Principles
Robert Chambers, whom Fisher considered a leading icon of the movement, defines PRA according to the following principles;
- Handing over the stick (or pen or chalk)
- Facilitating investigation, analysis, presentation and learning by local people themselves, so they generate and own the outcomes and also learn.
- Self-critical awareness
- Facilitators continuously and critically examine their own behavior.
- Personal responsibility
- Taking responsibility for what is done, rather than, for instance, relying on the authority of manuals or on rigid rules.
- Sharing
- Involves the wide range of techniques now available, from chatting across the fence to photocopies and e-mail.
PRA and PLA methods and approaches include:
- Do-it-yourself: local people as experts and teachers, and outsiders as novices
- Local analysis of secondary sources
- Mapping and modeling
- Time lines and trend and change analysis
- Seasonal calendars
- Daily time-use analysis
- Institutional diagramming
- Matrix scoring and ranking
- Shared presentations and analysis, and
- Participatory planning, budgeting, implementation and monitoring.
Read more about this topic: Participatory Planning
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,—a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,... and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...at this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women’s rights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.”
—Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926)