Summary. -Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) describes a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act. PRA has sources in activist participatory research, agroecosystem analysis, applied anthropology, field research on farming systems, and rapid rural appraisal (RRA). In RRA information is more elicited and extracted by outsiders; in PRA it is more shared and owned by local people. Participatory methods include mapping and modeling, transect walks, matrix scoring, seasonal calendars, trend and change analysis, well-being and wealth ranking and grouping, and analytical diagramming. PRA applications include natural resources management, agriculture, poverty and social programs, and health and food security. Dominant behavior by outsiders may explain why it has taken until the 1990s for the analytical capabilities of local people to be better recognized and for PRA to emerge, grow and spread.
¡OS fjullcq,n. vol 20 no 2. Inst tute of Des elopntent Sitahes, Sussex these flows. Indicators of poverty are then easily taken as indicators of other dimensions of deprivation. including vulnerability. But vulnerability, more than poverty, is linked with net assets. Poverty, in the sense of low income, can he reduced by borrowing and ;nvesting: hut such debt makes households more vulnerable. Poor people, in their horror of debt, appear more aware than professionals of the tradeoffs between poverty and vulnerability. Programmes and policies to reduce vulnerability-to make more secure-are not, one for one, the same as programmes and policies to reduce poverty-to raise incomes. Care is also needed because vulnerability and security start as 'our' concepts and are not necessarily 'theirs'. To correct and modify them to fit local conditions requires decentralised analysis, encouraging, permitting, and acting on local concepts and priorities, as defined by poor people themselves. To date, such analysis indicates that for them, reducing vulnerability and enhancing security are recurrent concerns. Moreover, in recent years, while conditions have improved for some people, hundreds of' millions of others have become more vulnerable: through greater exposure to physical or political disaster or threat, through higher costs of meeting contingencies such as health expenditures, or through loss of assets through individual or widespread disasters which have used up their reserves, leaving them less to cope with future needs and crises. With concerns like these a workshop on vulnerability and coping was held at IDS in September 1988, leading to this Bulletin. Some 20 people took part, about half of them reporting on recent fieldwork. The focus was at the household level, and the aims were to try to understand better the nature of vulnerability, how poor people cope with risks, shocks and stress, and what should he priorities for policy and research. Unlike poverty, vulnerability lacks a developed theory and accepted indicators and methods of measurement. The articles in this Bulletin provide ideas and material which should contribute towards developing these. Most directly, the first article, by Jeremy Swift, presents a critique of parts of Amartya Sen's entitlement theory, and then outlines a new analysis of vulnerability and security based on a classification of assets into investments, stores and claims. Investments Vulnerability 'Vulnerable' and 'vulnerability' are common terms in
OverviewThis article argues that in the 21st century livelihoods will be needed for vastly more people, many of them in marginal and fragile rural environments. To enable more of these livelihoods to be sustainable requires outsiders to reverse much that is normal in professionalism, bureaucracy, careers, and learning; to recognise that livelihoods are often complex and diverse; to decentralise; to deregulate and free poor people from hassle and rents; to make their rights more secure; to provide better access to services; and through all these to help poor rural people to take the long view. Normal prescriptions are for changes in structures, laws and procedures rather than in behaviour or methods. But recent experience has indicated that when outsiders behave differently and use new participatory methods, poor rural people show an unexpected creativity and capacity to present and analyse information, to diagnose and to plan. They know the complexity and diversity of their conditions and livelihoods, on which they are up-todate experts. To provide conditions for more sustainable rural livelihoods for the 21st century, one frontier for the 1990s is methodological R&D. This is to find better ways of enabling professionals and officials to change their behaviour and attitudes, and to learn from and to empower rural people.
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