                        frustration                   to                     fun

PRA should be careful to promote an atmosphere that allows for open participation without “Facilitating by Manipulation – Facipulation”.

6.3.1 Theoretical Background and Guiding Principles

Although different practitioners would list different principles underlying PRA and these have been evolving over time, there are certain key principles that form the basis of any PRA activity no matter what the objectives or setting.  They include the following:

i)        Capacity building: This is done by empowering the community. It is the process of enabling a local community to identify its obstacles to development and overcome them so as to be more effective and efficient in the process of identifying, implementing, monitoring and the evaluation of development projects. It is a mechanism of enabling local people to determine their own values, priorities and act on their decisions.

ii)      Reversal learning/Learning by experience (Learning from and with local people): PRA researchers must be prepared to constantly learn from, and with, local people. This involves learning from, with and by local people, eliciting and using their symbols, criteria, categories and indicators; and finding, understanding and appreciating local people's knowledge. Local perceptions and comprehensions of situations and problems are essential to learn and understand, since the intention is to plan programmes that are viable and acceptable to the local community. The knowledge base of the local community must be tapped in order to avoid misconceptions about the lives and constraints of this population. The most fundamental principle in PRA is the idea that the information is from, by and for the community. Local people’s perceptions and understanding of resource situations and problems are important to learn and comprehend because solutions must be viable and acceptable in the local context, and because local inhabitants possess extensive knowledge about their resource setting. This means that PRA is built on the recognition and belief of the norms, relevance of the traditional community knowledge and the community’s ability to solve their own problems. This principle is the reversal of the conventional method that ‘teaches’ the community. This involves learning from local people, directly, on the site, and face-to-face, gaining, insight from their local physical, technical and social knowledge. People’s perceptions and understanding of resource situations and problems are important to learn and comprehend because solutions must be viable and acceptable in the local context, and because local inhabitants possess extensive knowledge about their resource setting.

iii)    Outsiders (researchers, experts and officials) are facilitators; insiders (the community) are actors. As the consequence of the second principle is that the outsiders need to realize that their roles are only as ‘facilitators’ and not ‘actors, teachers, counselors or researchers’. The outsiders are conveners and facilitators, while the insiders are actors and analysts. Usually local people are more knowledgeable about their environment than the external experts (in other words, learn from expertise of non-experts). Their interest, abilities, preference and knowledge needs to be acknowledged and used accordingly during the entire life cycle of the project. The outsiders hand over control, and insiders determine the agenda, categories and details. This requires modesty, the will to learn from the community and positioning the community members as the main source in understanding the conditions of the community. In the application of PRA, the community dominates the activities.

iv)    Optimizing trade-offs: The PRA should optimize its activities and focus on things that are most important by balancing the cost of learning and the usefulness of the information provided. It should carefully balance the quantity, relevance, accuracy and timeliness of the information acquired, as well as optimize actual use of the data collected. To be efficient in terms of both time and money, PRA work intends to gather just enough information to make the necessary recommendations and decisions. Avoid the principle of optimal ignorance - knowing what it is not worth knowing, and then not trying to find it out, and principle 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. Not finding out more than is needed nor measuring more accurately than is needed, and so on. It avoids unnecessary details and irrelevant data.

v)      Triangulation/cross-checking: The basis of cross-checking is that inter-disciplinary groups work closely together enabling situations to be viewed by different people with different perspectives, thus the process benefits from a combination of skills and approaches. Accuracy is also achieved through diverse information from various sources and not statistical replicability. Cross-checking is carried out in relation to: composition of the team, sources of information and diversity of techniques used.

      Triangulation refers to the diversification of perspectives that comes about when a set of issues is investigated by a diverse, multidisciplinary team, using multiple tools and techniques, with individuals and groups of people who represent the diversity of the community. It is the use of several methods, types of information, investigators and disciplines for purposes of cross-checking and progressive learning and approximation. The inclusion of different perspectives and various methods can help ensure that the collected information is complete and reliable. This reduces biases and enhances the quality of information collected. It offset the biases that may result from looking at an issue from a limited viewpoint. This means combining several approaches and sources of information in order to increase the effectiveness, validity and reliability of data gathering and analysis process. In order to get information that is reliable, use triangulation method, this is a form of check and recheck. Triangulation can be done by:

a)      Having a multidisciplinary team to bring different types of experiences and perspectives. At the respondent level, gather information from all gender, ages, ethnic groups and social status.

b)      Utilizing a variety and combination of various techniques. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages. Not all the information needed can be attained, discussed and used with one or two techniques. One technique will complement another.

c)      Identify the various types and sources of information. The validity of each       type of information must be carefully studied with other sources and techniques. For example, the official statistic report on the area of various types of land use in the community must be cross-checked with the community/village map made by the community. Problems suggested by community government officials and community personage, can be cross-checked with statements from the community during the discussion. Different views from team members with different    education background will provide a more complete picture of the information  and also provide deeper examination from various aspects.

Therefore, triangulation, involves cross-checking and progressive learning and approximation through plural (multiple) investigation. This is done using more than one, and often three, sources of information to cross-check answers. To ensure that information is valid and reliable, PRA follow the rule of thumb that at least three sources must be consulted or techniques must be used to investigate the same topics. This is achieved by the use of the multi-disciplinary teams so as to increase the range of information collected.

vi)    Learning rapidly and progressively: Many new issues are raised along with better insights into the problems. Goals and objectives are modified as the team realizes what is or is not relevant. The newly generated information helps to set the agenda for the later stages of analysis. This involves “learning-as-you-go” process. It is these new issues and insights that lead to an understanding of the real problems and their solutions. This is done with conscious exploration, flexible use of methods, opportunism, improvisation, iteration, and cross-checking, not following a blueprint program but adapting through a learning process. PRA should be undertaken on an iterative basis through the flexible use of methods, be open to improvisation, take advantage of opportunities as they arise and cross-check findings. This involves learning from local people, directly, on the site, and face-to-face, gaining, insight from their local physical, technical and social knowledge. PRA should be conducted in a relaxed manner that emphasizes creativity, curiosity, and conscious exploration. Explore, be flexible and interactive, look for opportunities, and improvise.

vii)  Participation: The main aspect of the PRA is learning from, with, and by members of the community. It is important for the outside researchers to live in or close to the community that they are studying where possible. This enables the team to conduct direct observation (one method of cross checking) and have informal contacts with villagers when not actually doing research. Through this the team will be able to build a good rapport and earn the respect of the villagers. In the past much research has been done by urban based professionals who spent the least amount of time possible in rural areas and so failed to gain a deep understanding. This has been referred to as “rural development tourism”.

      All parts of the community must be involved in the research and particular attention should be given to ensure that certain low-profile groups such as women, average and poor farmers, the unemployed, elderly and children are included. In these instances, it is imperative that the research team has their confidence and builds up a rapport through sensitivity and close attention to cultural and domestic differences in lifestyle. The most vocal informants providing vital information are often the leaders of various groups in the village; progressive farmers, outside workers and officials, such as teachers, health workers and agricultural extension officers.

viii)            Flexibility, adaptability and Off-setting biases: Flexibility and adaptability: Pre-determined views and ideas should not cloud judgements. Allowing plans and research methods to be semi-structured and continually revised, enables the PRA techniques and approaches to be adapted and modified as the fieldwork proceeds. Biases pose the biggest impediment to collecting information that accurately reflects local reality. The biases include researcher biases, informant biases, tool and technique biases and study design and implementation biases. Especially those associated with formal research methods. This is done by being relaxed and not rushing, listening not lecturing, probing instead of passing on to the next topic, being unimposing instead of important, seeking out the poor and learning their concerns and priorities.

ix)    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 and is sometimes described as the principle of maximum diversity, or “maximizing the diversity and richness of information”.  This can involve purposive sampling in a non-statistical sense.  It goes beyond triangulation, for it deliberately looks for, notices and investigates contradictions, anomalies, and differences, and includes negative case analysis.

PRA focuses to large degree on the process through which research and/or a development intervention occurs. A properly implemented PRA gives enhanced attention to the inclusion of marginal and vulnerable groups - women, children, aged and destitute - and ensuring their effective participation in development planning and implementation. It also relies upon extensive and creative use of local materials and representations so as to encourage visual sharing and avoiding the imposition of external representational conventions.

6.3.2 Techniques for Participatory Rural Appraisal

There is no 'blueprint' for carrying out a PRA since the procedure will change for each project and will always be adapting. PRA uses various systematic methods rather than standardized approach to enable people to express and share information, stimulate discussion and analysis, and assist participants to organize and initiate changes to a particular problem. Combinations of different techniques and tools can provide 'project flexibility' and offer the chance to cross check data and discover omissions. The choice of methods or techniques used depends on the issue being examined and the context in which the PRA is taking place; there is to prescribed method for conducting a PRA. It provides a sample of the methods that can be used when conducting a PRA, divided into four classes of activities:

i)        Group and team dynamics methods: This includes team contracts, team reviews and discussions, interview guides and checklists, rapid report writing, energizers, work sharing (taking part in local activities), villager and shared presentations, and process notes and personal diaries

ii)      Sampling methods: This includes transect walks, wealth ranking and well-being ranking, social maps and interviews

iii)    Interviewing and dialogue methods: This includes semi-structured interviewing, direct observation, focus groups, key informants, ethno histories and biographies, oral histories, local stories, portraits and case studies

iv)    Visualization and diagramming methods: This includes mapping and modeling, social maps and wealth rankings, transects, seasonal calendars, daily routines and activity profiles, historical profiles, trend analyses and time lines, matrix scoring, preference or pair-wise ranking, venn diagrams, network diagrams, systems diagrams, flow diagrams and pie diagrams

In determining the techniques to use to assist participants to organize and initiate changes to a given problem, a researcher or facilitator should seek methods that:

i)        Have specific and positive impacts - techniques that energize, empower and mobilize the relevant local people;

ii)      Optimize cost and time, while also providing ample opportunity for analysis;

iii)    Emphasize teamwork, bringing together a mix of outsiders and insiders, women and men, and experts from various disciplines;

iv)    Are systematic, to help ensure validity and reliability (such as through partly stratified sampling and cross-checking); and

v)      Enable facilitators to measure and evaluate the impacts of the techniques applied using quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods.

Although the process of a PRA varies with the context, the steps below provide a guide that may be used when applying this approach:

1. Select a site and gain approval from local administrative officials and community leaders;
2. Conduct a preliminary site visit (steps 1 and 2 could include a community review and a planning meeting to share the purpose and objectives of the PRA and initiate dialogue between all parties as well as full participation);
3. Collect both secondary and field data (spatial, time-related, social, technical), and share information with selected communities. In this stage, facilitators may:

a)      Start with a mapping exercise to stimulate discussion and raise enthusiasm and interest, providing an overview of the area/community, and helping to deal with non-controversial information;

b)      Undertake transect walks and seasonal and historical diagramming exercises;

c)      Engage in preference ranking, which can be used to focus the intervention and as an ice-breaker for groups interviews; and

d)     Undertake wealth ranking once participants are confident with the process.

4. Synthesise and analyze data;
5. Identify problems and opportunities to resolve them;
6. Rank opportunities and prepare land maps and resource management plans (a basic work plan for all members of the community);
7.  Adopt and implement the plan; and
8. Follow-up, evaluate and disseminate any findings.

FLOW CHART OF THE PRA PROCESS

6.3.3 Advantages

PRA enables communities to identify and define their own way of sustainable development, a development strategy that is based on real needs, within the skills, capacities and capabilities of their local institutions. PRA helps local communities mobilize their human and natural resources to define problems, consider previous successes, evaluate local institutional capacities, prioritize opportunities and prepare a systematic and site specific plan of action. It places a premium on community articulation and ranking of their development priorities.

The PRA process is very useful in communities as a planning tool, for community unification, sensitization and mobilization towards collective activities. In addition, the PRA is an excellent tool in helping the communities to identify locally available resources and how best they can be used to implement poverty alleviation initiatives. PRA has been used for natural resource planning and management, because it offers an opportunity to generate wealth of social, geographic, economic, political and historical information about the community.  It has also been used as a baseline for further enquiry and research regarding the community.

PRA allows researchers and development workers to learn about a community and develop appropriate interventions through the use of an approach that is flexible and highly responsive to individual difference, situational changes and emerging information. The techniques employed, particularly visual tools such as mapping and calendars, are effective in encouraging participation by quieter individuals, members of minority groups (e.g., women), and those unable to read. They also enable researchers to collect a large amount of information in a relatively short period of time.

6.3.4 Possible Dangers and Drawbacks of PRA

Although PRA is becoming an increasingly adaptable and flexible research tool with a wide range of applications, certain considerations have to be taken into account when deciding if PRA is appropriate to your study:

i)        difficulty of finding the right team

ii)      the adaptability and flexibility of the project structure and its ability to make use of new information, and

iii)    the intended use of the findings and presentation of results

Experience, qualifications, teamwork and the commitment to project objectives are critical in determining the success of a PRA. If these are not available or do not function correctly, then the study may become counterproductive and the results questionable. The team must constantly review the results and stay focused, concentrating on the value of the data rather than the quantity. If done in haste and heavily constrained, PRA becomes superficial, relying largely on initial findings and merely confirms biases, preconceptions and stereotypes. The key to successful research using these PRA techniques is to achieve time and cost-effectiveness through continual and progressive knowledge building processes. Good PRA skills are only developed through practice and field experience.

PRA does have its limitations. The primary challenge of PRA is that the approach alone does not provide communities with decision-making authority or input into project management. Although PRA has been put forward a means of empowering people to take control of their own knowledge and use it in a manner that will provide them with benefits, the approach has the following limitations:

a)      The risk of raising expectations. Raises expectations that something will be done to address a problem, which, if no follow-up occurs, can lead to local communities seeing PRA as a transient, externally-driven development process. Raising expectations may be impossible to avoid, but can be minimized with careful and repeated clarification of the purpose of the PRA and the role of the team in relation to the project, or government, at the start of every interview and meeting. This is especially so when the PRA team is not well and adequately trained. 

b)      PRA may be externally driven and undertaken to justify intervention plans determined by outside project managers, agencies, NGOs and government officials

c)      PRA may be formulaic and not responsive to or respectful of the specific context in which it is being undertaken

d)     Insufficient time is allowed for the team to relax with the local people, to listen to them, and to learn about the more sensitive issues under consideration. Rushing will also often mean missing the views of the poorest and least articulate members of the communities visited.

e)      Equally, as PRA exercises are normally conducted in groups, the discussion and subsequent results are most likely framed by group dynamics. Indeed, studies in social psychology have long illustrated how members of groups behave differently from individuals on their own. As such, it is likely that the outcome of many PRA exercises is heavily influenced by group dynamics and consequently may present a distorted view of reality to the unaware researcher or practitioner. PRA may hide diversity, and can present a falsely homogenous view of ‘the people’ whose views it represents. As with other research methods, PRA necessarily involves some labeling - into women, men, young, old, rich, poor, household, or community - which can mask internal distinctions within groups.

f)       Does not respond to the potential threat to less powerful members of communities resulting from a PRA that challenges local vested interests through the social analysis conducted. The ‘public’ arena in which most PRA exercises take place are recognized as influencing the actual participation of those people who are the most socially marginalized i.e. the poor.

g)      Inherent biases: Although PRA has been developed in response to the limitations of conventional research, it can easily tend towards bias without careful control. These include:

i)        Elite bias - giving more weight to the articulated and educated

ii)      Concreteness bias - generalisations leading from detailed answers of one individual

iii)    Gender bias - working with women often tends to take much longer and they are often unwilling to talk freely. This can be alleviated by having female researchers and interpreters in the team

iv)    Helping the interviewees with leading questions.

Despite its limitations, the concentrated power of formalization of community knowledge through participatory techniques can generate an impressive amount of information in a relatively short space of time, leaving time for more selective structured formal surveys where they are necessary and of value.

6.4 Participatory Poverty Assessment

In recent years, participatory methods have increasingly been used in national poverty assessments, initially for enabling the poor to express and analyse their priorities and realities. One such a participatory approach that incorporates the views and perspectives of the poor in the community is Participatory Poverty Assessments (PPA). PPA is a participatory approach for measuring and analyzing poverty through the direct involvement and inclusion of the poor people’s views in the formulation of strategies to reduce it through public policy. Participatory definitions of poverty tend to focus on the immediate needs of the poor from the perspective of the poor themselves.  Definitions derived from a process of participation also have a useful role to play in identifying the factors that increase the risk of poverty for a particular group at a particular time. This has demonstrated that people own conceptions of disadvantage often differ from those of professional experts. Evidences from a number of PPAs show that, for poor people, the critical dimensions of poverty are:

1)      Food insufficiency and insecurity

2)      Unsatisfied basic needs, especially for clothing, water and sanitation

3)      Precarious livelihoods, leading to shortages of money to purchase necessities, including health care and education

4)      Lack of assets to provide a basis for secure livelihoods and safety net against insecurity

5)      Powerlessness and lack of self respect

6)      Isolation

7)      Vulnerability to stress and shocks

PPA produces information that can be used for defining poverty reduction strategies and for translating them into programs and services from the perspectives of the poor themselves. It is an iterative participatory research process that seeks to understand poverty in its local, social, institutional, and political contexts, incorporating the perspectives of a range of stakeholders, especially the poor, and involving them directly in planning follow-up action.

PPA is promoted by the World Bank, with the stated aim of helping the perspectives and priorities of the poor influence development cooperation and national policies, particularly in relation to poverty reduction strategies. The poor can and have the possibility to analyze their own facts and conditions. The purpose of PPAs is to improve the effectiveness of public policy in poverty reduction strategies. Its unique approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods based on listening to people allow the research team to shed new light on the nature of poverty in and area. It tells us that development programs can succeed or fail, regardless of the quality of their technical preparation, when they do not address the existential realities of life for the poor. These include their personal beliefs about the nature of development problems; whether their social standing (or gender) allow them a voice in the design and implementation of projects, what kind of hope they possess for their own future and that of their children, their levels of trust in government and donor-financed programs, and the sense of powerlessness felt by the poor in an institutional structure that is perceived as favoring the rich. Understanding these beliefs, perceptions and feelings, can help to guide us to interventions better adapted to the realities of poor people, improving their chances for success.

The approach is rooted in a belief that the development and implementation of a given poverty reduction strategy will be more effective if the views of poor people are taken into consideration. Doing so should help ensure that initiatives address issues that the poor themselves consider important and are implemented through institutional channels that they value. More specifically, PPA is viewed as a means to:

i)        Enhance conceptualization and understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty and its causes. This requires not only a strong presence and participation of the poor but also an understanding of what the causes of poverty and deprivation are from the perspective of poor people;

ii)      Improve participation, providing for wider ownership and for a broader cross-section of society (and particularly the poor) to influence policies and programs that would benefit them in the long-run;

iii)    Enhance policy effectiveness. The effectiveness of poverty reduction policies are more likely to be enhanced with the inclusion of a broad range of stakeholders, particularly the poor and voiceless, and also if such policies address the issues that the poor value most; and

iv)    Increased local capacity as the process enables previously disenfranchised people to directly engage in analysis and monitoring of poverty and policy impacts.

Ultimately, PPA is promoted as a mechanism for expressing the aspirations of people, especially for those who are excluded, voiceless and marginalized, so as to enhance their empowerment and autonomy, and the effectiveness of policies intended to support these aspirations.

PPAs are generally carried out as policy research exercises, linked to governmental policy processes, aimed at understanding poverty from the perspective of poor people – and what their priorities are in terms of actions to improve their lives. PPAs can strengthen poverty assessment processes through:

i)           Broadening stakeholder involvement and thereby increasing general support and legitimacy for anti-poverty strategies;

ii)         Enriching the analysis and understanding of poverty by including the perspectives of the poor;

iii)       Providing a diverse range of valuable information on a cost-effective, rapid and timely basis,

iv)       Creating new relationships between policy-makers, service providers and people in poor communities.

Among the activities that can be included in PPA processes are the following:

i)        Review of existing analysis and research carried out in poor communities using participatory approaches

ii)      Field research in poor communities – involving travelling research teams engaged in participatory research at the community level

iii)    Policy analysis using inputs from PPAs and other sources of information and analysis to influence policy development

iv)    Training of NGO, research institutes, central/local level government staff in methods and approaches for engaging with people in poor communities for research, consultation, planning and action

v)      Creating new networks and relationships within processes of policy formulation and poverty assessment.

6.4.1 Techniques of PPA

The methods used within a PPA have varied depending on time constraints, availability of funds, local research capacity and level of government interest in poverty issues. However, the basic elements of the design of a Participatory Poverty Appraisal may be identified as:

i)        Select technical assistance. Project implementers need to identify the technical assistance required throughout the life of a PPA and identify the individual able to provide this assistance in a responsive and consistent manner.

ii)      Identify implementation partners. Given the diversity of activities involved in a PPA, including financing, policy influence and analysis, technical skills in design and analysis, training, dissemination, and logistics and field management, the involvement of a variety of partners is often required. These partners may come from various levels of government, NGOs (local, national and/or international), research institutions and the private sector.

iii)    Identify objectives and the research agenda. Together, all partners engaged in a PPA should work to determine the fundamental objectives of the assessment and its key elements of implementation. Involving all partners in this process helps ensure greater long-term commitment to the exercise.

iv)    Identify members for the field team. These individuals may be drawn from key partner institutions or from consultants.

v)      Identify sources of financial support. Potential sources include donors, governments and participating NGOs.

vi)    Select field research sites and participants. Various approaches may be used to identify these locations, including selection of candidate locations that fit identified criteria and random sample selection guided by certain criteria. Whichever method is used, it is important to ensure that the criteria for selection are consistent with the objective of the PPAs.

vii)  Develop a methodology for research, synthesis and analysis. PPA designers may develop a methodology that reflects a chosen conceptual framework, such as the Capability Approach. It is advisable that the methodology selected incorporate tools and approaches already known within the country and that a clear plan for documenting the research findings and process at all stages be generated.

Implementation of the PPA can be undertaken through a number of different activities, including:

i)        Gathering of existing secondary information for context, background and triangulation of findings;

ii)      A review of existing analysis and research carried out in poor communities using participatory approaches;

iii)    Field research in poor communities involving travelling research teams engaged in participatory research at the community level. Tools used by these research teams may include:

a.    Unstructured and semi-structured interviewing of individuals and groups;

b.   Facilitated thematic group discussions;

c.    Direct observation;

d.   Case studies and biographies; and

e.    Structured, task-based analytical exercises carried out by research participants individually or, more commonly, in groups, and illustrating their priorities, judgments, understandings, analysis or experiences.

iv)    Policy analysis using inputs from PPAs and other sources of information and analysis to influence policy development;

v)      Training of NGOs, research institutes, central/local level government staff in methods and approaches for engaging with people in poor communities for research, consultation, planning and action; and

vi)    Creating new networks and relationships within the processes of policy formulation and poverty assessment.

6.4.2 Dangers and Drawbacks

Researchers have identified a number of potential dangers in designing and implementing a Participatory Poverty Assessment. These potential drawbacks also may be applied to other participatory processes, and include:

1)         The reliability of the information generated and the policy inferences drawn. There is a risk that the conclusions reached may be biased by the researchers own views and by participants responding to an inquiry so as to reflect what they think the researcher wants to hear or to derive some potential advantage from the anticipated outcome of the assessment. To overcome these concerns, it is important to be transparent about the materials presented in the PPA and the process used to reach the assessment’s conclusions.

2)          Ethical issues in participatory research for policy change. The ethical dilemmas affecting PPA include placing demands on participants’ time (many of whom can not afford to take time away from livelihood activities), raising expectations within a community that change will occur as a result of the assessment, and stirring up divisions within a community if a PPA affects tensions within a community. A variety of strategies have been adopted in PPAs to counter-act the dangers outlined above, including the following:

a.          Only engaging in communities where a follow-up capacity exists to facilitate further action.

b.         Emphasizing carefully and regularly the limits of the exercise. This entails being aware that transparency does not mean just negotiating access with community leaders and officials but ensuring that all participants have a chance to discuss and understand the context of the PPA and the purposes for which they are giving up their time.

c.          “Rewarding” participation, either directly to individuals, or via some form of gift at the level of a collective group (e.g., educational materials for the school).

d.         Structuring the research process so that activities take place at good times for the participants—rather than at the convenience of the researchers.

e.          Ensuring that groups that participate in a PPA remain engaged in the process through feedback on the results of the research at local, regional and national levels. The form of involvement can be weak (e.g., reporting back) or strong (e.g., inviting participants to regional or national meetings to discuss results and conclusions).

3)         The filtering of messages. Power and authority in a PPA process rests with the external researchers. The poor who participate in this process are provided with the opportunity to communicate information, undertake analysis and influence outcomes, but are not offered any form of direct decision-making control or authority. PPAs are most likely to have influence on policies when the approach becomes embedded in the policy formation process.

6.5 Participatory Action Research

Participatory action research refers to is a research method that brings together researchers and community members so that they can work together to identify problems faced by the community, to empower community members to research and create solutions to those problems, and to improve conditions in the community. It is a process in which a group of people with a shared issue of concern collaboratively, systematically and deliberately plan, implement and evaluate actions. It is a process whereby the researchers and stakeholders (those who potentially benefit from research results) collaborate in the design and conduct of all phases (e.g., specification of questions, design, data collection, data analysis, dissemination and utilization) of the research process. It seeks to understand the world by trying to change it, collaboratively and reflectively. PAR makes a concerted effort to integrate participation (life in society and democracy), action (engagement with experience and history) and research (soundness in thought and the growth of knowledge). PAR brings together participation, action and research in an integrated manner. "Action unites, organically, with research" and collective processes of self-investigation. All formulations of PAR have in common the idea that research and action must be done ‘with’ people and not ‘on’ or ‘for’ people. The way each component is actually understood and the relative emphasis it receives nevertheless varies greatly from one PAR theory and practice to another. PAR is not a monolithic body of ideas and methods but rather a pluralistic orientation to knowledge making and social change.

The investigation informs action and the researchers learn from critical reflection on the action. Its ultimate goal is taking action to solve the problem that is at the basis of the research. It is a research which involves all relevant parties in actively examining together current action (which they experience as problematic) in order to change and improve it. It focuses on research whose purpose is to enable action. Action is achieved through a reflective cycle, whereby participants collect and analyze data, then determine what action should follow. The resultant action is then further researched and an iterative reflective cycle perpetuates data collection, reflection, and action as in a corkscrew action.

The stakeholders do this by critically reflecting on the historical, political, cultural, economic, geographic and other contexts which make sense of the current action.  Participatory action research is not just research which is hoped that will be followed by action. It is action which is researched, changed and re-researched, within the research process by participants. It is a form of experimental research that focuses on the effects of the direct actions of practice within a participatory community with the goal of improving the performance quality of the community or an area of concern. It is conducted to answer specific questions and solve specific problems. In other words, it is a research that aims to serve a useful purpose; the focus is on application. It aims at finding a solution for a specific, immediate and concrete practical question or problem in a local setting or organization.

In essence, PAR involves bringing people from various social and political contexts and backgrounds to identify, investigate and take appropriate action on conditions that affect them as community members. It thus seeks to simultaneously (a) address the practical concerns of people by solving an immediate problem and (b) be a tool for education and the development of a critical analysis of social and economic conditions. It has a dual commitment to both studying a system and simultaneously working with participants to change the system so that it will move in a mutually desired direction.

The "research" aspects of PAR attempt to avoid the traditional “extractive” research carried out by universities and governments where “experts” go to a community, study their subjects, and take away their data to write their papers, reports and theses. Research in PAR is ideally BY the local people and FOR the local people. Research is designed to address specific issues identified by local people, and the results are directly applied to the problems at hand. PAR proceeds through repeated cycles, in which researchers and the community start with the identification of major issues, concerns and problems, initiate research, originate action, learn about this action and proceed to a new research and action cycle. This process is a continuous one. Participants in Action Research projects continuously reflect on their learning from the actions and proceed to initiate new actions on the spot. Outcomes are very difficult to predict from the outset, challenges are sizeable and achievements depend to a very large extent on the researcher’s commitment, creativity and imagination.

PAR is a continuous cycle in which insiders and outsiders together decide what needs to be researched on the community problems, design the research to be undertaken (what will be measured and how) and collect the necessary information. This information is then put into practical applications or used to identify new research ideas. PAR seeks to alter the traditional top-down approach to research by collaboratively engaging those experiencing a problematic situation in deciding what information is needed, in collecting and analyzing information, and in taking action to manage, improve or contribute to a just and sustainable society. As outside researchers and community members actively collaborative on all aspects of a research process in ways designed to benefit both, PAR is an effective approach for empowering the local community, or its representatives, to manipulate higher level power structures.

PAR strategies to democratize knowledge making and ground it in real community needs and learning represent genuine efforts to overcome the ineffectiveness and elitism of conventional schooling and science, and the negative effects of market forces and industry on the workplace, community life and sustainable livelihoods. These principles and the ongoing evolution of PAR have had a lasting legacy in fields ranging from problem solving in the workplace to community development and sustainable livelihoods, education, public health, feminist research and civic engagement.

6.5.1 Theoretical Background and Guiding Principles

PAR is distinguished from all other modes of action research by its adherence to four principles:

i)        Empowerment of participants;

ii)      Collaboration through participation;

iii)    Acquisition of knowledge; and

iv)    Social change.

It “embraces principles of participation and reflection, and empowerment and emancipation of groups seeking to improve their social situation”. The approach involves creating critical consciousness and giving participants the skills needed to become “self-sufficient learners”.

6.5.2 Techniques

There are basically five steps to designing PAR:

a)      Reflecting – In this phase, all members of the research team - including both community members and outside researchers - meet together to discuss and define the research problem. This also provides an opportunity for community members to raise concerns as well as to share their views with the outside researchers and with each other. It is the moment where the research participants examine and construct, then evaluate and reconstruct their concerns. Reflection includes the pre-emptive discussion of participants where they identify a shared concern or problem. It is an essential part of the adult learning process, concentrating on learning experiences being applied in everyday living. During reflection, individuals try to make sense of experiences, and find links between events, actions and feelings. The learning experience comprises concrete understanding, observation and reflection, thus forming abstract concepts and testing new situations. Reflection is necessary for continued learning. The connection between the levels of reflection and the level of commitment and interest should not be underestimated. Reflection should as a result include communication of results to participants, providing time and opportunity to review and reflect. Reflection at different levels, namely individual, group and community level, does provide valuable insights into the manner in which PAR as a strategy is implemented. Reflection with a social vulnerability focus assists communities to acknowledge and ponder the factors that contribute to the difficulties they experience.

Reflecting its holistic nature, PAR utilizes a variety of tools to assist with implementing each project.  These methods, which are commonly used in qualitative research, include:

i)        Keeping a research journal;

ii)      Document collection and analysis;

iii)    Participant observation recordings;

iv)    Questionnaire surveys;

v)      Structured and unstructured interviews; and

vi)    Case studies.

b)      Planning – The planning phase is when the research team creates the strategic framework for how they will work with the community and foster an environment of trust and communication between the research team and the larger community. Planning reduces insecurity, increases the effectiveness of the project, defines objectives in an unambiguous manner and provides opportunities for monitoring and evaluation. Planning includes vital steps, namely a SWOT analysis (strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), task breakdown structure, defining the work schedule and also financial planning. Planning has to be flexible to accommodate learning experiences and difficulties encountered. These difficulties include the level of skills and available resources of rural communities. Planning as a result includes setting time frames for various projects or tasks in a participative manner. Planning is a constructive process that arises during discussions among the participants. The completed plan must be for critically examined action by each of the participants and include evaluation of the change. Community members are therefore consulted and assisted in a continuous facilitation effort during the planning process.

c)      Acting – In the acting phase, the strategies determined in the planning phase are carried out. Project implementation comprises putting planning into action, and controlling and monitoring these actions. Analysing available resources at this stage eliminates duplicating of resource transfer, and allocates resources where they are most needed. Requirements for the implementation of plans include the development of detailed actions which need to be taken in accordance with the original plan. These actions must be goal-directed and co-ordinated. Participation, action and implementation always have to occur at grassroots level. Action plans have to be adjusted from time to time, to accommodate changing circumstances, difficulties which arise and resource specifications, which might change. Acting occurs when the plan is put into place and the hoped for improvement to the social situation happens. This action will be deliberate and strategic. It is here PAR differs from other research methods in that the action or change is happening in reality and not as an experiment ‘just to see if it works’.

d)     Observing – In the observation phase, the research team analyses the data generated. It comprises regular monitoring and evaluation from the start of the project, during and at the end of the project. Observing is where the changes as outlined in the plan are observed for its effects and the context of the situation. In this moment research tools, such as questionnaires, can be utilized to ensure proper scientific methods are followed and results have meaning. Observation and Action often occur simultaneously. Commonly used methods for assessing members through observation include self-assessment, worker observations, and reports. Self-assessment is the process whereby individuals assess their own behaviour, by simply recalling, examining and reflecting on their actions with the help of other members or individuals. Self-observation relies on memory to a great extent and therefore self-monitoring could be implemented as a triangulation method. Self-monitoring makes use of data collection by the individual at regular intervals, and in specific situations. Reports by other individuals include individuals who are familiar with the behaviour and action of specific individuals. These are typically women working in the same income-generating group. Data collected in such a manner should be reliable and valid, and not based on rumours or assumptions.

e)      Re-planning - Rural community structures and needs change with time and this has a direct impact on social vulnerability. Re-planning as a result allows for an opportunity for improvement. During the implementation, observation and reflection stages opportunities for future improvement are identified and noted, and are, as a result, implemented during the re-planning stage. Re-planning allows for support of broader social goals and objectives, such as political empowerment, addressing gender issues, and building social structures. During the re-planning phase the recommendations and results were taken into consideration in order to plan for a new intervention such as the introduction of new products. Recommendations included the need for start-up capital, business training, and exploration of existing markets, as well as the discovering of new markets.

Re-planning takes place during all the other stages of the PAR process, due to the value added when errors are detected or information transfer and learning take place. Learning and knowledge transfer is relevant for all role-players during the PAR process. It is therefore clear that re-planning occurs as soon as these aspects are detected. After re-planning the cycle of PAR continues, implementing the re-planning components into a new plan of action. These cycles have to continue for future generations and when new members are added to the income-generating group or ever-changing social structure of the community. This is done to spread the knowledge gained from past experiences, on route to ensuring sustainable communities.

The final outcome of participatory action research should be a more informed, empowered community that has experienced improvements in areas of interest as a result of collaborating with the outside researchers

6.5.3 Advantages and drawbacks

Participatory Action Research is a more holistic approach to problem-solving, rather than a single method for collecting and analyzing data. It thus allows several different research tools to be used as a project is implemented. However, PAR works well if implemented by a facilitator understand the local power structure and the issues. It is best reserved for situations where the external agent is aware of the potential for damage, both to themselves and, more importantly, to the disempowered in the community. It also works best where the external agency has a clear status and relationship with the community and can command resources for a long-term commitment.

PAR is fine if you understand the local power structure and the issues. It is best reserved for situations where the external agent is aware of the potential for damage, both to themselves and, more importantly, to the disempowered in the community. It also works best where the external agency has a clear status and relationship with the community and can command resources for a long-term commitment. However, it is very difficult for PAR to fully extricate itself from the researcher-community relationship that in itself affects local power dynamics. Community participation in such a context should be recognized for what it is - an externally motivated political act. However much the rhetoric changes to participation, participatory research, community involvement and the like, at the end of the day there is still an outsider seeking to change things... who the outsider is may change but the relation is the same. A stronger person wants to change things for a person who is weaker. From this paternal trap there is no complete escape.

6.6 Appreciative Inquiry

Most development projects are designed and delivered using a combination of participatory techniques such as PRA and various workshop methods to uncover local problems, resource constraints, deficiencies and unmet basic needs. These approaches encourage participation, emphasize the importance of local knowledge and address real problems, but they often fail to sustain community participation after the implementing organization withdraws. Generally, development agencies use these approaches to search for and identify community problems. They generate volumes of data that provide great detail on the origins and consequences of local needs and resource constraints. Interventions to address the problems are then developed, usually by consulting with the local community. But at the end of such an approach local people, not surprisingly, often view their community as a place full of problems and needs, most of which require the help of outsiders to overcome. By creating and reinforcing this identity through ongoing exercises during the project cycle, these approaches could have a disempowering effect that contributes to the development workers being viewed as the agents of change in the community, rather than the community members themselves. This viewpoint establishes and entrenches a sense of dependency in the community that the agency must then work to overcome.

These unintended consequences illustrate the need for a shift away from the problem-oriented methods toward processes that build on community achievements, existing strengths and local skills. Development organizations need better methods for engaging local people, so that they can help communities create a shared vision of an equitable and sustainable future and then move toward it through locally initiated and managed project activities. Such methods need to be complemented through capacity-building initiatives at the village level so that community members are able to measure progress toward their vision and to modify their strategies as local circumstances change. Focusing on community strengths has the greatest potential to advance sustainable development at the community level. This builds on local strengths by identifying and reinforcing the adaptive strategies that local people often develop to maintain their livelihoods in adverse circumstances. To enhance its livelihoods approach, a new community development method called appreciative inquiry can be used to capitalizen on past successes in the community. This is done using appreciative inquiry.

Appreciative inquiry is an approach to community development that identifies peak moments within a community and reinforces the conditions that make past achievements possible. It highlights critical incidents and identify actual reasons which lead to success or failure in the past. The reasons extracted from the critical incidents are analyzed and used for future projects.  Appreciative inquiry is a strategy for purposeful change that identifies the best of "what is" to pursue dreams and possibilities of "what could be." It is a co-operative search for the strengths, passions and life-giving forces that are found within every system—those factors that hold the potential for inspired, positive change. AI has been described as:

… the cooperative co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them. It involves the discovery of what gives life to a living system when it is most effective, alive, and constructively capable in economic, ecological and human terms. AI involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. The inquiry is mobilized through the crafting of the ‘unconditional positive question’ often involving hundreds or thousands of people. AI interventions focus on the speed of imagination and innovation-instead of the negative, critical, and spiralling diagnoses commonly used in organizations. In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, design and destiny model. The discovery (the identification of community processes that work well), dream (the envisioning of processes that would work well in the future), design (planning and prioritizing processes that would work well) and destiny or deliver (the implementation –execution- of the proposed design) model links the energy of the positive core to changes never thought possible.

AI identify and build on past achievements and existing strengths within a community, establish consensus around a shared vision of the future, and construct strategies and partnerships to achieve that vision. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving people. AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul-- and visions of valued and possible futures. AI deliberately seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”- and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized. AI is rooted in a philosophical belief that the past successes of individuals and communities are the basis for future success. Its philosophical approach can be applied to the application of participatory processes such as PRA as well as to daily life.

It starts with the belief that every community and every person in that community has positive aspects that can be built upon. It starts with the belief that every community has positive aspects that can be built upon. It asks questions like “What’s working well?”, “What’s good about what you are currently doing?”  It is about the co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their communities or organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI argues, when all members of a community are motivated to understand and value the most favourable features of its culture, they can make rapid improvements. The basic idea is then to build - or rebuild - communities based on strengths rather than weaknesses, around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn't, and on a vision of what is possible rather than an analysis of what is not. Focusing on the positive and working from strengths is more engaging to people than telling them they are a problem that needs to be fixed. People are receptive to being asked to share positive aspects of themselves through the process of telling stories.

AI is founded in a belief that we can choose to study moments of creativity and innovation, or choose to focus on moments of stress and failure. AI practitioners choose to focus on the positive aspects of communities.It turns the problem-solving approach by focusing on a community’s achievements instead of its deficits. One starts with the felt need (identification of the problem), followed by analysis of the causes, analysis of the possible solutions, action planning (treatment) and organizing a problem to be solved.

6.6.1 Theoretical Background and Guiding Principles

Practitioners of appreciative inquiry believe this approach is true to human nature because it integrates different ways of knowing. Appreciative inquiry allows room for emotional response as well as intellectual analysis, room for imagination as well as rational thought. The application of six principles helps to explain the power behind the appreciative approach:

1)      The Constructionist Principle – The principle postulates that social knowledge and community destiny are interwoven. It reflects an understanding that what we believe to be the real world is created through social discourse—that words create worlds. Through social interactions, societies define their understanding of the world, acceptable behaviour, and what is accepted as “reality.” Reflecting this perspective, AI views the words used to describe a situation as critical to conceiving and constructing its current and future state. To be effective as development practitioners, we must be adept in the art of understanding, reading and analyzing communities as living, human constructions. The questions that we ask set the stage for discovering stories from which a new future can be conceived and constructed.

2)      The Principle of Simultaneity – recognizes that inquiry and change are not separate moments, but occur together such that inquiry is intervention. The seeds of change—the things people think and talk about, the things people discover and learn, the things that inform dialogue and inspire images of the future—are implicit in the first questions asked. For AI practitioners, this implies that the questions (positive or negative) asked set the stage for what is found, and what is discovered becomes the stories out of which the future will be conceived and constructed.

3)      The Poetic Principle – states that human organizations, including communities, are an open book that is constantly being co-authored. Its past, present and future are an endless source of learning, inspiration and interpretation. Reflecting this principle, AI puts storytelling at the centre of its implementation. Story-telling is valued as a way of gathering holistic information that includes not only facts but also feelings. As well, through stories, it is possible to inquire into anything as no limits are placed on the language used.

4)      The Anticipatory Principle – postulates that current behaviour is guided by images of the future. People project a horizon of expectation ahead of themselves that brings the future powerfully into the present as a mobilizing agent. For deep change to occur, often an alteration of the active images of the future is required. Communities exist because the people who govern and maintain them share a vision of what the organization is, how it will function and what it is likely to become.

5)      The Positive Principle – reflects a belief that momentum for change requires positive thinking and social bonding - qualities like hope, inspiration and joy in creating with one another. People and communities move in the direction of their questions, and are more likely to be inspired and energized by a positive image of the future than by constant discussion of difficulties. Thus, if development practitioners use positive, provocative questions to guide community development, more longlasting and effective changes will occur.

6)      The Principle of Wholeness – reflects a belief that for an appreciative inquiry to be successful, it needs to be fully collaborative, involving everyone in a community.

6.6.2 Techniques of AI

The basic process of Appreciative Inquiry is to begin with a grounded observation of the “best of what is,” then through vision and logic collaboratively articulate “what might be,” ensuring the consent of those in the system to “what should be” and collectively experimenting with “what can be.” An appreciative inquiry usually proceeds through four stages: discovery, dream, design and delivery.

1. Discovery

The core task in the discovery phase is to appreciate the best of "what is" by focusing on peak moments of community excellence and achievement—when people experienced the community in its most alive and effective state. Participants then seek to understand the unique conditions that made the high points possible, such as leadership, relationships, technologies, values, capacity building or external relationships. They deliberately choose not to analyze deficits, but rather systematically seek to isolate and learn from even the smallest victories. In the discovery phase, people share stories of exceptional accomplishments, discuss the core life-giving conditions of their community and deliberate upon the aspects of their history that they most value and want to enhance in the future.

Through interviews and storytelling, participants discover and explore times when their organization or community was at its best. They identify and analyze the unique factors—such as leadership, relationships, technologies, core processes, structures, values, learning processes, external relations or planning methods—that contributed to peak experiences in their individual lives or in their community.

Various steps and techniques are used to encourage participants to tell stories as richly as possible and help the researcher and the community locate, illuminate and understand what makes the community alive. The key steps in the discovery data collection phase are:

i)        Identify stakeholders: who are the stakeholders and which stakeholders should be involved?;

ii)      Formulate a list of appreciative questions and develop an appreciative interview guide;

iii)    Conduct individual and group interviews using various participatory methods, asking probing questions to reveal underlying values, strengths and factors that led to success;

iv)    Document the stories, accepting all for what they are; and

v)      Analyze the stories to identify strengths and enabling conditions.

2. Dream

In the dream phase, people challenge the status quo by dreaming the ideal community, ie, envisioning more valued and vital futures. This phase is both practical, in that it is grounded in the community's history, and generative, in that it seeks to expand the community's potential. Appreciative inquiry is different from other planning methods because its images of the future emerge from grounded examples of the positive past. They are compelling possibilities precisely because they are based on extraordinary moments from a community's history. Participants use positive stories in the same way an artist uses paints to create a portrait of the community's potential. They think great thoughts and create great possibilities for their community, then turn those thoughts into provocative propositions for themselves.

Based on the values, strengths and hopes discovered through the storytelling and analysis activities, a vision of a desired future is created. This aspect of Appreciative Inquiry is different from other visioning or planning methodologies because the images of the community’s future that emerge are grounded in history.

The vision of the future emerging from an appreciative inquiry is captured by a single, compelling statement or provocative proposition. This statement should fully capture what the community wants to achieve. Examples of provocative propositions include:

i)        “Our farmer organization will develop sustainable environment management plans for each of our members by this time next year,” or

ii)      “This community will do whatever is necessary to build a long-term care facility for community members infected with HIV/AIDS within the next two years.”.

The Dream provocative proposition should be achievable because it is based on past periods of excellence, but also represent a challenge and require the participants to do something beyond “business-as-usual.”  The Dream phase is usually run as a large group conference or workshop in which participants are encouraged to envision their group or community as if the peak moments discovered in the “discovery” stage were the norm rather than the exceptional.

3. Design

In the design phase, the new structures and processes required to achieve the Dream are determined. Planning takes place at three levels: action planning on short-term objectives; discussion on long-term strategies to achieve more challenging goals; and consideration of structural changes. Through further inquiry and discussion, participants write “micro” provocative propositions that make explicit the qualities, behaviours, organizational structures and steps required for a group or community to achieve the “macro” vision identified during the Dream stage. Participants create a strategy to carry out their provocative propositions. They do so by building a social architecture for their community that might, for example, re-define approaches to leadership, governance, participation or capacity building. As they compose strategies to achieve their provocative propositions, local people incorporate the qualities of community life that they want to protect, and the relationships that they want to achieve.

To implement this stage, a small team of the participants is typically trained and empowered to design ways of creating the community’s dreamed future. In practice, the Dream and Design stages often take place at the same time.

4. Delivery

The final phase involves delivering the dream, and beginning the cycle of inquiry again. The delivery of new images of the future and is sustained by nurturing a collective sense of destiny.  In this stage, people act on their provocative propositions, establishing roles and responsibilities, developing strategies, forging institutional linkages and mobilizing resources to achieve their dream. It is a time of continuous learning, adjustment and improvisation in the service of shared community ideals. This takes place as new information, perspectives and community strengths are discovered thereby renewing the appreciative cycle. The momentum and potential for innovation is high by this stage of the process. Because they share positive images of the future, everyone in a community re-aligns their work and co-creates the future. Appreciative inquiry is a continual cycle. The destiny phase leads naturally to new discoveries of community strengths, beginning the process anew.

6.6.3 Advantages

The strength of AI is in its ability to assist groups and communities to understand their capabilities and develop positive visions for their future. By identifying and reinforcing positive, constructive actions, relationships and visions within a given community, Appreciative Inquiry encourages local ownership in activities that contributes to quality of life.

6.6.4 Dangers and Drawbacks

The success of an Appreciative Inquiry depends in large part on the skills of the facilitator, who must be able to engage participants in positive thinking and focus on strengths. The facilitator typically needs to internalize a belief in focusing on the positive and bringing an appreciative approach to all of their interactions with the group or community with which they are working.

PARTICIPATORY MONITORING AND IMPACT ASSESSMENT OF COMMUNITY PROJECT

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation and Impact Assessment represent the final phase of the PRA process. It represents a radical departure from traditional monitoring and evaluation approaches where monitoring and evaluation was left totally in the hands of the funding agency, who in turn contracted external consultants to carry out the evaluations. The results of this approach has been that, either the funding agency considers the monitoring and evaluation report as a mere formality and does not make any adjustments to projects as suggested in the evaluation reports, or that, it takes drastic steps following negative reports and ceases funding and wind-up programs without regard to the key participants of their projects, ie, the communities. The traditional monitoring approach has often left the communities unhappy about continued funding of “bad/failing” projects as well as failure to fund what in the communities’ perception are “good” projects. When making a monitoring system, it must be participatory. Therefore a participatory monitoring and evaluation system must have the concepts of participation, monitoring and impact which often mean different things to different people.

7.1 Participation

Community participation is defined as a process of equitable and active involvement of all stakeholders in the formulation of development policies and strategies and in the analysis, planning and implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development activities affecting their lives. In a participatory monitoring system, local people should be fully involved in designing the system. The external agency work with the local community to define the goals of the monitoring and assist the local community to develop their own system based on local perceptions of what needs to be monitored (leading to identification of indicators) and how the monitoring will take place (the methods). The local people collect, analyse and control the information, and use the information to improve their situation.

7.2 Monitoring

Monitoring is defined as the systematic and continuous process of assessing the progress and change resulting from project activities. It can also be defined as the regular collection and analysis of information to assist timely decision making, ensure accountability and provide the basis for evaluation and learning. It is a continuous function that uses methodical collection of data to provide management and the main stake holders of ongoing project or programme with early indications of progress and achievement of objectives. Simply, it is the tracking the key elements of programme/project performance on a regular basis (inputs, activities, results). Participatory monitoring involves local beneficiaries in measuring, recording, collecting, processing and communicating information to assist local development project extension workers and local group members in decision-making.

Monitoring is a management tool used to measure project implementation to ensure that correct activities are being conducted according to the plan. Participatory monitoring involves both the local community and the development project staff collectively, systematically and continuously assessing the progress and change resulting from project activities implemented in the community. Monitoring should be carried out on an ongoing basis to ensure that the aims and objectives of the project are being met and to readjust programming based on lessons learned to date. Internal evaluations are important not only to measure effectiveness, efficiency and project progress but also to help develop project ownership on the part of both the external agencies and the local community. It assists in determining whether a programme has achieved its intended outcomes. There are two types of monitoring:

i)        Monitoring implementation of activities (sometimes called process monitoring)

ii)      Monitoring impact of activities (sometimes called impact monitoring)

7.1 Impact

Impact refers to the effect of a development project on the local community. Development impact assessment involves a process to comprehensively evaluate the consequences of development on a community. The assessment involves three components:

i)        Describing the changes which have occurred in a community since the start of a project

ii)      Relating these activities to project activities, if at all

iii)    Understanding the link between the change which has resulted from the project and human welfare

All these three components are important during impact assessment. For example, it should be assumed that improved household incomes automatically provide benefit in terms of improved household welfare. Improved incomes may be realized but the market prices for basic goods and services are high.

The assessment process should be an integral part of the planning process as it provides extensive documentation of the anticipated economic, fiscal, environmental, social and transportation-related impacts of a particular development on a community. It provides a framework for addressing this issue. It is designed to assist local planners and decision-makers in understanding, ahead of time, what types of impacts a particular development may have on a community, thus allowing time for avoidance or mitigation of any adverse effects of a proposed development. 

Features of Participatory Impact Assessment

a.       Aims to empower local people: enable people to articulate their own vision to work towards achieving set objectives

b.      Community is fully involved in the process: it helps them to own the project so they can plan, implement, monitor and evaluate it

c.       Community identify their own indicators of success: based on goals, activities, decisions and results

d.      Methods are simple, open and with immediate of sharing results

e.       Built in from the start of a project

f.       Flexible to fit the local context

Guidelines for Analyzing Specific Development Impacts 

i)        Evaluate both positive and negative impacts of the proposed development for each of the impact areas. 

ii)      Focus on significant impacts, not on the nominal effects of development. 

iii)    Consider direct impacts as well as cumulative impacts of the development. The cumulative impacts are often the most difficult to assess, yet may have the most significant consequences. 

iv)    Give high priority to community values and long-term goals of the community when assessing impacts. 

v)      Involve the community in evaluating impacts, especially during the socio-economic impact assessment process. 

It should be noted that development impact assessment is designed to assess the impacts of development taking place at one point in time and space. Although many of the concerns are similar, it would have to be adapted to understand the impacts of many increments of development over time or across an extensive area. 

Benefits of Conducting a Development Impact Assessment 

Development may have a substantial impact on a community’s financial, environmental and cultural resources. Development impact assessment provides an opportunity for communities to gain advance understanding of the potential impacts of a particular development, so that they may plan to both efficiently meet new service demands (e.g., additional road construction or water line installation) and avoid potential environmental or social costs that may accompany the development. Development impact assessment is also important because it: 

i)        Promotes communication and conflict resolution among external agencies and the local community. The assessment process involves collaboration between external agencies and local community to identify concerns, exchange information and evaluate potential impacts associated with the development. The process is also a valuable tool for minimizing the risk of conflict between groups about the proposed development. 

ii)      Encourages responsive and informed decision-making. The assessment of impacts helps ensure that local officials acknowledge and respond to citizen concerns. Active involvement of both citizens and local officials in the assessment can lead to informed decisions that are consistent with long-term goals of the community. 

iii)    Addresses the range of potential impacts associated with a proposed development. The development impact assessment process is designed to address the potential , fiscal, environmental, socio-economic, and traffic impacts related to a proposed development. The comprehensive nature of development impact assessment ensures that many impacts are considered in the planning process and thus results in more informed development-related decisions. 

iv)    Facilitates interagency cooperation and efficiency. Since comprehensive impact assessment considers the range of potential impacts of a proposed development, the process requires substantial cooperation among various governmental departments to collect and analyze data about the project. For example, a proposal to construct a shopping center on the outskirts of town may require estimates of increased traffic congestion from the Department of Transportation, a biological assessment of the site from the Department of Natural Resources, and a benefit/cost analysis from the Department of Public Works or Planning Department. Moreover, the development impact assessment provides a common repository for information collected from each agency and the public. 

v)      Promotes fairness and consistency in the development process. The systematic approach applied during the assessment process ensures that all impacts are considered for each proposed development. 

vi)    Identifies resource needs and constraints. An important component of the development impact assessment is that the process helps local officials identify public services that need to be expanded or public facilities that need to be built or improved upon to accommodate growth. It also identifies, in advance of development, potential resource constraints (e.g., financial or environmental resources) that may impede the success of a proposed development. 

In summary, participatory monitoring and impact assessment can be useful because:

i)        It focuses on changes which local people prioritize and can measure using their own indicators and resources

ii)      It utilizes the indigenous skills to observe change

iii)    It uses participatory methods that often describe trends or compare variables, rather than seek to make precise measurements 

7.3 Evaluation

Evaluation is the systematic collection of information about programme, activities, characteristics, and outcomes of projects to make judgments about the project, improve effectiveness, and/or inform decisions about future programming. It is a process which attempts to determine as systematically and objectively as possible, the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability and the impact of activities in the light of predetermined objectives. Evaluation is not merely the accumulation and summary of data and information about a project. Importantly, evaluation provides managers with well-documented and considered evidence to support the decision-making process. Project evaluation serves two general purposes. Evaluation helps to determine the merit (does it work?) and worth (do we need it?) of a specific programme or project. It aims to answer specific management questions and to judge the overall value of an endeavour and supply lessons learned to improve future functions, planning and decision making. Participatory evaluation assists in adjusting and redefining objectives, reorganizing institutional arrangements or re-allocating resources as necessary. Monitoring and evaluation system allows continuous surveillance in order to assess the local development project‟s impact on intended beneficiaries.

An evaluation should provide information that is credible and useful, offering concrete lessons learned to help partners and funding agencies make decisions. Evaluation helps decision-makers determine if a project should be continued and, if so, suggests ways to improve it. Additionally, evaluation documents project (and program) accomplishments. If the project has been designed properly with well-articulated objectives that specify what must be accomplished, to what degree, and within what time period, the evaluation can determine whether or not the objectives are being met. The evaluation can gather information as to why a project is or is not meeting its objectives. On the overall, participatory evaluation is important for the following reasons:

a.       Involving local people in project evaluation is one of the learning objectives of participatory management.

b.      Apart from project’s impact on the life of the people, it is also worthwhile to evaluate: i) attitudinal changes in the local community about their role and sense of responsibility; ii) if people have gained confidence in their ability to undertake new activities; and iii) lessons about people‟s capacity, extent of participation and community responsibilities.

c.       It provides an opportunity to the project implementation committee to assess deficiencies in the project design - if objectives and work plan were realistic, if local funding was adequate and whether project actually owned by the people.

d.      Answers to these questions indicate future precautions and modifications in the method and approach. This in itself is an achievement in capacity building at the local level.

7.4 Indicators

In order to understand change, we need to measure things. Indicators are characteristics of a process of activity which are measured during monitoring and impact assessment. An indicator is a “pointer” that helps you to measure progress towards achieving results. It is important to realize that indicators do not tell us the whole story about the project. They are specific, measurable aspects of a project which help us to communicate complex processes and trends to a wider audience. We cannot measure everything in a project, but instead a number of indicators are chosen to represent important activities and change. The proper selection of the indicators is crucial if monitoring and impact assessment is to produce useful information. When selecting information, the key questions to ask are:

i)        Who is going to use the information and how?

ii)      What information is needed?

It is a very common mistake to select too many indicators that are difficult to measure. Avoid producing too much information than is never used. Indicators are commonly categorized into two types including:

i)     Process (outcome) indicators: Measures the implementation of the project activities. Process indicators are usually quantitative. Usually measure a physical aspect of project implementation, for example the procurement or delivery of inputs such as seeds, tools, fertilizer, livestock or drugs, the construction of project assets and infrastructure such as wells or home gardens, the number of training courses run by the project or the number of people trained. Process indicators are useful for showing that project activities are actually taking place according to the project work plan. However this type of indicator may not tell us much about the impact of the project activities on the participants or community. For example, increase household income by 50% at the end of the project.

ii)   Impact indicators: Measures change which occur as a result of project activities. It can be quantitative or qualitative, and usually relate to the end result of a project on the lives of the project participants.  Impact indicators look at the end result of project activities on people’s lives. Ideally, they measure the fundamental assets, resources and feelings of people affected by the project. Most projects involve some sort of direct or indirect livelihoods asset transfer, such as infrastructure, knowledge, livestock, food or income. These asset transfers sometimes represent impact, but usually it is the benefits or changes realized through the utilization of these assets that represents a real impact on the lives of project participants. . A quantitative impact indicator could be poverty measured in terms of income. A qualitative impact indicator could be improved nutrition. Whereas quantitative impact indicators are often associated with economic impact, qualitative impact indicators are often measures of social welfare. Because of the difficulty in measuring qualitative indicators, they can be quantified using scoring or ranking methods.

The development impact assessment process makes use of existing information, where possible to determine potential impacts of a proposed development. It also employs techniques to gather additional, new information, where necessary. It provides a framework to integrate these data, models, spatial and statistical analyses and experiences in other locales to predict development impacts. For each, impact area (i.e. fiscal, environmental, socio-economic, and transportation), this guide provides a series of worksheets, questions and other methods that may be used to collect information that will assist local officials and planners in assessing impacts. 

When Should a Development Impact Assessment be conducted? As soon as a development is considered and well before substantial capital has been committed, an analysis of potential impacts should begin. Once a draft plan of the proposed development has been submitted to the community, it is appropriate to begin thinking about the potential impacts of the development on the community, especially whether or not the project is consistent with the community’s plan or vision for the future. It is also important to keep in mind that the development impact assessment must be responsive to changes in the proposed development (e.g., size, scope, type of development). 

Who is this Guide Written for? This guide is intended for use by community leaders, planners, extension agents and community residents. Ideally, the development impact assessment should be pre-pared by a planner or staff person in the community who has knowledge of and is responsible for the issues addressed in the assessment. It may often be appropriate for the individual(s) in charge of the assessment to seek the assistance of a community task force or planning commission. Development impact assessment presents the community with an opportunity to provide valuable input into the local planning and decision-making process. 

7.5 Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation

Participatory monitoring and evaluation is an approach which involves local people, development agencies and policy makers deciding together how progress should be measured and results acted upon. It is a process through which stakeholders at various levels engage in monitoring or evaluating a particular project, program or policy, share control over the content, the process and the results of the monitoring and evaluation activity and engage in taking or identifying corrective actions. It focuses on the active engagement of primary stakeholders. It is a process that involves stakeholders at different levels working together to assess a project and take any required corrective action. Participatory community monitoring and evaluation is extremely important for learning about the achievement/deviation from original concerns and problems faced by local development projects/programmes being implemented, so that corrective measures can be taken in time.

Monitoring and evaluation are important not only for donors and implementing agencies, but also for project beneficiaries. No matter how development specialists measure the technical outcomes of a project, the criteria beneficiaries use to evaluate their own experiences will determine the sustainability of a project. Monitoring is undertaken as an ongoing process throughout the project cycle, while evaluations are usually conducted at project mid-term, completion or ex-post. The stakeholders groups typically involved in participatory monitoring and evaluation include project beneficiaries (including women and men at the community level), intermediary organizations (including NGOs), private sector firms involved in the project, project staff, and government authorities at all levels.

Why is Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation important?

a.       Participation is increasingly being recognized as being integral to the M&E process, since it offers new ways of assessing and learning from change that are more inclusive and more responsive to the needs and aspirations of those most directly affected.

b.      PM&E is geared towards not only measuring the effectiveness of a project, but also towards building ownership and empowering beneficiaries; building accountability and transparency; and taking corrective actions to improve performance and outcomes.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation should fulfill four key functions:

i)        help build capacity of stakeholders to reflect, analyse, and take action;

ii)      help develop lessons learned that can lead to corrective action;

iii)    provide stakeholders and program managers with information on the degree to which the project is meeting its objectives, and used resources, and;

iv)    help program staff improve program implementation.

What are the principles of Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation?

i)        Conventionally, monitoring and evaluation has involved outside experts coming in to measure performance against pre-set indicators, using standardized procedures and tools.

ii)       PM&E differs from more conventional approaches in that it seeks to engage key project stakeholders more actively in reflecting and assessing the progress of their project and in particular the achievement of results.

Core principles of PM&E are:

i)        Primary stakeholders are active participants – not just sources of information

ii)      Building capacity of local people to analyze, reflect and take action

iii)    Joint learning of stakeholders at various levels

iv)    Catalyzes commitment to taking corrective actions

PME should be:

i)        Demonstrative, not instructive in writing

ii)      Collaborative, not individualist or directive

iii)    Explorative, not repetitive

iv)    Listening to, not lecturing

v)      Interactive, not dominating

vi)    Qualitative, not quantitative

vii)  For community/people, not project-oriented

Aim of participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E)

i)        To assess information or generate data on development activities being carried out at the local community level.

ii)      To facilitate monitoring and evaluation by beneficiaries of different development activities.

iii)    To increase beneficiaries‟ commitment and understanding in designing, planning and implementing community-based development projects or programmes.

CHALLENGES TO EFFECTIVE PARTICIPATION AND PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT

6.1 Challenges for Effective Participation

"People today have an urge - an impatient urge - to participate in the events and processes that shape their lives. And that impatience brings many dangers and opportunities" (UNDP, 1993: 1)

Effective participation and participatory development faces many criticisms and challenges. The main challenges or criticisms to effective participation include:

1)         Coordination and integration of diverse interests into the project plan and implementation. When community participation involves many diverse groups, bringing together their different needs in the design and implementation of the project can prove to be very challenging. Diverse interests may give rise to collective action problems as well as conflict among participants as others may feel that they are not well integrated when the final outcomes seem to be significantly different from what they perceived in the outset of planning process. Community participation can bring latent conflicts to the surface and it can delay project start-up, while increasing the demands on project personnel and managers. Illiteracy is an inhibiting factor in community participation. This is because illiterate people may be marginalised by professional and technical communication during the community-participation process.

2)         Lack of a clear methodology: Community participation does not guarantee success and there is no clear methodology of community participation. That is why it lacks clear goals and objectives and why it is approached in an ad hoc and unsystematic manner. The result is that evaluating participatory processes becomes difficult, while cynicism and a lack of accountability among practitioners are taking place.

3)         Manipulation by local elites: In most cases, community decision making is dominated by the local elite through elite capture whereby. The local elites impose their own interests and objectives while negotiating projects with external funding agencies.

4)         It is not clear what constitutes a “good” decision when it comes to community participation. It is therefore difficult to assess the attainment of a “good” decision. Although there are attempts to classify a “good” decision according to the level of satisfaction and willingness to participate, for example, the literature does not state what the criteria for “good” decisions are. In other words, research on community participation is lacking as to whether there are legitimate factors for a good decision.

5)         Time consuming and costly: Community participation is time-consuming and it is difficult to judge to what extent projects are participatory. Community participation can be costly in terms of time, money and skills. However, it should be remembered that obstacles to community participation are directly related to one’s perspective of community participation. When compared with traditional forms of development, participatory development is sometimes criticized for being costly and slow. A project may take longer if one has to engage, work and come to a consensus with local communities, than if one did not have to do these things. Participatory development may also have higher start up costs than traditional development. In addition, it is criticized for reaching a smaller population than traditional development. Community dialogue and augmentation may initially involve only a few individuals, whereas dropped food aid reaches hundreds of people.

6)         Generalization: Participatory development projects have been accused of treating communities as if everyone in them is the same. This issue has been raised most specifically with regard to gender. Critics suggest that while many organizations acknowledge the importance of including women in development projects, the history of success has been limited. This may be because development projects seek to address women’s immediate needs “without addressing underlying aspects of gender subordination such as the unequal division of reproductive labour, restrictions on female mobility, domestic violence, women’s lack of autonomy and so on”. Critics have also said that participatory development projects fail to adequately address other inequalities such as class and caste.  In trying to give voice to communities, development agencies may connect only with elite members of a group, thereby re-enforcing local inequalities.

7)         Tokenism: Participatory development projects have also been accused of enabling tokenism, where a few “hand picked” local voices are allowed to speak as a “rubber stamp to prove...participatory credentials”. This view suggests that organizations only include local voices to improve their image, without really seeking to engage the population with which they are working.

8)         Unequal power relations between external agencies and the community: Fundamentally, it is important to acknowledge the unequal power relations and potential  conflicts at the centre of any participatory process. Outsiders initiating a participatory exercise, for whatever purpose, inherently have more power than the community members with whom they are to work. As well, there are power inequalities in any community where an intervention takes place. For participation to enhance the capabilities of the poor, both of these factors need to be recognized and their potential negative impacts minimized.

9)         The political conditions/power structures of the country and project area. These may vary in different forms and degrees from a decentralized, laissez-faire and/or free enterprise system to a fully centralized, strongly planned and/or controlled one. They may vary furthermore in regard to their degree of stability. Accordingly, widely differing situations can be found ranging from full support of the central and/or local government to participation of the poor to indifference and hostility versus this approach.

In fact, in a number of countries the urban and rural elites, influence the political and administrative structures to such an extent that any policy to encourage genuine participation of rural people is either inexistent, or strongly opposed, and/or by various means neutralized or strained. For example, by prohibitive legislation, exasperating government control, alleged unavailability of funds and/or personnel and so on.

10)     Legislative obstacles. Community participation is not a legislated requirement in all countries. Many countries therefore lack supporting legislation and an institutional framework to ensure that stakeholders are effectively and efficiently engaged in the decision-making process. Governments may have a problem to delegate authority and power and, although requirements to empower stakeholders in the decision-making process may exist in law, this has not always been translated into practice. This leads to confusion and disillusionment in the process as the rights and responsibilities of different stakeholders may not be clarified. Countries that have a history of repression are often challenged by mistrust between different sectors of society. This remains to be the case despite various attempts that are being made for higher levels of community participation. People may still fear adverse consequences if they openly express a difference of opinion. In various countries freedom of association either does not exist or only formally; in other ones where the right of association, including of small farmers, labourers, etc., is recognized in the laws, the labour legislation is inadequate and/or scarcely applied in practice. Under the influence of vested interest groups the laws might further be interpreted and/or applied in such ways that (part of) the rural poor are prevented from organizing themselves.

11)     Administrative obstacles. Centralized public administrative systems that control decision-making, resource allocation and information, may ostracize participation. The staff in  such structures frequently disdain people's involvement. Also complex, bureaucratic procedures impede genuine participation as well as one-way, top-down planning performed solely by professionals; the same can be said of rural development planning done in urban centres and hardly based on need assessments in the field.

12)     Socio-cultural impediments. A serious obstacle is the widespread mentality of dependence, sense of frustration as well as distrust in officials among low income rural people. The latter are frequently dominated by local elites to whom they have to leave key decision-making. All this forms part of the “culture of poverty” of the silent, excluded majority for whom survival is the sole aspiration. Furthermore, the poor form a heterogeneous “group”: there are various categories with class, caste, tribal and religious differences and also with different interests, needs, access to resources as well as potentials. Accordingly, also participation must be planned and promoted according to different local contexts and factions.

13)     Other impediments are: the isolation and scattered habitat of the poor, their low levels of living and heavy workloads especially of the women. Furthermore, their weak health conditions, low level of education and of exposure to non-local information, ignorance of their rights to self-organize groups and lack of leaders and know-how to move in this direction in order to promote their interests.

6.2 Ways to Ensure Effective Participation and Participatory Development

There are several ways to encourage effective community participation and participatory development. It is a collective effort and not just the duty of a certain group of stakeholders. The common ones include:

i)           The community should be empowered to take control over how things are done. People should feel that they can influence the outcome of the project in order for them to participate. They should be mobilised to take collective action aimed at sustainable development. Ignorance can be overcome by disseminating the appropriate information, and change agents should make sure that they are trusted by the community. This should be done by believing in the spirit in solidarity, conformity, compassion, respect, human dignity and collective unity.

ii)         People should also be made aware of their individual rights and be informed about issues affecting them directly. For example, local authorities could invest in public education initiatives. When people are informed and educated, they are an asset in promoting democratic accountability and administrative responsibility. Community participation should become a philosophy and the responsibility of all municipal employees. This kind of participation should become part of the organisation’s vision, mission, work ethic and culture.

iii)       Conditions should be created under which collaborative dialogue can occur around issues that are critical to the community. All viewpoints should be heard and all citizens should have an equal chance to participate in the decision-making process. Promote co-decision-making in defining needs, goal-setting and formulating policies and plans in the implement of these decisions. Communicate both programme/project successes and failure as sometimes failures can be more informative;

iv)       Community participation should seek to give a “voice” to those normally excluded from the process. Listen to community members, especially the more vulnerable, less vocal and marginalized groups. At the same time, community participation needs to be an ongoing commitment with preparedness to begin with “where people are at” rather than set aspirations too high.

v)         Developing critical consciousness about sustainability provides a platform for community participation. Stakeholder education for sustainability becomes a key component in facilitating community empowerment within the participatory development process. For this reason community participation cannot be proclaimed; it has to be developed. Many work with a commitment to participation but with only limited guidance on how to put such commitment into practice. When communities are aware of the issues at stake, they will be more willing to participate.

vi)       One way to strengthen community participation is through the welding of public/community/private partnerships built on existing organisational strengths. Community groups need to be remunerated for undertaking tasks of infrastructure  management and maintenance in partnership or under contract to local government. Only if communities and beneficiary groups participate in project operation and maintenance will sustainability be assured. If communities are to enter into partnerships with local government for the implementation and management of local economic development and infrastructure projects, the capacity to sustain these partnerships will need to be created.

vii)     The external agencies must demonstrate an awareness of their status as outsiders to the beneficiary community and the potential impact of [your] involvement;

viii)   Respect the community’s indigenous contribution as manifested in their knowledge, skills and potential;

ix)       Guard against the domination of some interest groups. Involve a cross-section of interest groups to collaborate as partners in jointly defining development needs and goals, and designing appropriate processes to reach these goals;

x)         Empower communities to share equitably in the fruits of development through active processes whereby beneficiaries influence the direction of development initiatives rather than merely receive a share of benefits in a passive manner.”

These suggestions serve as mere guidelines for community participation. They are provided to help re-orient the thinking of development experts from being implementers to facilitators. As facilitators, development experts and researchers should foster the principle of minimum intervention and respect the indigenous knowledge of the disadvantaged groups in the community.