The paper's purpose is to sing the praises of a particular method for doing development research that doesn't wait for future policies based on the research to have an impact. It strives to empower the people being researched. In fact, the whole point is that the people themselves are to do the research and then analyze it, and present a report to the 'outsider' researchers (or at least heavily influence what is considered to be the findings). At first thought, this all sounds very good. We like the idea of empowering poor people. Who better to tell us what the situation is like than the people who live in it? It seems that unless the people themselves draw the conclusions, some misinterpreting outsider is going to draw the wrong conclusions based on their 'western' bias. The other approach--household surveys with limited possible responses-- seems prone to miss important local information and very 'extractive' in nature.
However, the very elements which are so praised by advocates like Chambers are probably the reasons we should be skeptical of it. Return to my earlier point on the philosophical foundations of our development approach. Can we really assume, as the PRA approach does, that a rural community will come together and come to a consensus on the priorities and actions necessary to make life better for the worst off in their society? Isn't the usual economic assumption of rational self interest much more likely to hold, the type of self interested motivations that will simply make the PRA process a manifestation of current local power structures and discrimination? I agree that getting all the stakeholders together to voice their views and creative suggestions can be productive (especially in the case when what is best for the poorest is also best for the richer), but when there are strong divisions or when the poorest are afraid of future repercussions of contradicting large landholders and other important figures in the community, what appears to be consensus may be quite far from it. The richer people in the village may be altruistic and want to help the less well off, but they may also be prejudiced and think that the poor are poor because they are lazy or deserve it somehow. Certainly the researcher can not bring back a report that the people put together that says 'the poor are poor because they don't work hard enough' and yet, if certain dominant members of the society that hold that view are able to exercise their influence over the PRA process, such a crazy conclusion is within the realm of possibilities. When researchers walk into a village to do some PRA, it is not a neutral and blank slate. Why should the politics which govern daily life in the village cease to influence behavior when some researchers come to town?
A second and related argument can be made against the empowerment objective of PRAs: disappointed hopes. The PRA process is incredibly demanding of people's time. It asks them to sit in discussion groups and draw diagrams and put seeds in piles to show how good one harvest was compared to another. It asks them what they most want to see changed and by seeking to empower them to take action, implicitly suggests that they can and will see the changes made. This leads me to ask three questions. As just discussed, whose change will be implemented? The loudest voice need not speak for all. Second, what happens when change doesn't happen, when the root of the problem is deep (lack of access to credit institutions, widespread disease and food poverty) and requires more resources than can be conjured at the community level, and the government doesn't come through? Perhaps the disappointed hopes argument is not convincing, because we like to think that now that they are aware of the situation, perhaps that will empower them to keep pushing until the situation really is improved. That seems to be the hope of the advocates of PRA. Yet perhaps this makes me uncomfortable because these 'outsiders' are not only coming in and asking for information (as in household surveying), but they're coming in and telling me to how my society views me compared to others and that I should be creative and dream up solutions for change. And then they seem to go a step further and support a certain view that emerges from the 'consensus' and help draw up a plan to do it. The researcher is no longer an observer but an agent of change. This is what the participatory people love and many economists shrink from. Isn't it a little arrogant to come into a village for a week and claim that you've sifted through all the nuance and helped them pick the best plan of action? What you've done is taken a side. For in most every action there will be people who wish to protect the status quo and those who want change. Any those who want change, will usually want change that helps them somehow. The sheer complexity of these dynamics should make practitioners cautious to 'pick a winner' since they cannot have perfect information. Perhaps it comes down to job description, and I tend to think people collecting information are different from the Peace Corps.
The proponents of this approach argue that it is more cost effective and faster than the survey method. It is quite possible that funding a few researchers to live for a few weeks in a few villages will be less expensive than funding the larger number of researchers and technocrats necessary to conduct a nationally-representative household survey using rigorous and time-consuming (for the researchers) techniques to make sure the results can be used to make statistical inferences. Thus in terms of researcher time (and wages) it is quite possible and even likely that the PRA exercises will be a cheaper way of gathering information (though of a different kind) about local situations. But what about the people's time? Are the days of participating in discussions and drawing Venn diagrams costless? Their time has an opportunity cost. Since studies tend to shy away from paying people to participate (feeling this sends the wrong message) this type of study requires an awful lot from a wide group. It also raises the concern that those in the village who cannot afford to stop working to participate will not have their voices included in the findings. However, if the study was well planned and comes at a less busy time (such as after the end of an agricultural season) it seems that this issue could be minimized. Still the time cost required from the local people should not be overlooked. Depending on the number of people involved, and for how long, these costs could easily exceed what is required to conduct interviews for household surveys.
The first 2 arguments were assuming that the PRA functioned as designed, i.e. it was participatory in all dimensions. I think there is reason to question to what extent this is true in reality. The researchers are meant to act as facilitators while the analysis falls to the community. Surely rural communities do analyze things continuously. They have social hierarchies and leaders who make decisions and likely have mechanisms for ascertaining the level of wider support. Farmers experiment and act creatively on their land. Yet the proponents of this approach suggest that to question the local people's ability to analyze the findings of the PRA is to claim that western researchers are superior and people can't be trusted to make their own decisions. But this is far from the truth! The art of the summary is something American children practice in school constantly because summarizing is not actually that easy to do. After several days or weeks worth of diverse activities a huge amount of summarizing is necessary to make the information meaningful. Summarizing inherently involves a value judgment in the sense that 'this is worth mentioning' and 'this is not worth mentioning.' Therefore after researchers have spent years reading books and journal articles and learning how to suck the marrow from them and leave the rest, summarizing starts to come easier. I am not suggesting that many of these rural villagers could not become expert analysts with some training, but I am saying that 'analyzing the findings' is quite a challenge, and in reality is probably done with a huge combination of prompting and eventual editing by the researcher/facilitator. Therefore a large portion of the value judgments fall to the researcher to decide what is important and what is not. Perhaps she is very concerned with gender issues. She might prompt lots of questions on that subject and dwell on it in her final report, even though the villagers may not have considered it a major issue on their own. Thus saying that the villagers 'generate and analyze the conclusions' is certainly a stretch, and I venture to say a lie by Chambers, because in this paper he is unwilling to acknowledge these caveats.
I could continue with my critique but will instead shift now to the merits of this approach because I do think that certain tools and methods of the PRA perform useful functions and fill in some holes of the survey approach. They will both work better when they are used in combination - each one performing the function it is better suited for. Here are some ideas on how they could be combined.
Since surveys can be criticized for being rigid or too difficult to code the responses of when unexpected responses are given, it makes sense to use participatory approaches before the piloting stage. Even still, the PRA will pick up on special local circumstances that are unlikely to have their own coding. One example my professor gave of when he was conducting a survey is that all the men seemed to be missing from the village. What sort of male-less village is this? he thought until he asked one of the women and she said that a certain type of wildlife had been spotted in the forest and all the men had gone to hunt it together. Despite the likelihood that the survey would be affected by the lack of men in the village, there was no way to incorporate that into the results. Surveys will frequently miss the nuances of daily life. The PRA can also attempt to understand nuances within the family while the surveys are much more limited since the household head is most likely answering the questions.
Surveys can also be criticized for being a snapshot. Indeed past studies have shown that the longer the 'recall period' the more people forget and leave things out (which can make poverty look worse than it is). Therefore when it comes to food, they usually ask what food the family consumed in the last week and for clothes purchases and other less frequent events they might ask about the last 3 weeks or 3 months. Still, those 3 months might have been a particular tough patch for that household (perhaps because of an illness of the income-earner or a failed crop) or a particular lucky patch --the survey doesn't ask how their current consumption compares to past periods (though I think that it should, despite the expected measurement error). Panel surveys come back and talk to the same family after some time has passed (usually one or two years) but this can also miss out on the seasonal dynamics. PRA, especially the seasonal calendars and time lines and trend analysis tools, are useful for looking at these time issues. Additionally seasonal calendars could be useful in determining the right time to survey (if you didn't want to come right at harvest time when people are all well fed or when their food stores and opportunities to generate income were at their lowest- making the situation look worse than it is the rest of the year).
Additionally using oral histories and ethno biographies, especially of people who were once very poor but now have enough to eat, or of people who have enough some years but not in others (the transiently poor), can help development researchers 1) understand how and why people move in and out of poverty and 2) can help them better design survey questions that ask about the right dimensions of a person's life.
The thing I find most interesting about the participatory approach (or RRA for that matter) is that it provides the opportunity to ask 'why?' Surveys can ask why on certain matters that have short standard answers that can be coded. Open-ended interviews and discussion groups can listen to a person tell you they stopped sending their daughter to school this year, and the researcher can say "and why did you do that?" and hopefully receive a rich answer that reveals the opportunity cost of having their daughter in school and how much they value that. Clearly asking open ended questions to a few people in a few villages should not be used beyond its limited function--the answers can be illustrative but you cannot make statements that they are representative. Still, it seems like PRA can be a useful tool both before the survey, and afterwards for asking the 'why' questions about surprising and important survey results. If it is a panel survey and revealed lots of movement into and out of poverty, the PRA can check to see how real this movement is (or if it is just a statistical artifact of measurement error) by asking people how their wealth and status has changed over the period.
Well this has been very useful exam preparation for me so thanks for wading through my disorganized thoughts on PRA vs. household surveys. Perhaps I will post some more exam prep, so you can learn a little bit of what I've been learning as well.
