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Whose Voice? Participatory research and policy change
Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 179–191
Whose Voice? Participatory research and policy change Edited by Jeremy Holland with James Blackburn, with foreword by Robert Chambers; Intermediate Technology Publications 1998, London, 254pp Whose Voice? looks at how participatory research can affect policy making—and how the policy context influences the practice of participatory approaches like PRA1. Can the voices of the poor really be heard by the rich and powerful or do they have to be translated into policy speak? Is it possible to be ‘participatory’ if the overall objective is to feed findings into a macro-level analysis of poverty? To some, it may seem a contradiction in terms to find agencies like the World Bank using PRA to inform policy. But participatory research is increasingly being used on a large scale and becoming acceptable beyond the grassroots organisations where it originated. Despite the subtitle, the focus is on participatory research rather than policy change. As Robert Chambers points out (p. 197): “Empowering poor people to conduct their own appraisal and analysis, and to present their realities, is one thing. Whether their voices are heard and acted on is another. There are two weak links: from voice to policy change (policy-in-principle) and from policy change to practice (policy-in-practice)”. The reason for there being less in the book about policy links than participatory research, he says, is that the research is recent and has not had time to work through into policy-in-principle, and also because “causes and effects with policy change are often complex and hidden”. There is however a companion volume entitled Who Changes?, which complements the discussion through looking at the institutionalisation of participatory approaches, including “scaling up”. Whose Voice? is based on presentations and dis-
1
Participatory Rural Appraisal, PRA, has been described as a family of approaches, methods and behaviours to enable poor people to analyse and express the realities of their lives and conditions, and themselves to plan, monitor and evaluate their actions. Visual methods, such as mapping and diagramming, are used to facilitate discussion on people’s priorities and the problems they face.
183
cussion sessions at a workshop convened at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, in May 1996. The participants came from CBOs, NGOs, academic institutions, consultancy groups, and government, bilateral and multilateral institutions. These papers provide case studies varying in length from a couple of pages summarising issues (e.g. Inglis and Guy on PRA in Laggan, Scotland) to detailed accounts of specific projects (e.g. Gill on using PRA for agricultural policy analysis in Nepal). The book has three sections. Part 1 contains case studies of participatory policy-focused research which take as their entry point thematic or sectoral concerns (agriculture, health etc.). Some emphasise the policy output, others the participatory process. Part 2 concentrates on experiences with PPA (Participatory Poverty Assessment), a policy-oriented research instrument pioneered by the World Bank in over 30 countries. Part 3 contains reflections from the IDS workshop, comprising summarised discussions and individual analytical papers. Of particular interest is the case study, “Designing the future together: PRA and education policy in The Gambia”. Though used extensively in agriculture and health programme development, PRA has rarely been used in educational sector work. This chapter describes the use of participatory research to bring issues around girls’ education to policy makers’ attention. PRA activities enabled girls to highlight their concerns, such as identifying a common constraint to school attendance through drawing the cartoon problem, “No Toilet Door”. Participatory mapping of villages showed that teenage girls who were pregnant, married or about to be married (25% of all girls) constituted an ‘invisible’ segment of the community, not considered significant in discussions about schooling. This chapter raises issues around the practice of participatory research, questioning the assumption that local people should have access to the findings but not necessarily to the analysis and theory that have informed the study as a whole: “Are we just helping people to engage in low-level tinkering with research tools, or are we also equipping them to understand the fundamental assumptions underlying PRA so that they can fight back if they like,
184
Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 179–191
add some different viewpoints, or even help us make sense of the stewpot of contradictory paradigms from which we now draw? % do we want them to be craftspeople, paramedics rather than doctors?” (p. 38). Several other studies discuss similar issues. Booth, writing about health policy in Zambia (Chapter 4), discusses the “gap between field work and report writing”. He stresses the training implications if people are to develop the capacity to handle both dimensions (p. 30). The studies from Jamaica (Moser and Holland, Chapter 6) and South Africa (Attwood and May, Chapter 15) ask who owns the research process, and question who has overall control of the study. Anil Shah’s account of how an NGO managed to influence government policy in India (Chapter 21) outlines the policy maker’s viewpoint rather than the researcher’s: “Policymakers are bombarded daily with proposals for change: they are not waiting for good ideas. Their basket is full, the bus is crowded” (p. 164). The book is a valuable exploration of the challenges and dilemmas faced by participatory researchers, particularly issues around power, control and ‘voice’. As well as practical constraints of time, expense and training, the papers discuss more theoretical issues, such as PRA as a process (‘empowerment’) versus PRA as product (plans, maps, diagrams). A distinction is made between ‘extractive’ and ‘exploitative’ research (p. 13), and the generic principles rather than the techniques of PRA in policy contexts are stressed. The authors are reflexive around their role as researchers, analysing, for example, how they determined “whose voice” to include in order to make a policy point or trying to work out what caused subsequent policy change (PRA or something else?). Anyone familiar with the literature on ethnography as a text (e.g. Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Writing Culture) will find echoes here. What I found new was the introduction of these concepts into discussions of PRA. Issues like researcher bias and PRA methods involving an ideological stance rather than simply being a toolkit need to be addressed if participatory research is to initiate policy change.
It is a pity that this book missed the opportunity to present the interesting materials and case studies in a form that might be more accessible to both policy makers and those working at grassroots who are not familiar with academic genres. This is a book which seems intended for academics and researchers already familiar with the debates around reflexivity, methods versus methodology etc. The book is written by developers for developers (particularly researchers) and lacks a variety of voices or viewpoints—both people in the communities described and the policy makers themselves. This is not an easy, nor a short, read. Though the short case studies probably worked well in a workshop where the authors were present to fill in the background, I found them difficult to ‘enter’ in the form of chapters of a book. More quotations from the actual research findings (the voices of the researched were notably absent) might have made the book easier to digest. The decision not to generalise the ways in which PRA can affect policy is well-founded. PRA has evolved from a variety of research approaches, making it difficult to theorise in meaningful ways. Structuring the book around case studies captures this idea. There is a good range of case studies across continents and sectoral areas. Most of the cases were intended from the outset to affect policy in specific ways. The example of how a video made in Tanzania led to villagers’ action to bring issues around dynamite fishing to the attention of policy makers (Johansson, p. 156) is a welcome reminder of different ways in which participatory research can affect policy. Although initiated by outsiders, the participatory process took off in ways unanticipated by them and become controlled by the communities. I became more aware of two contrasting ways in which participatory research can effect policy change: either predictable change through feeding data to policy makers (the majority of cases presented here) or empowering communities to work directly on changing policy. Maybe we need a further volume on the latter— presented in the voices of those who have changed.
Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 179–191
Anna Robinson-Pant 42 North Way, Lewes, Sussex BN7 1DT, UK 31 May 2000 PII: S 0 7 3 8 - 0 5 9 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 4 7 - X
Cost Sharing in Education: Public Finance, School and Household Perspectives夽 Perran Penrose; Education Research Report Serial no. 27, Department for International Development, London, 141 pages, 1998, ISBN 1-86192-056-3, paperback, price: available free of charge from the publishers One in the series of Education Papers, published by the Education Division of the British government Department for International Development, this monograph attempts to provide answers to some of the questions on cost-sharing practices in education, some of which are taken for granted otherwise. The principal questions identified are: whether cost sharing increases availability of total resources for education? Does it enhance efficiency in the utilisation of resource? Does it improve the quality of education? Does it have any effects on enrolments and attendance? While many neoliberals go on trying to provide affirmative answers to these questions, very few try to look at these questions critically. Penrose belongs to this category of very few. A critical examination of these questions should be of interest to all serious researchers and policy planners in the area of education. After discussing the principles and key issues of cost sharing based on a review of the literature, Penrose empirically examines the experiences of Ghana and Tanzania. Penrose shows that many of the claims of the neoliberals on the benefits of cost sharing are not supported by empirical evidence. He concludes that
夽 Address of the publishers: Department for International Development, 94 Victoria Street, London SW1E 5JL
185
there are several problems with cost sharing. The benefits are few and the losses are many. Thus, cost sharing practices have been regressive, affecting student enrolments and equity dimensions in particular; these practices have little impact on quality of education; there is no evidence to show that efficiency in resource use can be enhanced due to cost sharing (in fact, costs of administration of some of the cost sharing mechanisms, e.g., student loans, are quite high); and cost sharing methods enable governments to squeeze public budgets for education, although there may have been some increase in availability of resources, as the households are compelled to spend more and more. The concept of cost sharing is considered a moderate concept, compared to the concept of ‘cost recovery’, though many do not maintain much distinction between the two in their discussions on the several proposals and practices in this regard. In fact, they are treated as if they exactly refer to the same modes and mechanism in nature and practice, and are based on the same philosophy—neo-liberal and market oriented. Penrole adopts a broad definition of cost sharing so as to include not only cost recovery in the form of fees from students, meeting of household costs of education by the households themselves, and community participation in financing education, but also international aid for education, i.e., all cost sharing by the government, the students, the families, the local community and the international community. Penrose is critical of many of the trends in government financing, increasing household costs, and of the role of the international aid in education development. Apart from theoretical weaknesses associated with cost sharing mechanisms, Penrose describes how the mechanisms of cost sharing allowed governments, with the flow of international aid on the one hand and user fees and less obvious compulsory payments on the other, not to worry about poor public sector management, and not to be concerned with the need for efficient reallocation of public resources. Further, during periods of adjustment, inappropriate initiatives were taken, which pushed up the costs substantially. Penrose systematically documents the evidence to show that practices of cost sharing in education do not axiomatically result in improvement in edu-
Whose Voice? Participatory research and policy change Edited by Jeremy Holland with James Blackburn, with foreword by Robert Chambers; Intermediate Technology Publications 1998, London, 254pp Whose Voice? looks at how participatory research can affect policy making—and how the policy context influences the practice of participatory approaches like PRA1. Can the voices of the poor really be heard by the rich and powerful or do they have to be translated into policy speak? Is it possible to be ‘participatory’ if the overall objective is to feed findings into a macro-level analysis of poverty? To some, it may seem a contradiction in terms to find agencies like the World Bank using PRA to inform policy. But participatory research is increasingly being used on a large scale and becoming acceptable beyond the grassroots organisations where it originated. Despite the subtitle, the focus is on participatory research rather than policy change. As Robert Chambers points out (p. 197): “Empowering poor people to conduct their own appraisal and analysis, and to present their realities, is one thing. Whether their voices are heard and acted on is another. There are two weak links: from voice to policy change (policy-in-principle) and from policy change to practice (policy-in-practice)”. The reason for there being less in the book about policy links than participatory research, he says, is that the research is recent and has not had time to work through into policy-in-principle, and also because “causes and effects with policy change are often complex and hidden”. There is however a companion volume entitled Who Changes?, which complements the discussion through looking at the institutionalisation of participatory approaches, including “scaling up”. Whose Voice? is based on presentations and dis-
1
Participatory Rural Appraisal, PRA, has been described as a family of approaches, methods and behaviours to enable poor people to analyse and express the realities of their lives and conditions, and themselves to plan, monitor and evaluate their actions. Visual methods, such as mapping and diagramming, are used to facilitate discussion on people’s priorities and the problems they face.
183
cussion sessions at a workshop convened at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, in May 1996. The participants came from CBOs, NGOs, academic institutions, consultancy groups, and government, bilateral and multilateral institutions. These papers provide case studies varying in length from a couple of pages summarising issues (e.g. Inglis and Guy on PRA in Laggan, Scotland) to detailed accounts of specific projects (e.g. Gill on using PRA for agricultural policy analysis in Nepal). The book has three sections. Part 1 contains case studies of participatory policy-focused research which take as their entry point thematic or sectoral concerns (agriculture, health etc.). Some emphasise the policy output, others the participatory process. Part 2 concentrates on experiences with PPA (Participatory Poverty Assessment), a policy-oriented research instrument pioneered by the World Bank in over 30 countries. Part 3 contains reflections from the IDS workshop, comprising summarised discussions and individual analytical papers. Of particular interest is the case study, “Designing the future together: PRA and education policy in The Gambia”. Though used extensively in agriculture and health programme development, PRA has rarely been used in educational sector work. This chapter describes the use of participatory research to bring issues around girls’ education to policy makers’ attention. PRA activities enabled girls to highlight their concerns, such as identifying a common constraint to school attendance through drawing the cartoon problem, “No Toilet Door”. Participatory mapping of villages showed that teenage girls who were pregnant, married or about to be married (25% of all girls) constituted an ‘invisible’ segment of the community, not considered significant in discussions about schooling. This chapter raises issues around the practice of participatory research, questioning the assumption that local people should have access to the findings but not necessarily to the analysis and theory that have informed the study as a whole: “Are we just helping people to engage in low-level tinkering with research tools, or are we also equipping them to understand the fundamental assumptions underlying PRA so that they can fight back if they like,
184
Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 179–191
add some different viewpoints, or even help us make sense of the stewpot of contradictory paradigms from which we now draw? % do we want them to be craftspeople, paramedics rather than doctors?” (p. 38). Several other studies discuss similar issues. Booth, writing about health policy in Zambia (Chapter 4), discusses the “gap between field work and report writing”. He stresses the training implications if people are to develop the capacity to handle both dimensions (p. 30). The studies from Jamaica (Moser and Holland, Chapter 6) and South Africa (Attwood and May, Chapter 15) ask who owns the research process, and question who has overall control of the study. Anil Shah’s account of how an NGO managed to influence government policy in India (Chapter 21) outlines the policy maker’s viewpoint rather than the researcher’s: “Policymakers are bombarded daily with proposals for change: they are not waiting for good ideas. Their basket is full, the bus is crowded” (p. 164). The book is a valuable exploration of the challenges and dilemmas faced by participatory researchers, particularly issues around power, control and ‘voice’. As well as practical constraints of time, expense and training, the papers discuss more theoretical issues, such as PRA as a process (‘empowerment’) versus PRA as product (plans, maps, diagrams). A distinction is made between ‘extractive’ and ‘exploitative’ research (p. 13), and the generic principles rather than the techniques of PRA in policy contexts are stressed. The authors are reflexive around their role as researchers, analysing, for example, how they determined “whose voice” to include in order to make a policy point or trying to work out what caused subsequent policy change (PRA or something else?). Anyone familiar with the literature on ethnography as a text (e.g. Clifford and Marcus, 1986, Writing Culture) will find echoes here. What I found new was the introduction of these concepts into discussions of PRA. Issues like researcher bias and PRA methods involving an ideological stance rather than simply being a toolkit need to be addressed if participatory research is to initiate policy change.
It is a pity that this book missed the opportunity to present the interesting materials and case studies in a form that might be more accessible to both policy makers and those working at grassroots who are not familiar with academic genres. This is a book which seems intended for academics and researchers already familiar with the debates around reflexivity, methods versus methodology etc. The book is written by developers for developers (particularly researchers) and lacks a variety of voices or viewpoints—both people in the communities described and the policy makers themselves. This is not an easy, nor a short, read. Though the short case studies probably worked well in a workshop where the authors were present to fill in the background, I found them difficult to ‘enter’ in the form of chapters of a book. More quotations from the actual research findings (the voices of the researched were notably absent) might have made the book easier to digest. The decision not to generalise the ways in which PRA can affect policy is well-founded. PRA has evolved from a variety of research approaches, making it difficult to theorise in meaningful ways. Structuring the book around case studies captures this idea. There is a good range of case studies across continents and sectoral areas. Most of the cases were intended from the outset to affect policy in specific ways. The example of how a video made in Tanzania led to villagers’ action to bring issues around dynamite fishing to the attention of policy makers (Johansson, p. 156) is a welcome reminder of different ways in which participatory research can affect policy. Although initiated by outsiders, the participatory process took off in ways unanticipated by them and become controlled by the communities. I became more aware of two contrasting ways in which participatory research can effect policy change: either predictable change through feeding data to policy makers (the majority of cases presented here) or empowering communities to work directly on changing policy. Maybe we need a further volume on the latter— presented in the voices of those who have changed.
Book reviews / International Journal of Educational Development 21 (2001) 179–191
Anna Robinson-Pant 42 North Way, Lewes, Sussex BN7 1DT, UK 31 May 2000 PII: S 0 7 3 8 - 0 5 9 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 4 7 - X
Cost Sharing in Education: Public Finance, School and Household Perspectives夽 Perran Penrose; Education Research Report Serial no. 27, Department for International Development, London, 141 pages, 1998, ISBN 1-86192-056-3, paperback, price: available free of charge from the publishers One in the series of Education Papers, published by the Education Division of the British government Department for International Development, this monograph attempts to provide answers to some of the questions on cost-sharing practices in education, some of which are taken for granted otherwise. The principal questions identified are: whether cost sharing increases availability of total resources for education? Does it enhance efficiency in the utilisation of resource? Does it improve the quality of education? Does it have any effects on enrolments and attendance? While many neoliberals go on trying to provide affirmative answers to these questions, very few try to look at these questions critically. Penrose belongs to this category of very few. A critical examination of these questions should be of interest to all serious researchers and policy planners in the area of education. After discussing the principles and key issues of cost sharing based on a review of the literature, Penrose empirically examines the experiences of Ghana and Tanzania. Penrose shows that many of the claims of the neoliberals on the benefits of cost sharing are not supported by empirical evidence. He concludes that
夽 Address of the publishers: Department for International Development, 94 Victoria Street, London SW1E 5JL
185
there are several problems with cost sharing. The benefits are few and the losses are many. Thus, cost sharing practices have been regressive, affecting student enrolments and equity dimensions in particular; these practices have little impact on quality of education; there is no evidence to show that efficiency in resource use can be enhanced due to cost sharing (in fact, costs of administration of some of the cost sharing mechanisms, e.g., student loans, are quite high); and cost sharing methods enable governments to squeeze public budgets for education, although there may have been some increase in availability of resources, as the households are compelled to spend more and more. The concept of cost sharing is considered a moderate concept, compared to the concept of ‘cost recovery’, though many do not maintain much distinction between the two in their discussions on the several proposals and practices in this regard. In fact, they are treated as if they exactly refer to the same modes and mechanism in nature and practice, and are based on the same philosophy—neo-liberal and market oriented. Penrole adopts a broad definition of cost sharing so as to include not only cost recovery in the form of fees from students, meeting of household costs of education by the households themselves, and community participation in financing education, but also international aid for education, i.e., all cost sharing by the government, the students, the families, the local community and the international community. Penrose is critical of many of the trends in government financing, increasing household costs, and of the role of the international aid in education development. Apart from theoretical weaknesses associated with cost sharing mechanisms, Penrose describes how the mechanisms of cost sharing allowed governments, with the flow of international aid on the one hand and user fees and less obvious compulsory payments on the other, not to worry about poor public sector management, and not to be concerned with the need for efficient reallocation of public resources. Further, during periods of adjustment, inappropriate initiatives were taken, which pushed up the costs substantially. Penrose systematically documents the evidence to show that practices of cost sharing in education do not axiomatically result in improvement in edu-