This is the second of a series of blogs hosted here that builds on, and extends, Reflecting Forewords (2024), a collection of forewords written by Robert from 1986 to 2020, each of which is paired with one or more pieces that offer contemporary riffs or contemplations on his ideas. Here, in the spirit of Reflecting Forewords we use Robert’s work as a springboard for our own reflections on strategy and practice.
This blog is authored by Juliet Millican, Associate Research Fellow in the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies and Coordinator of Re-Alliance, a UK based global network supporting regenerative practice in conflict and climate displacement.
At the end of the 1980s, as a naive development volunteer working in Senegal, someone handed me an article by Robert Chambers while explaining the difference between the terms ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’. I had been recruited to run a literacy programme in a country of which I had no former knowledge and in a language (Fulani) I couldn’t speak and feel horrified now that such roles were even possible. But the Chambers article opened my eyes to a whole way of working. In November 2025, over 35 years later while training a group of university lecturers in Ethiopia in participatory methods, I began reflecting on how Chambers’ work has framed the thinking of a whole generation of development workers and laid the groundwork for a move away from the colonial arrogance of the West.
Chambers’ early work
Despite reading most of what Robert Chambers’ has written, it is only on writing about him now that I discover he failed to complete his first PhD (in history) and was initially turned down for a professorship at IDS, (due to insufficient publications in academic journals). I also discover some synergies in our pasts, Robert’s eventual PhD was in resettlement and irrigation (both areas that I have worked in since) and his early lectureship was in rainy Manchester (which I left for sunny Senegal!). But it is his work on participatory rural appraisal (PRA) that has been most influential, stemming from RRA (Rapid Rural Appraisal) and evolving into PLA (Participatory Learning and Action). And while PLA comes from a range of different routes (The Sage Directory of Research Methods does not even mention Chambers in its entry), Intrac trace its lineage from RRA and PLA.
Some of the analyses of PRA link it to the writings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator who has been seen as the most influential thinker on education in the 20th century. Working with methods of teaching literacy through dialogue, concerned with liberation and freedom from oppression (see Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Freire saw literacy as an important tool of liberation, if reading and what people read was based on their everyday lives. His writings and his tools explored the relationship between colonised and coloniser and viewed learning as a process of co-creating knowledge, the knowledge needed for freedom.
In Chambers and Freire I discovered practical tools and approaches, a freedom from what I saw as the pointless oppression of academia (and rainy Manchester), and in 1989 in Senegal a way in to understanding who I was working with and whether and how learning to read might have a meaningful impact on their lives. Freire’s work –which prioritises the needs of the most oppressed and vulnerable and their lived realities has many links with Chambers’ early publications, ‘Farmer First’ and ‘Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last’. Between the 1980s and the mid 2000s Chambers’ work became a central voice for social justice in global development practice.
Critiques of participation
In my early years of international development work I encountered different versions of participatory work wherever I went. In India, Nepal, West and South Africa, local practitioners were conducting field level discussions with large community groups drawing graphs and maps in the sand, representing concepts with stones, rocks and branches. From mapping the placement of a water pump to relating seasonal calendars, rainfall, planting times and availability for other (literacy?) activities to ranking wealth and poverty and deciding what they wanted to learn and read, and communities soon learnt how to engage. But as Chambers’ work spread, like Freire’s work it was diluted and changed by those using it for different ends, and as such came in for its fair share of criticism.
In 2011, Andrea Cornwall and Gareth Pratt’s ‘The use and abuse of participatory rural appraisal: Reflections from practice’ documented its rapid rise, its frequent misuse and some of the main critiques that had been levelled against it, – commodification, mechanical application and over-use. The notion of ‘facipulation’, manipulation through facilitation, was coined by Cooke and Kothari in 2001 in their famous book ‘Participation, The New Tyranny’. Many saw its rapid use as a shortcutting of ‘proper’ rigorous research, but as Cornwall and Pratt argue, its intention, and its rapid inclusion of local voices, recognising communities as equal partners in development with a far better understanding of their own context than outsiders, is central to its strength, and is one I have rediscovered the value of, again and again, when working with countless different groups.
Ethiopia and the Sanitation Leaning Hub
Chambers’ later work and his involvement with the Sanitation Learning Hub in IDS picks up again on this notion of rapid access and its importance in emergency situations. He describes this in a short video on ‘Rapid Action Learning’ in relation to a campaign in India (2014-2019) where results on sanitation needs were urgent, and required relevant, actionable and timely information. In terms of behavioural research, it provided a more in-depth way of exploring behavioural practices that would not have been identified through a rapid survey.
These issues are currently relevant to a new large-scale research project in the Horn ofAfrica, I was invited tjoin, designing a research approach and training researchers from a local university , who surprisingly had never encountered PRA. 2025 marks a time of huge and unprecedented reduction in ODA and the dismantling of global institutions as conflict and climate displacement are escalating across the world. The impact on humanitarian as well as development practice has been massive, forcing those responding to displacement to rethink strategies on how to manage desperate need with disappearing funds. The project is exploring what behavioural strategies people use to meet their water and sanitation needs when camp or local facilities break down.
The research design for this project combined a rapid survey with participatory methods, and while the survey was insufficient on its own it did provide a valuable overview of context and concerns, which local researchers were then able to explore in greater depth. Using a visual ‘river of life’ researchers encouraged displaced and host communities to retell their story, the disruptions they had encountered and the advice they would offer to anyone else in their situation before ranking the different options available to them. As such the local research team were rapidly able to uncover the behaviours people resorted to and the advice or support they most needed. As many agencies in the area struggled to provide ‘more of the same’ when more was just not available, these methods were able to shift the conversation to what else might be possible.
What surprised me was how the ‘deluge of PRA practice’ had all but disappeared, and among the university-educated data-collectors we trained, none had come across this work ever before. We opened their eyes to new ways of doing research, fired their enthusiasm, and many left after the 6-day training and 2 days of piloting saying their work would never be the same again.
Since my early experiences on development projects throughout the 1990s I have shifted to working with universities in conflict contexts, to facilitating large scale organisational meetings and latterly to humanitarian response. Becoming increasingly involved with urgency and emergency, and with live time conflicts, I have found these methods of listening to different voices, visually mapping or tracking what people perceive to be happening and exploring feelings and motives that lie behind behaviours to be continually relevant. More than that, I recognise that what lies behind these methods is a deeper acknowledgement of people’s different realities and the need to take these equally into account. The world order is definitely shifting, large institutions no longer hold the power they held before, and polarised opinions within communities will need to be heard and unpacked if they are to be mobilised into relevant and timely action. RRA, PRA, PLA and RAL (Rapid Action Learning) are as useful now as they have ever been, and, whatever the acronym, should be part of our discourse moving forward.