Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly With Participatory Action Research

by Orlando Fals-Borda, Mohammad Anisur Rahman

Action and Knowledge draws on twenty years of experience with the techniques and philosophy of Participatory Action-Research (PAR). PAR is an innovative approach to economic and social change, which goes beyond usual institutional boundaries in development by actively involving the people in generating knowledge about their own condition and how it can be changed. PAR requires a strong commitment by participating social scientists to deprofessionalize their expertise and share it with the people, while recognizing that the communities directly involved have the critical voice in determining the direction and goals of change as subjects rather than objects. PAR has its origins in the work of Third World social scientists more than three decades ago as they brought new ways to empower the oppressed by helping them to acquire reliable knowledge on which to construct countervailing power. It has since spread throughout the world, as reflected in this book with contributions from Asia, Africa Latin America and North America in the form of case studies of actual experience with the PAR approach. PAR is not static and fixed but dynamic and enduring, as the case studies and the theoretical chapters that precede and follow the case studies amply reveal.

182 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, slim little volume on Participatory Action Research (PAR), that opens with a good background chapter from Orlando Fals-Borda on just what PAR is and what it hopes to achieve:

This experiential methodology implies the acquisition of serious and reliable knowledge upon which to construct power, or countervailing power, for the poor, oppressed and exploited groups and social classes—the grassroots—and for their authentic organisations and movements.
The final aims of this combination of liberating knowledge and political power within a continuous process of life and work are: (1) to enable the oppressed groups and classes to acquire sufficient creative and transforming leverage as expressed in specific projects, acts and struggles; and (2) to produce and develop socio-political thought processes with which popular bases can identify (p 3-4).

There are two kinds of knowledge, and PAR at its best brings them together in a process of transformation:

their knowlefge and experience stem from different class conformations and rationalities (one Cartesian and academic, the other experiential and practical). Thus a dialectical tension is created between them which can be resolved only through practical commitment, that is, through a form of praxis. The sum of knowledge from both types of agents, however, makes it possible to acquire a much more accurate and correct picture of the reality that is being transformed (4).

It has two primary characteristics, the first is that research is carried out through a subject/subject relationship rather than a subject/object relationship…which I love. It strikes me that the subject/object relationship is often what I find so cringeworthy about much academic work, though many researchers have enough respect for and empathy with those they work with to avoid this without necessarily going through this kind of participatory process.

It implicitly draws on Gramsci for its vision of how it is changing the world: ‘The collective pursuit of these goals in social, educational and political practice turns all those involved into organic intellectuals of the working classes without creating permanent hierarchies’ (5). Like popular education, it works in a spiral moving from the micro to the macro level, acquiring a political dimension that allows theory and action to come together. This must happen in its own time, it is conjunctural and cannot be forced.

The second is that people ‘learn to know and recognize themselves as a means of creating people’s power’, that ‘science is not a fetish with a life of its own’ but a ‘valid and useful form of knowledge’, albeit one that ‘carries with it class biases and values that scientists hold as a group’ (7). PAR works with the following techniques to draw out the knowledge of the people:

1. Collective Research
2. Critical Recovery of History through collective memory
3. Valuing and applying folk culture
4. Production and diffusion of new knowledge – always trying to end the monopoly of the written word through various mediums.

Again pulling from Gramsci, all of these things together work to transform ‘“common” sense into “good” sense or critical knowledge that would be the sum of experiential and theoretical knowledge’ (9)
Muhammad Anisur Rahman further develops this introduction

The basic ideology of PAR is that a self-concious people, those who are currently poor and oppressed, will progressively transform their environment by their own pracis. In this process others may play a catalytic and supportive role but will not dominate (13).

Thus you have class struggle, but no vanguard, and for PAR ‘domination of masses by elites is rooted not only in the polarization of control over the means of material production but also over the means of knowledge production, including control over the social power to determine what is useful knowledge’ (14). That last is particularly important I feel, as is the understanding of consciousness: ‘The claim of ‘advanced consciousness’ is, in fact, a false one. Consciousness is derived from realities that people live (social existences), and people living entirely different realities develop consciousnesses which are not very comparable within the same scale of assessment’ (19).

There’s an interesting review from both Fals-Borda and Rahman of the trajectory of PAR from the 1970s to 90s, a long brilliant list of people working in the field that you can follow up on to read more. Some discussion of the ways that it has been coopted by Universities and development agencies, stripped of its political content. I love that they write this:

We should have no regrets over our original iconoclasm. And it is well to remind ourselves and others at this challenging moment that a rather permanent existential choice is made when one decides to live and work with PAR’ and that it is ‘not a finished product, an easy blueprint or a panacea. We should recall that PAR…is an open-ended process of life and work—or vivencia—a progressive evolution toward an overall, structural transformation of society and culture…’ (29).

This open-ended process seeks to bring together different kinds of knowledge, create ‘reenchantment bridges’ (32) between the academic and the popular, the qualitative and the quantitative. We need to recognise that both possess validity, both contain their blind spots and their mistakes, thus a dialogue and process of mutual learning is needed between the two.

Part II looks at actual examples of vivencias, or PAR put into action, across a variety of projects from Africa to Latina America to the US. Some good quotes from these:

That is, a research experience had to be set in motion which would develop the participants’ potential so they would not only see reality for what it is but do so with a view to changing their place and role within it… the process of generating knowledge also must have a mobilizing effect, reaffirming the people as actors capable of transforming reality (Gustavo I. de Roux 44).

…it is not so much the simplicity of the techniques that defined the research as participatory research, but rather the fact that the topics, methods and implementation were all decided by the peasants themselves. (Vera Gianotten and Ton de Wit - 69)

The people have to organize themselves. Organization cannot be imposed from outside with rigid rules. While it easy for a leader to organize the people, such organization risks being dominated by the more able. It is better to let the people gradually seek out the path themselves in order to reduce this risk, according to their traditional modes, and thus develop a natural process of discussion and review. For obtaining and sustaining the solidarity of the group, the process is more important than the result. (Rahman – 89)

The tragedy of underdevelopment is not that the ordinary people have remained poor and are becoming poorer, but that they have been inhibited from authentic development as humans… For no one can develop others; one can only stretch or diminish others by trying to ‘develop’ them (Rahman-103).

My favourite chapter was by Sithembiso Nyoni, on ‘People’s Power in Zimbabwe’, this had the most nuts and bolts descriptions I felt, and as someone who has tried to do a lot of this in my work, this was the most interesting and useful (though everything here is interesting and useful). It’s also rather beautiful:

The development of a people with such a history cannot be achieved by any ‘system’. Nor can a people’s development continue to be designed and seen solely through the eyes of experts, who in the past have only been able to identify the smoke from the burning land of our people, but not the causes of the fire or how it could be extinguished (110).

Participation has been viewed either as equivalent to grassroots democracy or as a derivative of Western social philosophy. This type of participation has underestimated the drama that takes place when the people engage in a participatory process. It has not allowed for the consideration of contradictions and conflicts in any given situation. For us, the birth pains of participation involve surfacing, understanding and mastering these conflicts and contradictions that have led us to new visions, new relationships and strategies of work’ (111)

Therefore participation is not a smooth, easy or painless ‘development’ process. It is an active engagement in the search for one’s own history and the part played by the individual and others around him in shaping that history. Participation does not apportion blame to outside forces as the sole cause of a people’s plight. It helps the people examine themselves, their roles and positions in society as well as the external factors om the processes of development/underdevelopment…In a word, participatory advancement is for us a deep self-searching process which leads to the authentic development of a people’s self-reliance and people’s power’ (113).

John Gaventa is here too, I loved his work on power in Appalachia and have long admired him as the director of the Highlander Centre. He focuses on the importance of a process of demystifying the ‘myth of expertise’.

The third and final section is a reflection on these practices. I wish I had read this years ago when I was working in popular education and organising (and several people note this tension which we felt so strongly, between popular education and political practice), but look forward to wrestling with some of this in my future practice.

[Gabriel Servin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conjunto de ensayos (¿o experiencias?) que no sólo se presenta como un convencimiento para les más reacios a formas alternativas de hacer ciencia (estoy simplificando de más la cuestión), sino que ofrece una reflexión importante sobre la imperiosa necesidad de que las comunidades se "desarrollen" en sus propios términos, sin necesidad de asistencialismos que camuflan la causa de los males que aquejan a diversos sectores de la humanidad. Buen libro si te adentras al asunto de investigación-acción y la producción horizontal de conocimiento