Participatory Learning and Action

Participatory development implies an approach to planning and governance that encourages and supports the two-way exchange of information between local communities and outsiders. Participatory development recognizes that community members have valuable knowledge, legitimate concerns, and a lived experience that can contribute to exploring solutions to natural resource–related issues, to planning, and, more broadly, to redressing inequality. Currently, the term is used extensively because of the widespread and growing recognition that participation of local communities in decision making is critical to achieving sustainable development. As a result, community participation has become a central precept underpinning the development agenda.

Fundamental to participatory development practice is a clearly articulated and systematic set of strategies, methodologies, and literature that facilitate community mobilization by community development intermediary organizations (CDIOs) in the execution of local-level decision making. Participatory learning and action (PLA) is an umbrella term used to describe these strategies and methodologies. Robert Chambers, a central figure in PLA practice, describes it as a family of approaches, methods, and behaviors to enable poor people to express and analyze the realities of their lives and conditions and then themselves plan, monitor, and evaluate their actions. PLA has been widely used in developing countries to support planning for poverty reduction and is increasingly being employed in the global North in community development projects.

PLA incorporates rapid rural appraisal (RRA), participatory rural appraisal (PRA), and participatory action research (PAR) methodologies and techniques, among others. Yet PLA also can be understood to have grown out of these other methods, each of which represents a distinct stage in the history of participatory development.

RRA was popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. It acknowledged for the first time that experts recognized the need to formally include the poorest members of society in development planning and decision making. RRA offers an approach and a toolbox that supported development professionals in interviewing community members using low-cost and flexible qualitative research tools (primarily semistructured interviews). The information gathered from these interviews was interpreted by professionals and thus helped inform development intervention.

By the 1990s, RRA had evolved into PRA. PRA focused on development intermediaries working with local communities to identify and articulate development needs through structured group discussions, visualization tools, and other facilitated activities. PRA differed substantially from RRA approaches in that the tools used were more interactive and involved a stronger participatory component.

By the mid 1990s, participatory approaches had evolved into PLA. PLA differs considerably from its predecessors in that it focuses on achieving the full participation of local community members in the process of learning about their needs and opportunities and in the action required to address them. In other words, community members are not simply providers of information that may (or may not) be used to guide development; rather, they are actively engaged as agents of change and are an intrinsic component in planning, implementing, and evaluating development activities. Through interactive learning, knowledge exchange, and flexible yet structured reflection, PLA approaches seek to mobilize local communities and stimulate action that addresses issues of social injustice.

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