Content

Key Concepts

Definition

History

Degree

Scope of Action

Project Cycle
Management

Methods

Approaches to
Participation

Rapid Rural
Appraisal

Participatory Rural
Appraisal

Participatory Action Research

Principles, Attitudes

Participatory
Project Cycle
Management

Type of Participatory
Projects

Application of participatory tools in the different project stages

Sector Specific Use
of Participatory Tools

List of Documents

Exercises

Strong or weak
participation

Stakeholder analysis

Different Approaches to Participation

Different approaches to participation often reflect different motives for engaging in participatory research or development The motives for participation stem from three broad roots: (i) functional motives are those concerned with the efficiency and effectiveness of research and development, and are the main driving force behind the efforts of many governments to improve participation; (ii) empowering motives are concerned with participation as an end in itself and are closely linked to democratic processes, they are associated much more with the approaches of community-based organizations and the NGO movement; and, (iii) philosophical motives which have explored the understanding of knowledge and knowledge systems between formal science and indigenous culture, and tried to encourage a greater interaction between them.

These are outlined below and summarised in the box below.

Functional
It has long been recognised that greater participation by those who are to be affected by research or development can improve the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of those processes and their outputs. Where such benefits are the reasons for encouraging participation the motive can be broadly described as functional. Chambers (1995) notes several functional reasons for the growing interest in greater participation:

1. that the imposition of standard "top-down" interventions on diverse local realities have failed to address local needs,
2. the greater involvement of local people may have positive cost implications, and
3. the more local people are involved in development initiatives, the more likely they are to shoulder the ongoing cost of maintaining such initiatives.

Participation for functional reasons is generally passive and seen as a manageable input to an externally defined process of research or development (Oakley and Marsden, '1984). However, whilst functional participation may have started in this way it has progressively informed and influenced a more fundamental shift towards people-led development, and this includes a parallel shift in research. Chambers says that "Arguably, the big shift of the past two decades has been from a professional paradigm centred on things to one centred on people"(1995:32).

Empowering
There are reasons for supporting greater participation in research and development which deal with people's right to be involved in activities concerning their lives. These reasons are broadly related to empowerment in that they deal, inter alia, with access, power, decision-making, prioritisation, agend setting quid distribution of benefits. Central to empowerment-level reasoning on participation is a reaction against centralisation, bureaucratisation, rigidity and remoteness of the state (Midgley, 1986). In extreme cases it is a reaction to the oppression .of one group of people by another and the exclusion of their perceptions of reality from the research and development process (Freire, 1972).

Participation from an empowerment perspective is seen as a process which is both a means and an end in itself. Participation, in both research and development, is then seen as the driving force of the development process and not just a factor for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of "topdown" activities.

Philosophical
There are also reasons for supporting greater participation in research and development which relate to the philosophy underpinning the way we describe, understand and explain the world we live in. The evolution of participatory processes has led some researchers to the belief that there are multiple realities and that “...professional realities are constructed differently from those of local people.” (Chambers, 1998:107).

This philosophical approach to different knowledge systems influences not only attitudes to participation in the research and development process but also the value placed on indigenous knowledge. For policy purposes, science-generated knowledge is generally regarded as more valuable than knowledge generated through indigenous processes (Redclift, 1992). As Chambers and Richards say: "In the dominant model of development, useful knowledge was only generated in central places – in universities, on research stations, in laboratories..." (1999: xiii). This situation is gradually changing and traditional ecological knowledge is playing an important role in fields such as ecology (Berkes, 1993). An important, if rather patronising, step towards greater participation of traditional communities and their knowledge systems has been that indigenous knowledge which has been `extracted' using social research methods and placed in a scientific framework, has a value-added quality.

Source: New Approaches to Participation in Fisheries Research