Are our participatory behaviours, attitudes and methodologies, a good point of entry for institutional change and are they responding to the accelerating changes of current times?

According to Chambers, we are living in a world dominated by old men who are out of touch with current realities and unadaptable to changes. Many of whom suffer from ERR? Not of the 'Economic-Rates-of-Return' kind but the "Egocentric-Reminiscence-Ratio" characterised by large proportions of speech devoted to the past such as “when I was…”

The only thing that is constant is change and with accelerating change, we often find our methodologies are out of kilter with reality. It also holds true in terms of how we behave and how we live our lives. This poses a real and major challenge. We need many more people who are in a facilitating mode in organizations. For instance, there are some rather conservative approaches and cultures in most universities throughout the world. Questions should, therefore, arise on how we teach in universities and whether there are participatory roles enabling people to learn in more effective ways.
 

Time for Revolution?

Revolution can be understood in two senses: A revolution that happens in our heads: to be able to say things the way we want them, question them and append all sorts of things as professional values and methods.

Another type of revolution is going round in circles. Many valuable approaches and methods from the past have been lost or forgotten such as the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), that emerged in the 90´s, and the Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA). We continue to suffer a great deal in development for abandoning important approaches, methods, behaviours and relationships which we are now desperately seeking to revive.

A desirable change that we should be thinking of is seeing more and more organizations with relationships that are less top down and more egalitarian; where facilitation and support comes down, bosses are coaches and information and learning goes up. We are talking about a completely different kind of relationship. It is important to ask: "what is the nature of relationships at the grassroots level between people working in the communities? Is it possible for community workers to participate in processes and decision making? Or do they feel that orders come down and they have to adopt the same sort of approach with the communities?" These are crucial questions we should begin to ask for any planning and intervention to be meaningful and successful.

Top-Down or Bottom-Up Approaches- Building indicators in an innovative way with the Communities

Development is running into a sort of reversals. Donors are insisting more on results-based-management, on impact-assessment, on targets, on upward accountability which many times acts against downward accountability. The whole process has become centralized and numbers are being generated by the top and not from below. This trend is something we have to fight. It is my fervent hope that we will not be talking about these approaches and methods in 10 years to come; and illustrate that participatory approaches and methods can empower people, generate good numbers and foster institutional change.

Let me use Bangladesh to demonstrate this point. An international agency gave grants to a local organization with the condition of an evaluation. They asked a "normal" professional to devise ways of measuring empowerment. This person came up with 5- 6 indicators which were the usual simple basic indicators: "How many women? How often are their meetings? How many women take part?" 

On the other hand, another person who used to work on participatory approaches and methods and is an outstanding innovator worked with community members and colleagues to get their views on what was empowerment and positive social change. Through focus groups, brainstorming and other techniques, they ended up with 132 indicators. People would indicate the relevance of an indicator by pasting either a happy face or an unhappy face against it. This generated numbers, statistics about social change and allowed the monitoring of social change through people's own numbers.

An external official was outraged at the process remarked “How can you possibly have 132 indicators? It's far too complicated for people. Don´t you realize these are poor people and their time is precious? How can you exploit them in this way? It is terrible, you should stop!”, he said.

When these comments were taken back to the people in the community their response was: "What's your problem? We enjoy it and we learn a lot. It doesn't take that much of our time and it has really helped us in changing things for the better in our community."

About Professor Robert Chambers