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The Nhlangwini Integrated Rural Development Project aims to empower local people, in order that they may improve their quality of life, by helping them develop strategies for addressing basic needs. The Nhlangwini Ward is situated in southern KwaZulu, South Africa. Three workshops were held over a period of three months during 1989. The first examined development problems in the area; the second specifically probed those problems associated with family planning; the third was a development planning workshop, employing visual techniques described in some detail by the paper. Participants were asked to draw local resources by imagining they could view the area from a helicopter. The process of adopting visual techniques has resulted in a change in emphasis - as a result of findings, the integrated development programme has switched approaches with regard to issues facing women, and in terms of its goal setting mechanisms.

This paper describes a game and a story that were presented during the workshop to show how PRA can "help people to address and resolve conflict". The TASO game (described in the appendix) was used to illustrate current HIV transmission rates in Uganda. The story showed how PRA exercises conducted by Redd Barna in Zimbabwe brought out women's and men's different views of a proposed irrigation scheme. The potential for PRA to help resolve such conflicts is the emphasis placed on "the value of good communication skills". Development workers need to learn "facilitation and arbitration skills" in order to deal with, rather than "glossing over" conflict and "failing to acknowledge the political dimensions to all our interventions". Psychological stress (particularly in relation to HIV and AIDS) also needs to be recognised as "a valid development issue".

Participatory Rural Appraisal was conducted in two villages in Southern India in order to supplement formal survey information. One of the objectives was to develop a procedure for determining emic indicators of health and nutrition security. Four types of PRA were employed: i) participatory mapping (conducted separately by women and men) - to identify 'high' and 'low' risk households; ii) food charts - participants use beans to indicate the relative importance of foods consumed; iii) women's activity chart - beans are used to indicate the relative time spent on daily activities. iv) seasonality chart - this method was conducted with small groups (differentiated by gender and caste) to understand the yearly changes in rainfall, harvest of staples, food consumption, labour demand, childhood illness and women's illness. An ethnographer used in-depth interviews, key informant interviews, focus group and participant observation to conduct six household case studies in the two survey villages. The PRA techniques generated emic indicators of food-security which could be compared with the etic indicators of the formal survey.

Two RRAs were carried out by interdisciplinary teams over a period of five weeks in two areas of Benin where malnutrition was considered a problem "this mixture proved effective, permitting not only a comprehensive analysis of the problem, but also comprehensive remedial action". Chapter 1 describes RRA techniques in nutrition and health, Chapter 2 is focused on the methodology employed, Chapter 3 discusses the findings, Chapter 4 compares the RRA results with those obtained from three quantitative studies. In Chapter 5, the methodology used in the two RRAs is reassessed and recommendations are made to researchers and development workers who want to follow a similar approach.

This paper presents a number of methodological innovations on RRA and PRA in the context of food security. It is interesting in the first instance because it reviews work done as a follow-up to a PRA workshop on household data collection for food policy needs. On the method front, there are examples of mapping, diagramming, ranking and how each method feeds into food policy decisions. An increased use of visual methods is highlighted, and the connected increase in participation in and ownership of the research by local people. Along with this is an increasing importance of qualitative data in food policy decisions. The paper also includes an introduction to and comparison of PRA and RRA. It concludes by commenting that an additional advantage of these methods is that they are cost-effective, but that this may bring a linked disadvantage - that PRA methods are used with the intention of "extracting" information.

This summary is based on a report written for the Monitoring and Evaluation Division of the IFAD, with the general objective of examining the use of RRA methods for M&E. That report proposes a taxonomy of survey/RRA techniques and methods, which can be regarded as "a menu", thereby allowing choices to fit the precise needs of the user of information and institutional context. As such, the author argues, RRAs and formal surveys can be mixed to great effect. The criteria for such a taxonomy is outlined in this paper, as is a summary table of the main RRA techniques. The lessons from case study RRAs discussed in the original report are mostly positive, confirming "the value of weaving an RRA in to existing data" and showing how a low cost M&E system could be built on this. This is a useful and stimulating report with some clear summary diagrams and an extensive bibliography.

This thesis reconsiders women's health status from the perspective of changing and multiple productive roles. A reading of Foucault's 'The Birth of the Clinic' is used to problematise both the current focus of health care and the system of measurement through which it sees and represents the world. Shifting social and economic boundaries have radically altered the terrain of health policy and thus, health indicators are no longer focusing attention on the most central health issues. It is suggested that the apparatus of health indicators and their system of measurement is now inappropriate (from the author's abstract). The methodology combines quantitative and qualitative approaches. Chapter six focuses on the qualitative aspects of the research and would have the most relevance to urban PRA. A week of participatory urban appraisal was conducted in a slum in Santo Domingo. The purpose of the reserch was to gain an understanding of how women perceive the changes in their productive roles and the impact these changes have had on their health status. Methods used included semi-structured interviews, card sorting, constructing activity and time lines, ranking and scoring, and constructing a community map and history.