|
|
|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Contact |  |
Search |
|
People |
| Home | ||||||
|
|
Community participation - Participatory Appraisal for Community Assessment: Principles and MethodsJules Pretty and Rachel Hine Contents
1. Why Participation?Recent years have seen a rapid growth in interest in community participation in a wide range of sectors and contexts, including health, environmental management, urban regeneration, agriculture, conservation, national parks, and local economic development. New forms of engagement are beginning to emerge, resulting in people increasingly getting involved in their own communities and influencing decisions that affect their lives. The complexities of real-world problems need solutions developed by all stakeholders, if they are to trust in and abide by the outcomes. In some cases, these new forms of participation are having substantial effect; in others, rather little. Several important trends have shaped the need for enhanced forms of public engagement in modern society:
Decline in civil engagementThere has been a long-term decline in traditional forms of engagement by people in civil society. In the UK, trades union membership fell from 53% in 1980 to 32%; church attendance from 9.1 million to 6.4 million between 1970 and 1995; and the proportion of adults reading a daily paper fell by 14% between 1980 and 1995. The decline in services that promote participation has also been marked, particularly in rural areas: 13% of parishes in rural England have no bus service whatsoever; 30% no village hall, community centre, public house or daily bus service; 40-45% no permanent shop or post office; 50-60% no school or church or chapel with resident minister; 83% no GP; and 98% no permanently staffed police station Similar declines in membership of local groups have been noted in the USA: in the 1960s, some 12 million parents were involved in parent-teacher associations, but by the mid-1990s this had fallen to 7 million. Some estimates put the decline in participation in voluntary associations at some 25-30% in the past 25-30 years. Social exclusionNew forms of engagement are needed to fill these emerging gaps. A greater challenge, though, is to involve those people who have not been involved in the past, or those whose views have not been incorporated into traditional decision-making, such as the less articulate, non-literate, those in poverty, and young people. Social exclusion persists as a deep problem in society. Those who stand most to benefit from new community-oriented approaches or regeneration programmes are precisely those who are most suspicious of external agencies and authorities. Their views have been ignored in the past – so why should things change now? Why should they want to participate in anything? This is the historical context that has to be addressed in many rural and urban contexts. Declines in natural and physical environmentThe natural and physical environment play a vital role in people’s lives. Yet in most rural and urban environments, there has been a steady erosion of these assets. Despite continued economic growth, the environment continues to be threatened, despite widespread appreciation of problems and their causes. Climate change, pollution of air, water and soils, soil erosion, freshwater depletion, habitat loss, energy overuse, and species extinctions are all symptoms of an economic process that depletes resources at one end, and causes pollution at the other. As a result, important life support services are under threat. According to some measures, rural communities and farmers are very successful. Farms are more efficient, and food cheaper and more abundant. But this `success’ has come at some cost. The state of both natural resources and rural societies is vital for welfare and economic growth. But as soils become depleted or erode, water is polluted, trees, hedges and other habitats lost, and wildlife threatened; and as trust falls, social institutions are rendered ineffective, and reciprocity and exchange mechanisms lost, so it is increasingly difficult to sustain vibrant rural communities. Limitations of exogenous developmentThe dominant pattern of development in recent decades has been `exogenous’, which implies looking for outside solutions. The aim is to attract external capital, technologies or institutions to local contexts to promote change. Such business recruitment, or `smokestack chasing', is an important strategy in local development, and it often makes a substantial difference. Yet it can be expensive and risky. Local communities or authorities usually must offer incentives to encourage businesses to relocate, such as land, infrastructure, tax breaks, and exemptions from labour and environmental regulations. But these incentives can backfire. All too often, the net effect is simply to move jobs around the country - from areas where businesses do not receive subsidies to those where they will. An alternative school of thought focuses on `endogenous' patterns of development, which implies `growing or originating from within'. The priority is to look first at what natural, social and human resources are available, and then to ask: can anything be done differently that results in more productive use of these available resources? 2. Five Assets for Local Communities and EconomiesEconomic systems at all levels, from farms, livelihoods, communities and national economies, rely for their success on the value of services flowing from the total stock of natural, social, human, physical and financial capital (Figure 1). These assets are:
These five assets are transformed by policies, processes and institutions to give desirable outcomes, such as jobs, welfare, economic growth, clean environment, sustainable use of natural resources, reduced crime, better health and schools, and so on. If achieved, these desirable outcomes then feed back to help build up the five capital assets. Where they are undesirable, such as pollution or deforestation, or increased crime or social breakdown, they reduce the asset base. The basic principle is that sustainable systems accumulate stocks of these five assets. They increase the capital base over time. But unsustainable systems deplete or run down capital, spending it as if it was income, so liquidating assets and leaving less for future generations. 3. The Need for a New ApproachFor such sustainable development to occur, new partnerships and connectedness between different stakeholders are needed. As social, natural and human capital have been lost in rural and urban areas, with consequential increases in deprivation, stress and unhappiness, so it needs now to be re-created with the new approaches to policy and practice. New participatory processes are needed to bring together different stakeholders in the renewal of the countryside and the town. History tells us that coercion does not work. We may have technologies and practices that are productive and sustainable, but if they are imposed on people, they do not work in the long term. These processes and technologies must be locally-grounded, and so produce different solutions for different places. Fortunately we do have somewhere to turn. There has been a revolution in the past fifteen years in participatory methodologies. Emerging from a range of different traditions and disciplines, they have expanded in use and efficacy during the 1980s and 1990s. The greatest expansion has occurred in the developing country context. Recent years have also seen a rapid expansion in their use in the industrialised world. As a result, the terms ‘people's participation’ and ‘popular participation’ are now part of the normal language of most development agencies. It is such a fashion that almost everyone says that participation is part of their work. This has created many paradoxes. The term `participation has been used to justify the extension of control of the state as well as to build local capacity and self-reliance; it has been used to justify external decisions as well as to devolve power and decision-making away from external agencies; it has been used for data collection as well as for interactive dialogue. In conventional development, participation has commonly centred on encouraging local people to contribute their labour in return for food, cash or materials. Yet these material incentives distort perceptions, create dependencies, and give the misleading impression that local people are supportive of externally-driven initiatives. When little effort is made to build local skills, interests and capacity, then local people have no stake in maintaining structures or practices once the flow of incentives stops. The dilemma for authorities is they both need and fear people's participation. They need people's agreement and support, but they fear that such wider involvement is less controllable and less precise. But if this fear permits only stage-managed forms of participation, distrust and greater alienation are the most likely outcomes. This makes it all the more crucial that judgements can be made on the type of participation in use. In Britain, the meaning and use of the term participation has been long interpreted in very different ways. At the end of the 1960s, for example, the Skeffington Report indicated that planning could only be legitimate if it had an input of responses from the public. But since then, external agencies have tended to seek to educate local people into what was expected of them rather than involving them in the system of planning. Where the self-help ethic worked, it was commonly challenged on the basis that encouraging local people to take on the role of the state simply legitimised public spending cuts. 4. Types of Participation`Participation’ is one of those words that can be interpreted in many different ways – it can mean finding something out and proceeding as originally planned; it can mean developing processes of collective learning that change the way that people think and act. The many ways that organisations interpret and use the term participation can be resolved into six distinct types. These range from passive participation, where people are told what is to happen and act out predetermined roles, to self-mobilisation, where people take initiatives largely independent of external institutions (Table 1). The problem with participation as used in types one to three is that any achievements are likely to have no positive lasting effect on people's lives. The term participation can be used, knowing it will not lead to action. Types 4-6, by contrast, involve building of social and human capital. Great care must, therefore, be taken over both using and interpreting the term participation. It should always be qualified by reference to the type of participation, as some types will threaten rather than support the goals of community regeneration. What is important is for institutions and individuals to define better ways of shifting from the more passive, consultative and incentive-driven participation towards the interactive end of the spectrum. Table 1. A typology of participation
5. Benefits of ParticipationWhat has become clear in recent years and in a range of sectors is that interactive participation can lead to improvements in performance and outcomes. A limited number of comparative studies have been conducted on rural and urban development programmes in recent years. These have measured and documented both the positive outcomes of participatory processes and the increased management and administrative costs necessary to make them effective. The typical impacts of these deliberative and participatory methodologies have included:
The World Bank's internal `Learning Group on Participatory Development' conducted a study in 1994 to measure the benefits and costs of their participatory projects. They distinguished between the use of the word and its practical application: "many Bank activities which are termed `participatory' do not conform to [our] definition, because they provide stakeholders with little or no influence, such as when [they] are involved simply as passive recipients, informants or labourers in a development effort." A total of 42 participatory projects were analysed, and compared with equivalents. The principal benefits were found to be increased uptake of services; decreased operational costs; increased rate of return; and increased incomes of stakeholders. But it was also found that the absolute costs of participation were greater, though these were offset by benefits: the total staff time in the design phase (42 projects) was 10-15% more than non-participatory projects; and the total staff time for supervision was 60% more than non-participatory projects (loaded at front end). It is increasingly clear that if the process is sufficiently interactive, then benefits can arise both within local communities and for external agencies and their professional staff. 6. Approaches to ParticipationThere are many different ways that authorities engage and interact with local people, ranging from voting to planning consultations, from newsletters to citizens’ juries. Figure 2 shows these separated according to two spectra: from consultative to interactive on the vertical scale, and from one-off activities with a selected group of people to continuous activities with a wider range of stakeholders. Bottom-left sector – one-off activities with only a small number of stakeholders: these include formal planning consultations, media campaigns and open meetings. They are mainly to get across a message, and to give some people the opportunity to comment on an external decision or plan. Bottom-right sector – more regular activities with a larger range of stakeholders, but again tending to focus on getting across a message or giving people the opportunity to register some view. Newsletters and voting fall into this category.
Top-left sector – these are more interactive activities that tend to occur at a particular and restricted time, and represent a range of activities where external authorities are making genuine attempts to involve people or to understand their views, but may not have internalised the need to continue these over a long period. Examples include citizens’ juries, future search events, roadshows, and parish mapping. Top-right sector – these are interactive activities involving many stakeholders and are spread over time. Some may, however, come to a halt, and so tend towards the top-left sector. Examples include have-your-say websites, citizens’ panels to give regular feedback, and a range of participatory planning and assessment methodologies, for example, action planning, participatory appraisal, community assessments, and planning for real. It may not always be necessary to aim to be in the top-right sector, but it is important to know where a methodology does fit, so that process can be tied to expected outcomes. 7. Core Principles of Participatory MethodologiesRecent years have seen a rapid expansion in new participatory methods and approaches to learning in the context of both rural and urban development. There are now more than 60 different terms for these systems of learning and action, some more widely used than others. This diversity and complexity are strengths, as they are signs of innovation and ownership. The contexts for the use of these deliberative and participatory methods has been broad, and includes for natural resource, forestry and fisheries management; for community planning and housing needs analysis; for health planning and for the elderly; for involving young people in their own development; for urban based action planning, and for estuary area and river basin regeneration. Despite the different contexts in which these approaches are used, there are four important common principles uniting most of them.
8. From the Verbal to the VisualMany of the recent innovations in participatory methods have involved a shift from verbally-oriented methods (formal interviews and written assessments) to visually-oriented ones (participatory diagrams and visualisations). Everyone has an inherent ability for visual literacy, and the impact of visual methods on communication and analysis can be profound. They allow non-literate and literate people to participate in the process as equals, facilitate the exploration of complex relationships, and generate collective knowledge. Diagrams and visualisations are pictorial or symbolic representations of information, and are a central element of participatory analysis and learning. They work because they can provide a focus for attention while discussing an issue; can stimulate discussion by both non-literate and literate people; can represent complex issues or processes; can provide means for cross-checking and therefore provoke effective group work; and can evoke creative associations. There are many different diagrams and visualisations. These include resource maps (agro-ecological zones, land tenure, land use, etc), social maps (health, wealth and well-being, etc), mobility maps, time lines and historical profiles, seasonal calendars, daily routines, flow diagrams, impact diagrams, crop biographies, pie diagrams and Venn diagrams. There are important contrasts between visual and verbal modes of communication (Table 2). Literacy skills are not necessary for the construction of complex diagrams, as those who cannot read are usually visually literate. Visualisations, therefore, allow those who have not learnt to read and write and who are often politically weaker and poorer to be drawn into the process of analysis and discussion. It has often been the case that this involvement of such groups for the first time in productive dialogue is revealing for professionals who had not realised poor and non-literate people `knew so much'. Table 2. Comparing the verbal and the visual
9. Stages and Methods in Community AssessmentThere are three important stages for the analysis and understanding of a given problem situation:
This simple set of stages (looking back, looking forward, planning action) should be put together into a package that suits the specific needs of the institutions and context. These will always be different, and so the methodology should always be designed to meet these needs. The process could, therefore:
Table 3. Selection of participatory methods for use in community assessments
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
