Participatory methods (PMs) include ways of designing and implementing research and engagement which sit within a set of participatory values and principles.
They include a range of activities with a common thread: enabling people to play an active and influential part in decisions which affect their lives. In our work at IDS, we aim for research processes in which people’s knowledge is valued and in which their voices and analysis shape outcomes that benefit them and others.
Researchers, community members, activists and donors can all use PMs. Centring local knowledges and experiences through PMs can enable better understanding of plural and contested experiences, contexts, and ways that pathways for social change may be supported. Through our research, we show how interventions that are generated through PMs and which reflect local realities, can lead to deeper, broader and longer lasting social change.
There are many different, overlapping threads and traditions of participatory practice all over the world. The information on this site focuses on the more recent work of the Participation, Inclusion and Social Change research cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. All of the work featured is the result of collaboration with many experts in many parts of the world.
The approaches we use have a particular emphasis on shifting the dynamics that lead to and perpetuate social exclusion, oppression and harm, such as: exclusion faced by women, people living in extreme poverty, people with disabilities, enslaved people and bonded labourers , children, refugees, and others. Although all people have agency to create change, a systemic understanding can help to uncover the system dynamics that perpetuate exclusion, opening up emancipatory pathways. And often, a systemic solution calls for working with many different actors, including the powerful and elites. Many participatory methodologies link research to action.
The participatory paradigm
Participatory research methods sit within a participatory paradigm, or way of looking at the world that is relational, emergent, and rooted in people and processes. Because of this, participatory research has its own orientation, expression, methods, assumptions, and value base. How the participatory paradigm differs from a paradigm which is rooted in planning and procedures (Chambers 2008), is summarised below.
| ‘Contrasting paradigms of things and people’ | ||
| Planned and procedural | Grounded and emergent | |
| Orientation, planning and access | Top-down Centralised Controlling | Bottom-up Decentralised Empowering |
| Key words | Planning Design Blueprint | Participation Emergence Process |
| Methods | Standardised Reductionist Universal Fixed | Performative Inclusive Contextual Flexible |
| Embodying Expressing | Rules Conventions | Principles Values |
| Implicit assumptions about causality and change | Linear Controllable Predictable | Non-linear Uncontrollable Unpredictable |
| Valuing and relying for rigour and quality on | Regulation Precision Measurement Statistical analysis | Responsibility Fitness Judgement Triangulation |
| Roles and behaviour | Supervising Enforcing | Facilitating Enabling |
| Typical procedure and process | Questionnaires Randomized control trials Logframes | Participatory methodologies |
| Mode and ethos | Hierarchical | Democratic |
This binary view of research practice is a simplified view of reality. It helps to distinguish between the different approaches, yet, in our practice it is uncommon to work entirely within a participatory paradigm. We are often navigating between different paradigms in seeking meaningful participation. On any one of the dimensions, we can see these distinct positions as creative tensions – for example, as Apgar and colleagues (2023) suggest, navigating between linear and non-linear views of causality is necessary when learning with and from international development programming.
The participatory paradigm’s emphasis on people and grounded processes has significance for the role of the researcher and for decisions they make during the research process (see quality points below). Participatory researchers aim to work with a set of guiding principles. Applying these to our research designs, choice of methods and our practice, can help us to centre the people and not the procedure, to be adaptive to context, responsive to new knowledge, and to generate useful knowledge with people.
Principles
- Allow diversity of ways of knowing
- Enable collective analysis and learning
- Think of yourself as facilitator and catalyst rather than data gatherer
- Offset your own biases through reflexivity
- Be flexible, let things emerge, encourage interaction
- Have an action orientation (what does this knowledge mean for our action?)
- Be sensitive and aware of power differentials, including those created through gender, age and ability norms
- Be ready to learn from others
Foundations and principles
Participatory research and practice today combine and extend different approaches which have developed over time, in diverse contexts across the world, and in multiple fields of inquiry and action. These foundational concepts and approaches coexist today and have influenced one another across the world. This is not a definitive list, but some key thinkers who have influenced our work in the development sector include:
- Latin American foundations: Paolo Freire in Brazil worked with marginalized communities and developed methods that enabled these communities to study and make sense of their own situations and to be critical of the underlying factors that kept them in the margins. Freire’s work focused on conscientization in adult education – or the process of becoming aware of systems of oppression through reflection and action together with oppressors – emphasizing the relationship between them. Fals Borda, based in Colombia, was an early pioneer of what is now called Participatory Action Research (PAR), which emphasizes the transformational collective power of the working classes and peasant-indigenous groups, and proposes building power from below.
- Post-colonial African traditions: Marja-Liisa Swantz (2015) was part of a PAR movement that emerged in Tanzania during Nyerere’s people-focused policy development era. It came from deeply embedded research on ‘people’s own’ concepts of development. Other post-colonial traditions include work out of the African Renaissance (e.g. Mangu 2006; Nabudere 2006).
- India and South Asia: Robert Chambers and colleagues in India such as Muhammad Anisur Rahman, and Rajesh Tandon, challenged the development paradigm of top-down planning and imposed projects and programmes (see also Escobar and Galeano on Latin America). They argued that the knowledge that people (especially the rural poor) have of their environments and situations, is critically important to bring into development planning. Their work passed through multiple iterations, including RRA (rapid rural appraisal) in the 1970s; PRA (participatory rural appraisal) in the 1980s; and PLA (Participatory Learning and Action) from the mid -1990s. Praxis continues to build on and innovate with Freirean and PRA methods.
- Indigenous and decolonial methodologies challenge the worldview (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemologies), and ways of doing and relating (axiology) of ‘Western’ research, which obscure or marginalise alternative paradigms. Indigenous methodologies from the Pacific (Smith, L. 2010) offer research ethics and practices which are relational (between people but also with the non-human world) and decolonial. Newer traditions of African indigenous scholarship build on and extend these ideas in contextualised ways such as for example the Made in Africa work by Bagele Chilisa and others.
- European and North American action research tradition is a field developed by many disciplines, and which informs Participatory Action Research. The term is often ascribed to Kurt Lewin, whose work in the 1940s promoted collaborative and action-oriented approaches to research. His work was built upon by the Tavistock Institute, the Highlander Center, and resonates with Gustavsen’s approach to labour organising and the democratisation of organisations in Scandinavia. More recently our work has built on the foundations of cooperative inquiry substantively developed by John Heron and Peter Reason.
Examples
On this website, we describe methodologies that can help you think through your project’s design and include case studies as useful examples of where participatory approaches have been used. Our ethics page also offers some guidance on ethical challenges.
Quality in participatory research
Quality in any participatory process rests on how decisions are made about who is included, when, how and for what purpose and how facilitation navigates power. How we approach and assess inclusion is therefore key. One approach is to assess the desired level of participation at each stage, together with research partners or co-researchers (Vaughn & Jacquez 2020)
Our criteria for assessing participatory research and practice need to be congruent with the participatory paradigm (people and processes). Criteria appropriate for non-participatory forms of research, are often not fitting for PR – as reflected in the table above. In our participatory practice, we often draw on participatory action research quality criteria (Bradbury & Reason 2001) who argue for ‘broadening the bandwidth’ of validity and quality criteria in research. By reflecting on our choices around five critical issues (relationships, practical outcomes, extended ways of knowing, purpose, and enduring consequence), we are better able to see the quality of our work. See also how the Action Research Journal defines its quality choicepoints.
- Relationships: Quality as relational practice
This relates to power, and the development of quality relationships between members of the research partnership: people with lived experience, practitioners, researchers, and other actors, including our relationships with the non-human world.
Are we explicit in developing a relational way of researching and acting?
2. Practical outcomes: Quality as reflexive-practical outcome
Are we guided by reflexive concern for practical outcomes? Is this work useful? For whom?
3. Extended ways of knowing: Quality as plurality of knowing
Are we generating theory which is reasonable and practical?
Are we extending our ways of knowing? (Heron & Reason 2008 include embodied, experiential and other non-intellectual forms of knowledge, presentational knowledge (e.g. generated through drama, artistic expression etc), practical knowledge (‘how to’), and theoretical or conceptual knowledge).
Are we using appropriate methods? (which engaging with people on issues that are important to them, eliciting multiple forms of knowledge, and are sensitive and respond to the context).
4. Purpose: Quality as engaging in significant work
Is this work important to those involved? Is the work well-grounded in the daily concerns of the people involved, and so significant to them.
5. Enduring consequence: Emergent Inquiry towards enduring consequence
Is our work together contributing to something new and enduring? This refers to the evolving and emergent nature of participatory enquiry. It also relates to whether the impact and outcomes of the inquiry will persist beyond the lifespan of the project/programme.
Our collective work in the Participation Cluster suggests an additional quality criteria:
6. Capacity for analysis and action
Is our work creating spaces for those involved to grow confidence in their ability to analyse, to reflect on the knowledge they are generating, and to take action?
