Issues in Participatory Development:
From Participatory Rural Appraisal to Appreciative Planning and Action --
A Former Volunteer’s Personal Journey of Discovery
Malcolm J. Odell, Jr., Ph.D.
Technical Advisor, Participatory Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation
Habitat for Humanity International
Box 5367, TangalMarch 20024 Whitehall Road
Kathmandu, NepalEmail: uth Hampton, NH 03827
Tel: +9771-4l7980Tel: 603-394-7890
Some Fruits of Appreciative Planning and Action (APA): Women planting degraded hillside adjoining site of Kali Gandaki Hydropower Project in Central Nepal. APA helped turn conflict into cooperation. Villagers voluntarily planted over 50,000 seedlings during the monsoon of 1998 to help control the 60 landslides that blocked the Project Access Road.
Summary
For the past 6 years I have been actively involved in the development, testing, and adaptation of participatory research techniques in Nepal, and in particular, in seeking means of enhancing the capacity of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA)-based approaches to promote mobilization and empowerment among rural people, and of promoting positive action through positive inquiry. These draw on work that I began in the Peace Corps in Nepal from 1962-1967 and in collaboration with Robert Chambers in Botswana in the late 1970s. Since then I have tested, with promising results, the blending of concepts from several schools of organizational development theory to help rural people and development practitioners reverse negative self-images commonly held by villagers and to generate, instead, the pride and self-reliance upon which successful rural development must be built. These PRA-based techniques, drawing in particular on Appreciative Inquiry, with input from Asset Based Assessment, Open Space Technology, and Future Search models, have shown positive results in replacing the fatalism and resignation of villagers with pride in their achievements, self-confidence in their ability to set attainable goals, and success in achieving them.[1]
This quest began when I served over 30 years ago as a volunteer in the first Peace Corps group in Nepal, working in Dhankuta and Solu-Khumbu districts, sometimes 2 weeks hike from the nearest road or telephone. Despite the fact that Nepal's mountain people have mastered the art and science of survival in one of the world's most difficult environments, with many attaining world acclaim as Gurkha soldiers and Sherpa mountaineers of extraordinary courage, endurance, and good humor, I found on returning some 35 years later that many Nepali villagers today look down on themselves as poor, backward, illiterate, and ignorant. This paper summarizes a journey of exploration that began and ended in Nepal -- a journey which led to the process of discovery, dream, design, and delivery that both characterizes and has played such an important role in the development, testing, adaptation and application of the Appreciative Planning and Action approach.
From Academic to Participatory Research:
Lessons from Native American and African Cultures
Recognizing that I needed additional skills to pursue a career addressing the problems of rural people in developing countries, I followed my 5 years in Nepal with graduate work in Rural and Development Sociology at the Cornell Agriculture School. I chose this discipline of practical, applied research because I believed it could provide the necessary tools for analyzing and understanding rural societies in order to meet my ultimate objective: the design and implementation of successful development programs in the Third World. Cornell also introduced me to my wife and life partner in this adventure of discovery, Marcia Odell, who took me first to learn from America's Native Americans about the richness and wisdom to be found in the United States' own traditional societies, about the folly of ignoring, undermining, or seeking to change cultures we do not fully understand. As a participant in her study of federal land policies, of the break-up of communal land tenure systems, and of the damage this wrought upon the Cherokee Nation, I witnessed how a proud, highly organized and educated people suffered greater destruction from the privatization of their land than from the violent and inhuman "Trail of Tears" that forced them to migrate from the green hills of Appalachia to the dry plains of Oklahoma.[2]
My own thesis research, focusing on the public participation of rural people in modern communications, included time among the Seneca, another Native American society similarly undermined by misguided national policies, often cited by reformers as undertaken 'in the best interests of the Indians.'[3] From Cornell, seeking to return to active work in the developing world and to learn from programs in other parts of the globe, Marcia and I set off together for Africa where we were soon immersed in the implementation and assessment of policies which bore disturbing similarities to those that had been imposed upon Native Americans.
Taking a position heading up the Government of Botswana's new Rural Sociology Unit, in 1975 I found myself in charge of an applied research program that was to guide a new national tribal grazing land policy. The goal was to protect the fragile Kalahari eco-system while promoting improved rural incomes, a policy in which Chambers and his colleague, Feldman, had played an important design role. This program was one of the first major national programs to respond to "The Tragedy of the Commons" school of thought regarding common property that argued for privatization of common land on the grounds that common property lacked the incentives necessary to assure sustainable management.
Given that implementation of the Tribal Grazing Land Policy was already moving ahead at a rapid pace in Botswana, it was clear that traditional academic research would be too slow and expensive for monitoring the implementation of this policy to produce appropriate adaptations that might be made before it was too late. Furthermore, the research that Marcia and I had done among the Cherokee and Seneca Nations had taught us the risks inherent in the privatization of common land, the destabilization of social and economic systems and the roles they had played in the destruction of Native American cultures and social organizations.
Thus the need for rapid, but reliable field research tools led my local team to begin developing short-cuts to classical research design; we needed to get answers to important questions in time for key decisions regarding certain policy initiatives. These included fenced ranching and the drilling of boreholes in a semi-desert environment inhabited by tribal cattle herders and Bushmen.[4] The train was leaving the station and we either had to be on board or settle for post-facto analysis of what had happened, rather than be part of protecting both the land and the people who had managed it for generations.
In the context of rapidly changing circumstances, I welcomed the return to Botswana of Robert Chambers to follow up on his policy recommendations. It was then that I learned that we shared concerns and interests in developing what Chambers soon popularized as Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA). We learned much from his experience and guidance, and tested the emerging package of RRA tools immediately in our field work. As our Rural Sociology Unit proceeded to use and test these early forms of RRA, however, we identified the need to consult and involve the local people in the research process, in recognition of their extensive local knowledge and insight. My colleague Yvonne Merafe, bringing social sensitivity and group process skills, was instrumental in this process and later assumed leadership of the unit and its applied research program. We thus began combining our rapid appraisal tools with small group meetings with villagers, drawing on the lessons of 'focus group' research in marketing applications in the US and Europe.
These techniques, which benefited from further interaction and exchange of ideas with Chambers, were among a number of precursors to what is known worldwide as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). They proved effective in generating reliable, insightful, and timely information that played an important role in shifting Botswana's national policy away from fenced ranches on leasehold land toward more organic community-based livestock management, which combined traditional management practices with modern technology.[5] As a result of these and other similar initiatives world-wide, major donors such as the World Bank and USAID began developing new programs utilizing participatory, village-based approaches for managing communal lands, and to allow flexibility to draw on a wider range of inputs and options than in earlier designs. Both the Chambers and Feldman report and Chambers’ PRA approach, in its earliest incarnations, had made an impact on national policy, the natural environment, and the lives of villagers, whose own ideas and knowledge had led to programs that had positive results for both themselves and the natural environment on which they depended for their livelihoods.[6]
Transferring Technology:
The Journey Back to Asia
After leaving Botswana, I undertook nearly l5 years of consulting work during the 1980s and early '90s. I used my African and Asian experiences to shape a series of project evaluations, program designs, and training programs for over 1,000 participants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. RRA and PRA were critical tools for these training and evaluation endeavors and contributed to a gradually widening acceptance of participatory approaches in programs as varied as village services and farming systems, in settings that ranged from Egypt and Pakistan to Bangladesh and India.[7]
Returning to Asia in 1994, I took up field assignments in the mountains of Nepal that brought me back to the village settings in which I had been immersed for 5 years during the 1960s. My first position upon returning to Nepal was as Country Representative and Co-Manager (1994/96) of the Makalu-Barun Conservation Project with The Mountain Institute (TMI), and subsequently as Senior Advisor for Environment and Community Development (1996/97). From mid-1997 I became Environmental Advisor/Trainer for the Kali Gandaki Hydroelectric Project, heading up its Environmental Management Unit (KGEMU). More recently I have been working with the development of community mobilization tools for a major national women’s empowerment program and as technical advisor for participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation for Habitat for Humanity International. As a core activity in each of these assignments, which were heavily dependent on the participation of local communities, I turned to sharpening and reformulating the participatory research tools I had used in both Botswana and my consulting work.
My commitment to reassessing the PRA tools I knew so well came from a disturbing discovery: After some 30 years away from the villages of Nepal, a country which had attained world renown for its active commitment to PRA and participatory approaches to small farmer irrigation, community forestry, and community-based buffer-zone management of national parks, I found little had changed in many mountain villages, despite these encouraging programs. Most disillusioning, however, was finding widespread negative self-images and discouragement among the proud villagers that I had known so well decades before. With some of the world's most advanced and successful participatory programs, and widespread acceptance of PRA approaches evident in Nepal, villagers not only were still among the poorest in the world, but seemed to have little pride in their remarkable achievements (including arguably the most successful community forestry program in the world). Even worse, they appeared to have even less confidence than previously that they had any power to change their circumstances without major and continuing help from outside. The traditional self-reliance of Nepal's remote communities appeared to have been replaced with a dependency syndrome that, in the face of political, financial, and administrative obstacles in Nepal and declining donor investments, did not bode well for the future.
Back to the Drawing Boards:
The Search for Tools for Empowerment
Beginning in 1994, as I hiked from village to village in the hills I had known so well as a volunteer years before, I began to search for the roots of the negative and self-defacing attitudes of these rugged and independent Nepalis. Our TMI project was built on participation, and PRA was widely known and practiced. People were being consulted and involved in all phases of the project, and numerous assessments of local problems and resources had been conducted in the project area between the Arun Valley and Mt. Everest. These had used the best-known PRA techniques and had been introduced by skilled practitioners ever since the first TMI task force had made its initial design studies in the early 1990s. Yet something was missing. With a decade of the publication of popular and professional literature, and innumerable conferences, "empowerment" had become the 'buzz word.' Yet these villagers, however resourceful and active in development programs, appeared far from empowered. When entering a village, one of the most common greetings, after a polite welcome, was for a villager to relate a litany of problems, prefaced with remarks about the remoteness, poverty, ignorance, and backwardness of the village--whether it was a 10-day hike into the mountains or a 5-minute walk from the major highway running from the capital to Pokhara.
The women of Dhan Bahadur’s Allo Production Club discussing plans for an ‘Each One, Teach One’ program to achieve 100% literacy among their members, using proceeds from the Rs.100,000 they had earned during 1997/98 from their weaving.
Encountering Appreciative Inquiry:
From the Organization to the Project Context
While I pondered the anomaly of negativity and dependency in the villages, as Project Manager I became involved with a series of team-building and organizational development workshops within The Mountain Institute introduced by our new President, Dr. Jane Pratt, who had come to TMI after a successful career with the World Bank. Based on the work of Cooperrider and Srivastava,[8]these workshops used a relatively new organizational development (OD) approach, Appreciative Inquiry (AI ), to discover individual and organizational strengths, dream of what would be even better, design a process to get there, and deliver a program of action built on personal commitments. I found the results were energizing and contributed to a new atmosphere of optimism, team-work, innovation, and renewed commitment among our team members. Looking into the roots of the approach, as well as other OD tools such as Future Search,[9] I joined my colleague, Bob Davis, in an effort to introduce Appreciative Inquiry into TMI's work in Nepal, including management, planning, and team-building among our diverse staff and partners. The results were encouraging and contributed to improved morale and self-esteem among staff members, and to more productive -- and enjoyable -- planning sessions.
In a difficult but ultimately wise move, at the age of 57 and encouraged by our TMI president, I shed my TMI management duties and turned directly to addressing both the dependency syndrome evident in Makalu-Barun villages and the potential for linking PRA and AI principles to address this dependency pattern. Bob Davis, following on the successful role that AI had played within TMI, had tested the introduction of AI principles into a village planning training program in Sikkim with promising results. With this evidence in hand, I made a personal commitment to return to the villages on a full-time basis and explore the potential of the appreciative approach for building self-esteem and teamwork at the grass-roots level. With the support and advice of other Appreciative Inquiry pioneers in Nepal, including Ravi Pradhan of Karuna Management and Buddhi Tamang of SAGUN, I headed for the hills and the villages of Makalu-Barun to develop and test these encouraging ideas.
On the Trail:
The Evolution of Appreciative Planning and Action
In November 1996 I undertook an intensive one-on-one personal and professional assessment and training program with Barbara Sloan, one of the founders of the Appreciative Inquiry approach. With the support and encouragement of TMI, I then started on a program of extensive research, design, field testing and adaptation of different PRA-based approaches onto which my TMI colleagues and I grafted concepts from these appreciative mobilization and team-building approaches. From this came a rather simple concept that summed up where we were headed:
"If you look for problems, you find more problems; if you look for successes, you find more success. If you believe in your dreams you can accomplish miracles." Our motto thus became to "seek the root cause of success," rather than the “root cause of problems.”
Over the following year, freed of management duties and able to spend full time in the field, I hiked from village to village with a revolving cast of Nepali colleagues including, in particular, Chandi Chapagain, Ang Rita Sherpa, and Lamu Sherpa. On a daily basis we tried one approach after another, assessing and redesigning every evening around the fire. By mid-1997 we had developed together what is now an internationally recognized community mobilization strategy based on both long involvement with training and implementation of PRA systems and new experiences with modern organizational development strategies.
This PRA and AI adaptation, "Appreciative Planning and Action” (APA), is simple in concept, yet profound in its impact in the villages. Using a basic "1, 2, 3, and 4D" model that is both easily learned and readily adapted to different situations, we found ourselves entering a village to the old refrains of fatalism, and departing a few hours later surrounded by people literally dancing and singing...or busy building latrines, cleaning the village common, repairing the trail to the spring.[10] Village leaders and the most junior among our staff of 100 took up the technique, telling us, "This we understand, and we can do it!" When we took them at their word, as we did one afternoon in a grungy market town along a rolling stream 4 days’ walk from the nearest road, within 10 minutes they had a meeting of local people in full swing in which people shared success stories and were creating a new vision for their community. Within an hour the group had dispersed and, with great gusto, was busy making brooms and cleaning up the entire bazaar.