The role of video in participatory development

Why should an agency like Oxfam be interested in using video as a tool for social development? Video has the potential to retrieve the experiences and reflect back the voices of under-represented people. It can provide an accessible record of testimony, discussions, and activities. Groups and individual participants can use these audio-visual records to discuss and reorganise their opinions and concerns, and they can re-record and add information. When they are satisfied that they have represented what they want to say and show, they can take their information and re-present it to others. Video tapes can act as a conduit for communication between grassroots communities and those whom under-represented groups would not normally be able to address.

Unfortunately, the advantages of the participatory uses of video do not automatically resolve all the problems of management, planning, timing, sustainability, training, and facilitation that affect other approaches to participatory learning.

Participation and development

To appreciate the significance of the pilot project in Ky Nam Commune, which was set up to investigate the potential of video as a tool for learning, it may be helpful to consider it in the context of recent and current thinking about participatory development.

In the 1960s and 1970s, debates about the meaning of 'participation' were associated with a growing body of theory about grassroots development. Educationists such as Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire devised radical learning programmes with people living on the margins of society. They introduced new and liberal methods of teaching to encourage poor people to think critically about the reasons for their oppression and exclusion. Freire introduced the notion of learning as a process that could lead to social transformation.

Rather than using pre-printed textbooks in adult literacy classes, Freire encouraged learning groups to develop their own materials, based on the daily reality of their lives. This methodology represented an opposition to traditional approaches to learning, which Freire called 'the banking system of education', and replaced it with a process of dialogue between teachers and learners which Freire called 'critical pedagogy'.

Freire's objections to a 'top-down' mode of learning in which marginalised people are treated as passive recipients of knowledge were reflected in a move among development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to devise methods of working with poor communities which would actively involve them in identifying and solving their own problems. Rural people's ability to survive in harsh climatic, social, and economic conditions argued for the need to reassess and respect local knowledge and expertise.

Development agencies and university researchers began to devise processes, known as Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), which addressed the issue of how outsiders might gain knowledge and insights from rural people, while enabling local communities to have access to the results. The use of survey questionnaires, administered by external researchers, was seen to place a disproportionate value on factors that were quantitative rather than qualitative. It also tended to produce information that was biased by the social position, context, and gender of the respondents. And inevitably it reflected the cultural assumptions of the researchers. RRA methods, although still essentially extractive, marked an important step in development research methods, because their exponents posed the question: whose knowledge counts?

By the mid-1980s the terms 'participation' and ^participatory' were beginning to be used by development professionals in conjunction with RRA. It was claimed by the advocates of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) — Robert Chambers and others — that the processes enabled farmers to become the principal 'owners' of information gained through a whole range of participatory methods, designed to enable villagers to focus on and discover things about their own lives and needs:

A PRA process ... seeks to enable outsiders to learn, through the sharing of information in a manner which enhances people's analysis and knowledge and leaves them owning it ... for example, through participatory mapping of a watershed, where the map is used by villagers to plot current conditions and plan actions, and retained by them for monitoring action taken and changes; or through mapping and surveying degraded forest, deciding how to protect it and what to plant, and then managing the resource ... the aim is to enable people to present, share, analyse and augment their knowledge as the start of a process. The ultimate output sought is enhanced knpwledge and competence, an ability to make demands, and to sustain action. Instead of imposing and extracting, PRA seeks to empower.

In PRA, or PLA (Participatory Learning Approaches, or Participatory Learning and Action) as it is now generally known, the learning activities undertaken by local people in the local context are designed as a focus to promote critical thinking, and it is the discussion which such a focus provokes that leads to the real sharing of information and knowledge. Researchers use maps and diagrams drawn in dust on the ground, or group walks and discussions that take place along the routes familiarly taken to grazing grounds or water-sources, to enable women and men to share their knowledge of their own landscapes and to decide together the issues or topics they need to research further. From the global perspective of the whole village, they are able to discuss who owns which land, who produces what, which crops are best grown where, and so on. As a result, an overview of the social, economic, and environmental world of the village is built up by the village participants, and the focus of the later participatory research activities is developed from this perspective. The layers of the onion of village relations, conflicts, gender issues, health problems, wealth and poverty can gradually be peeled back and examined.

Problems with participatory approaches

A great deal of debate has focused on the definition and refinement of PRA/PLA processes and practices. At times it seems that there is an ever-expanding industry of participatory training and research. It is an industry that is not without its critics. David Mosse, for example, has warned that a set of given techniques is of secondary value to an understanding of the complex social and political environments in which they are applied.

The mechanical application of PRA/PLA 'methods' or 'activities' (the mapping exercises, diagrams and so on) is one potential problem. Another is that the mere use of PRA/PLA methods is no guarantee that external bias will be eliminated and that local conditions — social, cultural, and political — will be...