Continuing Relevance of Participatory Rural Appraisal: Managerial Implications and Strategic Importance for Democracy

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), as a tool of development research since the 1970s, has been successful in its pursuit of social justice, poverty alleviation and democratization, and has continuing relevance. The impetus is not on the spread of PRA, but on participatory approaches, behavior, attitudes, and mindset. PRA has the flexibility to adapt and synthesize with other development tools. Therefore, it has the ability to meet immediate
social demands through improvisation, and turn itself into a movement. This democratic PRA entered the development mainstream in the early 1990s in a definitive move from the controversial, top down bureaucratic project planning methodologies like that of survey questionnaires, coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Long before PRA was conceptualized, its basic principles were in practical use in informal ways in many parts of the world. Participation has numerous managerial implications in terms of quality decisions, ownership of decisions, leadership, economies of scale, higher levels of productivity, and effective utilization of available resources. The concept of participation is increasingly seen in the context of citizenship and local governance. The transformative notion of participation endows people with the right to participate in politics, democracy, and development.