Am sorry for not be able to provide the original sources (of reading). I think it's a summary from various articles or whatever. Well, I definitely needs to consume salmon omega-3 everyday, hehehe...
Key Questions on participatory development in terms of the practice and process of participatory research, planning and governance in the context of community development:
1. Why a participatory process ?
It is important to define the ends served and making them explicit in collaborative work. The end of participation includes the planners, the facilitators and the objective of the participants. This can be done through these steps:
- All should make their reasons explicit and then to attempt to reconcile differences.
- Participatory exercise can then be tailored to the various ends which the group decides to pursue
2. What ends does it serves?
- Participation as a means to specific ends - Instrumentalism
Instrumentalism Participation is an instrumental use of people and their participation by outsiders for the achievement of some implicit or intentionally concealed aim. It is hand in hand with mobilization, in terms of getting certain people to do something, even if it undermines their interests.
In some cases, people are unable to re-orient or resist inappropriate interventions, and projects are perpetrated upon them rather than being designed and carried out by and for themselves. Participatory process, combined with an explicit treatment of the objectives of the process itself, can prevent such abuses.
- Participation as an end in itself
It implies that men and women are learning, organizing, deciding, planning and acting, whether quickly or slowly, easily or painfully, and with or without a specific end. In some cases, the end is participation for its own sake in a first phase, so that people are in a position to define their own goals and to act on them in a second phase.
3. The Objectives of Participatory Research
There are many kinds of participatory research objectives which are:
- To extract information from people (the more common approach)
- To place outside researchers at the service of local communities or popular social movements.
- It is placed as collaborative efforts ranging from documentation of local experiments and innovations by professional scientists to farmer participation in outsider-designed agricultural and forestry experiments. We propose to join together people and institutions with very distinct traditions of acquiring and testing knowledge, and often, very different needs and uses for knowledge.
4. Participation and Relations of Power
To promote social change through participatory development, it is essential to understand better and to address the way that power is distributed and wielded. Therefore facilitators should do the following:
- Identifying the multiple actors within communities, as well as those who work within and between communities and others whose decisions affect local development from afar.
- Understanding power relations embedded in the culture and social structure within local communities, based on class ethnicity, religion, race, nationality, ideology, etc.
- Facilitator needs to consider carefully their choice of partners to organize and plan activities, whose interests to address and whom to include in any given event.
5. Whose Interests, whose voices, whose actions
· The community is not a homogenous group.
Individuals may identify more of less strongly with gender, class, ethnicity or religion, depending on their own experience and the current context. These attributes also interact. Culture and social relations are not static with respect to gender, class, caste or other dimensions of difference.
· The groups (in the community) will shift on the basis of the context and the issues at stake, i.e. people shared interests on a specific issues, coalitions between very distinct groups with a common goal or broader affinities among groups and between individuals. Therefore, facilitators need to grapple not only with difference, but with a multitude of different possible groupings and beyond that, a shifting constellation of groups with flexible boundaries. They must also confront the question of how actively they will promote the participation and follow-up actions of the less powerful groups.
6. The Temporal Context
· It is important to situate the origin of problems and opportunities in time, as well as the groups involved, and the nature of our interventions/partnerships, in order to choose the time horizon of participatory research, planning and action agendas.
· Participation need not be associated with either one-time appraisals or a life-time residential commitment, but should reflect an honest search for the most appropriate time frames suited to the context of the place, the people, the partnerships and the scope of changes contemplated.
· There are several ways to match the time frame of analysis with the topic, the actors and the scope of their concerns, includes the time frame for:
- understanding the current situations: (i) to understand the history of the current situation in any given places and of any given group, including individual life histories, the history of specific groups and communities, etc; (ii) the history encompass social, cultural, economic, environmental changes, etc through people’s lives and landscapes, and are seldom written. conducting research
- planning activities
- implementing plans
with considering the time limits (for example immediate future -3 years, longer time frames for planning and actions -10-20years, etc) and the institutional concerns (e.g. the actors in the process).
7. Where to Focus Participation
The ‘popular’ participation are usually located in public meetings, where ‘local people’ and officials engage in planning discussions about local problems and proposed development solutions. Basically, participation could take place in national policy discussions and legislative process as well as in small, quite meetings between family members, neighbours, or members of particular groups based on occupation, class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or other bases of identity and difference.
8. Addressing the Problems
· Close attention to the appropriate scale of problem definition, analysis and action can make a major difference in the quality of participation, the rate of participation, and the representation of all groups involved in a given process. It also could influence the outcome, both overall and for particular groups.
· To address the problems of one community group at a given time and place may require a much broader look at the regional and national context, as well as a closer look at the daily lives and landscapes of individuals and particular groups. In order to do this, the steps are:
1) The explorations of problems and opportunities at multiple scales, always looking at larger and smaller-scale process that influence of influenced by any given problem.
2) The process, with special attention to the size and nature of the social unit of resource users and stakeholders and the size of the landscape units involved in various stages of participatory initiatives.
3) The size and nature of the landscape area and the social units for follow-up action will vary with the type of problem and the context. Careful attention to the scale of both social organization and ecological units can improve the quality and outcome of each of these stages of participatory activity.
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