Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods

Connecting People, Participation and Place

Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby, Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134135554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Geographie

Participatory Action Research (PAR) approaches and methods have seen an explosion of recent interest in the social and environmental sciences. PAR involves collaborative research, education and action which is oriented towards social change, representing a major epistemological challenge to mainstream research traditions. It has recently been the subject of heated critique and debate and rapid theoretical and methodological development.

This book captures these developments, exploring the justification, theorisation, practice and implications of PAR. It offers a critical introduction to understanding and working with PAR in different social, spatial and institutional contexts. The authors engage with PAR's radical potential, while maintaining a critical awareness of its challenges and dangers. The book is divided into three parts. The first part explores the intellectual, ethical and pragmatic contexts of PAR; the development and diversity of approaches to PAR; recent poststructuralist perspectives on PAR as a form of power; the ethic of participation; and issues of safety and well-being. Part two is a critical exploration of the politics, places and practices of PAR. Contributors draw on diverse research experiences with differently situated groups and issues including environmentally sustainable practices, family livelihoods, sexual health, gendered experiences of employment, and specific communities such as people with disabilities, migrant groups, and young people. The principles, dilemmas and strategies associated with participatory approaches and methods including diagramming, cartographies, art, theatre, photovoice, video and geographical information systems are also discussed. Part three reflects on how effective PAR is, including the analysis of its products and processes, participatory learning, representation and dissemination, institutional benefits and challenges, and working between research, action, activism and change.

The authors find that a spatial perspective and an attention to scale offer helpful means of negotiating the potentials and paradoxes of PAR. This approach responds to critiques of PAR by highlighting how the spatial politics of practising participation can be mobilised to create more effective and just research processes and outcomes. The book adds significant weight to the recent critical reappraisal of PAR, suggesting why, when, where and how we might take forward PAR's commitment to enabling collaborative social transformation. It will be particularly useful to researchers and students of Human Geography, Development Studies and Sociology.

1
Introduction

Connecting people, participation and place

Sara Kindon, Rachel Pain and Mike Kesby

Purpose and scope

Participatory Action Research (PAR) is an umbrella term covering a variety of participatory approaches to action-oriented research. Defined most simply, PAR involves researchers and participants working together to examine a problematic situation or action to change it for the better (Wadsworth 1998). For over seventy years, advocates of participatory approaches have been challenging the traditionally hierarchical relationships between research and action, and between researchers and ‘researched’ (Wadsworth 1998). They have sought to replace an ‘extractive’, imperial model of social research with one in which the benefits of research accrue more directly to the communities involved. Put another way, advocates have attempted to remove hierarchical role specifications and empower ‘ordinary people’ in and through research. Their intention is to transform an alienating ‘Fordist’ mode of academic production into a more flexible and socially owned process.

For a long time, this struggle occurred at the margins of the academy, but over the last decade or so a series of shifts in philosophical critique, economic policy and international geopolitics has generated a context in which participation can ‘come in from the cold’ (see Cornwall and Pratt 2003; Fals-Borda 2006a; Hall 2005). Furthermore, as millennial reflection caused researchers once again to question their role and relevance in a rapidly changing world (see Staeheli and Mitchell 2005), the academy has become more receptive toward a ‘participatory turn’ (Fuller and Kitchin 2004). Participatory and Action Research are rapidly becoming a leading paradigm within the social and environmental sciences (Brydon-Miller et al. 2004; Greenwood and Levin 1998; Jason et al. 2004; Park et al. 1993; Reason and Bradbury 2006; Selener 1997; Taggart 1997). The purpose of this book is to support researchers working within this paradigm.

As contributions to this book illustrate, the process of PAR is cyclical. Researchers and participants identify an issue or situation in need of change; they then initiate research that draws on capabilities and assets to precipitate relevant action. Both researchers and participants reflect on, and learn from, this action and proceed to a new cycle of research/action/reflection (see Kindon et al., Chapter 2 in this volume). Together they develop context-specific methods to facilitate these cycles. These may include the adaptation of traditional social science methods like semi-structured interviews, focus groups and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), or innovations in visual or performative methods like diagramming, video and theatre (see Part II of this volume). This methodological openness reflects PAR’s commitment to genuinely democratic and non-coercive research with and for, rather than on, participants (Pratt 2000; Wadsworth 1998).

Having said this, participatory approaches and PAR are not without their challenges and critics (Cooke and Kothari 2001a; Greenwood 2002; Hayward et al. 2004). Often, for academics to undertake participatory and action-oriented research, and to achieve a successful career, they must bridge ‘two conflicting social worlds’ (see Cancian 1993:92). For example, the academy in many places continues to exclude the epistemologies involved in PAR (Kuokkanen 2004) and communities frequently question the relevance of academics to meet their needs (Stoeker 1999). Achievements often depend on researchers’ commitment, creativity and imagination in negotiating competing discourses and expectations.

Criticism of participatory approaches, meanwhile, has intensified. For some, the increasing popularity of participation within development and policy contexts, for example, represents its commodification within schemes and research that remain ‘top down’ and extractive (see Cornwall and Brock 2005; Mohan 1999; Pain and Francis 2003; see also Kesby et al., Chapter 3 in this volume). There are also considerable concerns about the under-theorisation of power, and the possibilities for marginalisation that occur within participatory processes striving for consensus and collective action (Cooke and Kothari 2001a).

While we are unapologetic advocates of participation, we believe (in line with PAR’s long tradition of self-reflection and internal critique) that it is important to keep a critical eye open for its weaknesses, limitations and dangers. Thus we value contemporary academic critiques: we recognise that while participatory approaches seek socially and environmentally just processes and outcomes, they nevertheless constitute a form of power and can reproduce the very inequalities they seek to challenge (Cooke and Kothari 2001a; Kesby 2005). We acknowledge that the ubiquity of participation in international development, for instance, can make it seem like a tyrannical yet bland orthodoxy (Cooke and Kothari 2001a; Kapoor 2005). Further, we agree that participation has too often been dislocated from a radical politics oriented toward securing citizenship rights and informing underlying processes of social change (Hickey and Mohan 2005; see also Chatterton et al., Chapter 25 in this volume). However, rather than abandon participation, our response is to look for ways in which such critique can fortify and transform our practice.

Indeed, Participatory Action Research is one means of repoliticising participation (Fals-Borda 2006a; Kapoor 2005). PAR emphasises dialogic engagement with co-researchers, and the development and implementation of context appropriate strategies oriented towards empowerment and transformation at a variety of scales. This political commitment has been posited as something of an antidote to the increasingly commonplace technocratic deployment of participation or participatory techniques (Kapoor 2005). Thus, while not a panacea for all research and development ills, there is much radical potential left in PAR, as the chapters in this volume illustrate. Our aim in this book, therefore, is to engage with PAR’s radical potential, while maintaining a critical awareness of its challenges and dangers. For us, the strength of critically-informed PAR lies precisely in its ability to facilitate the intersections of theory, practice and politics between participants and researchers in a diversity of contexts.

As geographers, we find that a spatial perspective and an attention to scale offer helpful means of negotiating the potentials and paradoxes of PAR (Pain and Kindon 2007). The importance of space to social life is increasingly recognised across the social sciences (see Massey 2005) and the participatory development literature (Cornwall 2002; 2004b; Gaventa 2004; Kesby 2005; 2007a). The chapters in this volume remind us that space and place are important to participation as a political practice. They illustrate how understanding the spatialities of participation can inform both our theoretical understandings and the outcomes of social or environmental change.

Space is also important when trying to affect change beyond the various sites and arenas of participatory intervention (Cornwall 2002; Jones and SPEECH 2001; Kesby 2005; 2007a). Typically, participatory approaches prioritise local community concerns, the immediate social and natural environments in which they are located, and ground up processes. With greater attention to space and scale however, the local is understood as intimately connected to the global, regional, national, household and personal. PAR can help to unpick the hierarchical scaling of events, things and processes, conceptually, practically and politically (see Klodawsky 2007; Marston et al. 2005). It can help participants to re-engage with wider structures and processes of inequality to effect change. It can also involve and alter spaces of empowerment and action, when it contributes to policy, social or personal transformation (see also Kesby et al., Chapter 3; and Pain et al., Chapter 4 in this volume).

While the practice and discussion of PAR is by now widespread and well developed, there are few single texts to which readers can turn for information on every aspect of the approach: from underlying philosophy and ethics, through field techniques and practical guidance, to issues of dissemination, action outputs, activism and theoretical critiques of the approach itself (cf. Selener 1997). It is our purpose with this volume to provide such a text. We therefore take a wide-ranging and critical approach to consider the intersections of theory, practice and politics informing co-research using PAR. We recognise that PAR is a form of power, and return frequently to why we might nevertheless use participatory approaches and methods to address particular questions. We also consider how they might inform our research relationships and any resultant action. At the heart of these considerations, we attend to the practice of the ethical and spatial relationships involved, as they ultimately connect people, participation and place to the wider politics of social and environmental transformation.

We have therefore aimed to provide a book which:

• discusses ethical, personal and institutional challenges commonly encountered when using participatory approaches and methods;

• provides links between theoretically informed critiques of Participatory Action Research and its applied practice; and

• grounds the debates and practice within social and environmental sciences, and in particular foregrounds insights from Human Geography in exploring the value of a spatial perspective to the practice of participation.

Format

The book is organised into three parts, each containing short, readable chapters. We want to disrupt the common perception that academic work is verbose, impenetrable and of little use to anyone in the ‘real world’, by speaking to the busy practitioner, the time-pressured graduate student and the community researcher. At the same time, we want to acknowledge and nurture the value of theory and academic reflection. Indeed, we know that many practitioners of PAR, both inside and outside the academy, are interested in keeping abreast of emerging theories and methodological developments in order to strengthen their disciplinary knowledge and applied practice. The key to a robust future for PAR is clear, respectful communication that closes the perceived gap between theorists and practitioners and further facilitates the informed use of PAR within, and beyond, the academy.

It will be obvious to readers that the inclusion of many images and figures is an attempt to reflect the importance and utility of visual methods within PAR. They also illustrate the people and places involved and some of the products produced. We hope that they help to stimulate creative and appropriately embedded methodological adaptations in readers’ own work. Perhaps slightly less obviously, the book’s collaborative writing and editing represents an attempt to distanciate (spread and sustain) the politics and practice of PAR beyond place-based field research (Kesby 2007a). Most of the chapters have been produced collectively, with joint or multiple authors (including many non-academics). They also include many text boxes in which participants and researchers voice illustrative stories as a powerful means of sharing experience and effecting change. Through these alternative modes of representation and collaborative modes of writing, we attempt to provoke a questioning of mainstream academic and corporate publishing practice (see also Cahill and Torre, Chapter 23 in this volume), and further emphasise that knowledge production (in texts not just the field) can be a collective participatory activity.

Overview

The various contributors bring to their chapters rich and diverse insights from rural and urban contexts in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australasia and the Pacific. Frequently, ideas raised in one chapter are echoed or complemented by those in other chapters so readers will find many cross-references and common the...