participatory research: a brief overview
TRANSCRIPT
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Participatory research:
A brief overview
Paul Sillitoe
University of Durham
Expert meeting on participatory agricultural research: Approaches, design
and evaluation, Oxford, 9-13 December 2013
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Development as material progress
• Assumes technologically driven change
• Assumes capitalist market political
economy
• Development aims to reduce global poverty
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• Material = only legitimate measure of objective progress
• Top-down interventions planned and implemented by agencies
• Theory of modernisation
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Development and social change
• Technology not socially neutral
• Natural resources v. social dimensions -
enduring source of confusion about
development
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Socio- cultural variation
• Socio-cultural acceptability a
central issue
• Generic solutions v culturally
tailored ones
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Unsustainable development
• Sustainable development – today’s buzz
word
• Repeated failure of development
programmes
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What is sustainability?
• Sustainability - change is gradual
• Development - change is rapid
• Difficult to square sustainability with
economic growth
• Environmental costs of capitalism potentially
unsupportable long-term
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Participation
• Agencies realise human element important
• Precursor = Farming Systems Research
• But participatory approaches have not
enjoyed the success anticipated by
supporters. Why?
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Local versus global science
What do you see?
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• Duck-rabbit -- questions privileging of
global science
• Focus on the interface where knowledge
negotiation occurs
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Hybridisation
Generic development
solutions versus socio-
culturally specific
ones
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Soundness of local science
• Idea others’ knowledge can contribute -- even
challenge science – appears preposterous
• Increasingly realised local knowledge of
natural resources and practices integral
aspects of any environment
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Local know-how and sustainability
• Much to learn from those we presume to develop regarding sustainability
• Appreciation of local ideas & practices to encourage more sustainable development in both ecological & cultural senses
• Implies undoing much of the change previously imposed on populations to ‘develop’ them?
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Interdisciplinarity
• Focussing on identified researchable constraints
• Distorting to divorce knowledge from wider
socio-cultural context
• Problems of reductionism lead to calls for
interdisciplinarity
• Local knowledge interdisciplinary by definition
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Tacit knowing
• Challenge documenting tacit knowledge
• We all engage daily in acts not focally aware of
• How can we capture in words?
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Variation
• Variation in what people know
• Clustering of certain knowledge within
populations
• Links to political power
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Local political issues
• Participation in hierarchical societies?
• Experts know all
• Challenge to devise inclusive approaches
• Problem of short time research frames
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Knowing what’s at stake:
education?
• Education a development priority, to inform
people
• But how to avoid brainwashing?
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International political issues
• Left wing = appropriate local determination
• Right wing = getting market to work
• Participation as parroting dominant view
• How realistic to expect dominant nations to relinquish power?
• Complexities of democratic government
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Manipulation of participation
• Participation a forlorn hope?
• Participatory development subject to
manipulation
• Political pressures for control and ‘results’
• Blueprint v process approaches
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Misuse of knowledge
• Agencies may misuse knowledge
• Unfair exploitation as a commodity
• Concerns for intellectual property rights
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• Substantial challenges
• Thanks!