Participatory Research in Basarwa Settlements: Shifting Development Paradigms

Abstract

As anthropologists, applied researchers, and action researchers, we have long explored the relationship between researcher and researched; many of us have tried to reconceptualize these roles to make informants more equal partners in the research process. In the Southern African country of Botswana, Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs) have become the favored way to involve community members in applied-research. PRAs assist communities gather and document information about their surroundings, build rapport between the local community and extension officers, and plan development efforts through a series of facilitator-led activities. A PRA exercise results in a community-action plan, in which community members outline what will be done, when, how, and by whom. But while PRAs have been developed to help community members create a village profile and needs assessment, the research protocol itself tends to be a standardized "fill-in-the-blank exercise." In the most typical scenario, community members, with the guidance of outside facilitators, supply the missing information. The popularity of PRAs, coupled with this fixed, externally-driven format, raises questions about the meaning of participation in participatory research, and the degree to which community members can be expected to participate in researching their own lives. As part of my own examination of these issues, I recently co-facilitated a different model of participatory research in Botswana, in which the tools for data collection were fully designed and used by community members to research their own communities. In this article, I write about my own experiences, and those of the men and women who became participant researchers, in order to examine the power that active participation in research generates among community members and to describe the social and political dilemmas that arose from that participation.