Document(s) 3 of 18

For two years, between 1982 and 1984, Lawrence Salmen experimented with evaluations on sewage and water projects supported by the World Bank in the urban areas of La Paz, Bolivia, and in Guayaquil, Ecuador. During that time he came to what was then a controversial conclusion. He found that the real nemesis of foreign aid was a lack of decent information, in other words, the absence of communication between beneficiaries and project managers. What projects needed most were better ways for managers to know about beneficiaries, and the best way for managers to know about them, he argued even more controversially, was to train beneficiaries as researchers to render what beneficiaries already knew into semiofficial form. He referred to this idea, or method, as "participatory observation," and although this phrase doubtless struck anthropologists as a tired piece of verbiage, his proposal gave a fresh twist to how donors might come to know about projects.

The method, if it can be called that, fulfilled most of Salmen's vaunted claims: it was cheap, it required minimal expertise, it often quickly uncovered problems that plagued projects, and it came up with interesting solutions. It worked well enough that the World Bank decided to use it in other locations. One of them, in 1984, was a project to establish a marketing cooperative for fishermen in Brazil's northeast state of Rio Grande do Norte, where the dilemma was this: fishermen beneficiaries refused to join the cooperative, and the local manager had no idea what the problem might be. Salmen's "experimental" evaluation began by identifying a local fisherman with some university training who would live in two fishing communities for several weeks, listen to the fishermen and fish with them, listen to other actors in the fishing industry in various parts of the region, and make a report.

It seems that the prominent fish buyers, unbeknownst to the project manager, were waging a propaganda campaign against the cooperative and had actually succeeded in convincing most of the fishermen that their own price for fish was higher than the price given by the marketing cooperative. In truth, the reverse was true. But there was another factor. Many of the fishermen had longtime relations of kin or friendship among these influential fish buyers, and when they had to decide whether to believe them or the cooperative's agents, naturally they chose to believe the fish buyers. The only fishermen who decided unequivocally to join the cooperative were those who for one reason or another did not get on well with the fish-buyer middlemen, and the result was that the cooperative had too few members to operate effectively.

No one had bothered to listen to the fishermen during the four years of the cooperative project. In fact, when the cooperative failed to attract the requisite number of members, it never occurred to the cooperative management to initiate a discussion among fishermen. What was needed, obviously, was better communication, which meant, in this case, a campaign to inform fishermen of the short- and long-term benefits of cooperative membership. This was done. Then a new cooperative director was found who built a better rapport with the members and clarified the cooperative's policy of redistributing profits, and not long afterward, the marketing cooperative was attracting more members than it could handle.

In hindsight, Salmen's experimental evaluations seem far from controversial; if anything, they seem banal in their utter simplicity. But this is the point. The principal insights in what are now known as participatory evaluations border perilously on the obvious. They confront the conventions of scientific inquiry and the pretensions to accountability, which for so long encumbered the way donors and administrators learned how projects work, with painfully simple alternatives. Salmen's approach obviated the onerous task of identifying indicators in advance, recognizing that evaluators can rarely know the main issues before project effects make themselves known. The complexities of measuring impact became a secondary concern. The primary concern was instead to provide a mechanism by which useful information could flow from the beneficiaries to project managers, to bother less with describing a project and more with making it work.

A similar experiment was under way in Kenya at the same time under the inspiration of the nongovernmental organization PROWESS, another of the early advocates, like Salmen, of treating evaluations as devices for generating project-useful information (Narayan-Parker 1988). People living along Kenya's southern coastal area suffered from diarrhea and other water-related diseases, and the obvious solution was to make clean water available. This was straightforward enough, since a clean water aquifer lay twenty feet below ground level, easily accessible with hand pumps, but two programs to install hand pumps had already failed. The hand pumps had worked fine for a while, but since the villagers knew nothing of pump mechanics, the pumps eventually fell into dis-repair. The broken pumps remained derelict and rusting while the people returned to the unsanitary practice of getting water from hand-dug wells.

A new idea emerged in 1983, sponsored by the African Medical Research Foundation (AMREF) with support from the PROWESS group then associated with the United Nations Development Programme. It was to ask villagers to form associations among themselves with the objective of looking at their needs and how to solve them. The associations started off as evaluators, asking why the hand pumps had failed and what communities could do differently. As evaluators, they learned that they needed spare parts, they needed the money to pay for them, they needed trained technicians, and they needed some way of generating the resources for providing these inputs. Up to this point, their evaluation exercise looked pretty much like any other evaluation, moving from problem to inquiry to recommendations. Conventional evaluations, however, would have stopped once the recommendations were made, but here, the recommendations marked the midpoint, not the end point, of the exercise.

The evaluator groups went on to make contact with AMREF's partner, the Kenya Water and Health Organization (KWAHO), which contracted two sociologists to help them meet the conditions the evaluator groups had identified as lacking. Pump caretakers were trained, and groups were established to generate resources to pay for the pump caretakers and for the parts they needed. Rules were written down for running these new water committees, for choosing leaders, and for holding meetings. The innovation in this evaluation exercise occurred when the evaluator groups, water users themselves, arrived at a common under-standing—a body of knowledge known to everyone—of what stood between them and cleaner water. The reason is this: There is a qualitative difference—subtle but dramatic—between separate pieces of information that some people know and a common body of knowledge that everyone knows. In pieces, knowledge is static, a congery of separate inconclusive mysteries, but knowledge shared fully among a concerned group of people turns readily into a plan of action.

Buying locks for the pumps seemed an unnecessary expenditure until everyone realized that there was regular pump damage, and then water users were happy to make an extra contribution. Collective problem identification mobilized, at the same time, resources for the solution. The matter of contributions remained a problem, however, and a thorny one, particularly regarding what to do with members who could not pay. But once the matter was discussed in an open meeting and everyone appreciated firsthand the financial difficulties of the few nonpaying members, the group agreed to allow indigent members to pay in kind instead of in cash. Another problem was solved. The women played active roles in the water committees as treasurers and as mechanics, and this made a few of the men nervous until the majority of men realized the benefits of sharing responsibility with women; the majority of the water committees made money and opened bank accounts under the women's direction, and no one could argue with that.

Toward a Project-Sensitive Epistemology

The difference between conventional and participatory evaluations has in part to do with training beneficiaries as researchers who, with some guidance, undertake an evaluation themselves. There are then two other differences, essential ones, that to some extent evolve out of granting beneficiaries the authority for creating project knowledge and that have far-reaching implications. The first of these is that participatory evaluations gather information that is first and foremost useful for making projects work; participatory evaluations are not concerned, in the first instance, with monitoring performance or expenditures. The second is that the end point of evaluations is a bank account and not the recommendation to open one; the information that evaluations produce is stagnant unless it provides a basis for common understandings that lead to social action.

The rationale for participatory evaluations is that they address those issues that will make projects work for their constituencies in such a way that the constituencies are moved to act on what they know. This seems on first glance innocently straightforward, and although it may be straightforward, it is anything but innocent. The roots of this rationale lie in a radical critique of development expertise, in particular, how and with whose input development understandings are recognized as expertise. Knowledge for and about development has, for the past fifty years, been so shrouded in economic ideology and burdened with the accoutrements of proof imposed by auditors and academics that it was nearly unthinkable that it could come from poor people or that it could be created or used by them.

To a large extent, this was because development and knowledge about development were theaters of the cold war. Gunnar Myrdal opened his great work Asian Drama with a cautionary chapter entitled "The Beam in Our Eyes," warning social scientists that they were so overly burdened with political convictions that they were unlikely to solve a problem as politically loaded as poverty (Myrdal 1968). Poverty and its relief were pawns, he said, in the cold war game of power, and social scientists failed to see beyond the ideological tangle of their times, hence the "beam" in their eyes. Development and knowledge about development became pawns in the cold war game, hobbled with so much ideological baggage that those thinkers who really made a difference in the allocation of funds rarely imagined development as more than a contest between the ideology of marketplace individualism and its challengers.

Economists, hawking marketplace solutions to poverty, rose to prominence in these times, though their message was intellectually threadbare. Their message relied heavily on the dubious notion that poor farmers were too poor and knew too little about economic growth to participate in the development process and had to be led out of poverty by the more powerful investors or the more prudent savers. It was unthinkable that a poor woman could pretend to tell experts what was best for her children or her neighbors or her village or would have any idea about how levels of health or income stagnate or decline, much less improve. Poor people did not qualify as actors in the process of growth because they were poor, for only those with resources qualified as actors in the marketplace, and among these, only those who could spend and produce in just the right way qualified. Sociologists, progressive economists, and anthropologists all objected loudly. They said that big investors either did not act in the poor people's interests or made it impossible for them to act for themselves, and the result was increasing poverty or increasing inequality or both. But the economists claimed to know better (Freedman 1994).

While economists challenged poor people's knowledge because this knowledge was not relevant to economic growth, bureaucrats challenged it because there was no guarantee that poor people, unassisted, would be forthcoming with accurate information. Gathering good information needed the trappings of science, the appearance of objectivity, random sampling, and numbers for credibility; and credibility was the all-important ingredient in being accountable. It mattered little that scientific designs were inaccessible to beneficiaries; they were not, after all, the ultimate end users of projects. Taxpayers from donor countries were credible, for they, in the end, were paying for the political or economic advantage that development ventures promised.

And the consequence was a body of knowledge about "development" locales that was many times removed from the sites themselves, not to mention the people whom it most intimately concerned; this remove was, furthermore, sanctioned by the academy. Utility, or project problem solving, was not a priority in knowing about projects. The beneficiaries were rarely the end users of what was known, and, more poignantly, since those in the know were rarely those who took action, there was a righteous divide between knowing and doing. The principal reason to officially know about development was for the exchequer to check, or for posterity's sake.

Development knowledge, like the curious oxymoron "military intelligence," became a non sequitur and languished for years bereft of sensible propositions, burdened with ideological agendas and the trappings of scientific method. It was only around the fringes of standard disciplines that alternative criteria for creating knowledge about development emerged. It fell to the rare economists, activists, and progressive philosophers to create a new epistemology that sanctioned such commonsense notions as "local knowledge," "quick and dirty approaches," and "participatory research." In the last decade, a number of writers and practitioners have begun to argue for alternative development epistemologies.

Three, in particular, have had a conspicuous impact on how we now think differently about acquiring and accumulating information for development purposes. Robert Chambers is unquestionably one of these three. For purely practical and pecuniary reasons (it was quicker and cheaper), he proposed to solicit the involvement of poor people in gathering data for project designs, an idea that was enshrined in the phrase rapid rural appraisal (RRA). The idea caught on quickly in spite of the suspicions of bureaucrats and social scientists. But then he carried the idea to its logical conclusion, which was to bestow on poor people the authority for generating data themselves, replacing the predecessor concept of RRA with a newer one, participatory rural appraisal, or PRA. There is nothing ideological about either of these approaches and little that is particularly profound, but they both contain well-tested instruments for engaging beneficiaries in collective research exercises (Chambers 1994a, 1994b, 1994c).

Orlando Fals-Borda represents another of these three. He differs from Chambers in that his ideas are distinctly ideological. Fals-Borda draws on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which views self-knowledge or "conscientization" as a necessary step toward social transformation. Participatory action research (PAR), or participatory research as it is variously called, advocates participatory evaluations because they are political acts capable of rallying the disenfranchised to take actions against exploitation (Fals-Borda and Rahman 1991). However political the theory, and however strenuously Chambers might object to the parallels between PRA and PAR, the practice of PAR does not differ significantly from Chambers's PRA, for they both rely on the premise that there is an undeniable connection between people knowing about a problem and their willingness to take action to solve it.

A third spokesperson for a new, project-sensitive epistemology is Norman Uphoff, whose position comes less from political convictions than from a profound philosophical disquiet about the conventions of standard social science. He uses the efficacy of participatory evaluation as evidence in his case against a social science that indulges in overly mechanistic models and pretensions to precision judgments. The notorious dichotomies that typically frame social science research—objectivity versus subjectivity, altruism versus individualism, knowledge versus action—are false dichotomies and force social thinkers to make unnecessary choices. These rigidities in social science have blinded its disciplines to the real complexity of human society. Uphoff's work, Learning from Gal Oya (1992), has strung a theoretical thread between practicing participatory evaluations and propositions for an alternative, more reflective and socially responsible social science.

All three, but especially Uphoff, call attention to the significant role that participatory evaluations play in rearticulating the missions and methods of social science. Although participatory evaluations may be, for Chambers and others, a practical alternative to the standard performance reviews, they really do challenge the way that donor agencies acquire information, as well as the way the grander institutions think about social change. Participatory evaluations are innovations for development practitioners, but the experiments that they inspire regarding how best to know about other people have broad implications. At one level, they are commonsense, even simple methodologies for project management. At another level, however, the rationales that justify them pose complex challenges to the way in which change agents come to know what they are doing.

The Art of Doing Participatory Research

The art of evaluating in the participatory mode entails treading a fine line between adopting procedures for systematically asking and recording the right kind of data and adapting these procedures to the capacities of non-scholarly participants. Conventional evaluations can be needlessly elaborate because evaluators go to great lengths to surround their study with the appearances of rigor in order to withstand the challenge of managers and ministers' offices. They may incorporate elaborate statistical tests, select respondents randomly to guarantee objectivity, and sample control respondents under before and after conditions. Most of this is unnecessary. The art is finding research exercises that participants like to do and that will make them proud of their work, while keeping the technology appropriate. This means using numbers for effect but not for proof, using commonsense methods for assuring fair representations of all beneficiaries, abandoning the strict sense of objectivity, and generally recognizing that compassion works as well as distance in assuring accurate information.

It also means choosing indicators that make sense to participants and their understanding of the project. More to the point, it means avoiding indicators whose principal justification is that they are "standard" indicators or that they ask whether a project met or did not meet its objectives. This seems awkward at first, because benefactors and beneficiaries alike presume that there are certain things that an evaluation is absolutely required to ask. This is not true. The end users of participatory evaluations are beneficiaries, and their questions are the ones to ask.

When water committee members in east Indonesia, villagers in the Wanita Air dan Sanitasi (Water and Sanitation) Project, undertook an evaluation with the help of PROWESS, they puzzled at first over what to ask. Planners would want to know about water-use patterns, hygiene, and maintenance of pumps. The villagers had different questions. The PROWESS facilitators, recognizing that the questions of beneficiaries and planners would be different, encouraged the water committee members to come up with their own indicators. The information they wanted about their sanitation project was whether the women had turned a greater profit selling vegetables since the pumps had been installed. It was a good question because, for the village, one value of more accessible water was having more water to spread on vegetable gardens. So the question was asked and the answers were carefully counted, and it turned out that the proportion of women growing produce for sale and making more cash had increased by nearly 50 percent in the course of the project. It was an interesting conclusion (Narayan-Parker 1989).

Incidentally, the pumps also provided water in a more hygienic way and fewer people were sick, but for the people, this mattered little, even though better hygiene was an original goal of the project. A conventional evaluation would have measured child mortality or diarrhea rates before and after the project, comparing control groups who had no pump installations to groups with pump installations. But this would have been of questionable value. Managers of projects need to have information they can use, information that directly concerns project users. It is hard to use data on diarrhea rates. For most people, changes in diarrhea have little to do with pump installations, or if they do, it is nearly impossible to prove, since so many factors influence health and disease. A control group might well have had less diarrhea than those using project pumps, since there are many causes for diarrhea besides dirty water. But the question of vegetables was easy. Projects need more reliable, local, and concrete justification, and, more importantly, the people themselves need evidence that their work has its rewards. Vegetables, in this case, work better than health.

This is why participatory evaluations ask people to make their own research designs. These designs may not control for extraneous variables; they may have no control groups, no before and after. The question for them is not whether the planners' goals of the project have been met and whether whatever progress has been made toward achieving these goals can be causally linked to the project. Their concern is whether the project has addressed their interests, and they do not worry whether pumps can be linked without question to the things that have happened because of them. The link between vegetables and pumps is too obvious a link to test or control for the link itself. What counts for the people is the immediate and obvious consequence, the things they can feel and consume, not abstract indicators whose proof is, at best, questionable.

Adapting research to a nonscholarly environment continues throughout the research cycle, from research design to data recording and analysis, and especially to presenting the information. Conventional evaluators submit their invoices when the final draft of the report is written, for the job is done when the report is accepted and it disappears into agency files. At this stage, however, the participatory researchers' work has just entered its most critical stage, for they have done nothing if the information they have assembled is not made public. They want others to know what they have discovered, and it is this— dramatizing, disseminating, and mobilizing—that gives these pieces of information their power to mobilize for change.

Reporting the findings of participatory evaluations has an explicit purpose. It is to complete a circuit that takes a group from a process of knowing to doing something about what they know. It takes them from collecting information to depicting their findings in pictures and photos, flyers, puppet shows, and plays, and causing others to take notice. When people know what they need and when the circuit is complete, they are more likely to rise to the occasion to get it. If beneficiaries know for sure that a missing ingredient in a project is better self-management, they are likely to try it. If they know that a lack of women's involvement deprives certain families of a greater potential for income, they will do something about it. When fishermen know that a marketing collective gives better prices for fish than middlemen do, they join, and when farmers realize that preserving their trees is crucial for feeding themselves, they plant trees. But first they must know, firsthand, what these crucial facts are.

In participatory research, they may discover a need for better technology or for more financial resources. More often than not, the crucial facts they discover are social ones. They may discover that, as neighbors and villagers, they fail to act effectively on their own behalf and in the process realize how they might change in order to do so. Participatory research in this way marries research and social action.

This is a simple idea. But putting the idea into practice often seems awkward because it combines two normally distinct activities: social research and social action. Unlike conventional research, which focuses on the one task of compiling information, participatory research does two separate things: it gathers information and creates associations, and it does them together. It creates associations that, in doing research, set in motion a process of acting together, a process that ideally culminates in people acting in concert on matters more bonding than collecting and analyzing information. This combination of efforts—data gathering and social action—places research inside the larger objective of creating viable associations. Research is no longer an end in itself. Evaluations do not begin with experts bringing in questionnaires and knowledge of survey research, nor are they over when reports are submitted.

The Gal Oya irrigation scheme meetings of watercourse groups devised an ingenious way of completing this circuit of exercises all in one sitting. In 1979, the Gal Oya irrigation scheme in Sri Lanka undertook to reverse two decades of irrigation mismanagement. The scheme sought to rehabilitate physical structures that had seriously eroded and, at the same time, sought to revive water management associations that in previous years had nearly ceased to function. The restoration of water management associations relied primarily on introducing mechanisms of self-evaluation as part of the functions of watercourse management groups (Uphoff 1988).

The Gal Oya scheme engaged group promoters to guide watercourse groups through their first self-evaluations, and to do this, the promoters assisted groups in making up a list of questions that members were likely to want answered about themselves. These questions included ones about economic and technical performance; about group dynamics; about how well the group interacted with other such groups, the community, and the state; about self-reliance; and about financial records. The membership chose which questions they wanted, and although the promoters made suggestions, the group's decision was final. In one instance, after reviewing the list, the membership recommended including a question on how many members had participated in an annual harvest festival, and although the promoter was skeptical, the members insisted, claiming that members who attended the festival formed stronger groups. The question was added.

At the meeting, as members discussed each of the questions, the idea was for the membership as a whole to come to a decision about how to answer the questions. A question might ask about conflict resolution, whether conflicts over water were resolved (1) easily, (2) not so easily, (3) with difficulty, or (4) not at all. The membership had to agree, eventually, on one of these answers, and this frequently required lengthy discussion. In this way, the evaluation was planned and implemented, and the answers were made public, all in a single meeting. The ingenious part of this technique is the way it engages all members in witnessing the discourse leading to agreement and causes them to reflect, in the process, on how to alter themselves.

It happened that the watercourse management groups had become aware of the dangers of allowing a single leader to continue to serve year after year, even if that leader was a good one, or even if no one else appeared willing to serve. Together with facilitators and planners, the groups came to understand that at least one part of the problem had to do with how many members in the group actually wanted to serve as leaders. If the group got together and asked whether there were a lot of people willing to lead, or only a few, or perhaps none other than the leader himself, the members would at least become aware of this part of their problem. So they did. The group met and ranked itself on the issue of whether there were enough members willing to lead, and they ended up giving themselves a poor mark because the group as a whole wanted more leaders. No one felt embarrassed, because the ranking they gave in the end was less important than the discussion itself, and as it turned out, certain young men and women who had previously been overlooked did become known as potential leaders. It was a gentle way to democratize leadership assignments.

Like the science of psychiatry or the art of performance, the art of participatory evaluations lies in someone assembling the intuitions of an audience—in this case, a membership—and giving them shape, bestowing on these once formless intuitions an aura of potency. It is the shaman who, in less mechanistic societies, combined these functions of healing and display—psychiatry and performance—of converting a social illness into a social drama and, with this sleight of the dramatist's hand, resolving critical problems. The ultimate trick, of course, which the psychiatrist and the thespian rarely reveal—much less so the shaman—is to know the right things. A shaman or a sorcerer may appear to "magically" heal a neuropathy by removing an ancestor's tooth embedded in a patient's subcutaneous tissue with the aid of a sucking horn, but we all know that the real shaman's art is to know the social integuments that disturb the sufferer and cause grief. Armed with these key pieces of information, which disturb and move people, the shaman reassembles them in so artful a way as to create a moment of truth for those gathered together, to help the sufferer see the source of misery and to help the consociates take some responsibility for realigning these integuments in the sufferer's favor. This is not to say that beneficiaries are victims—though they may well be—so the analogy stops here. Nor is it to say that participatory evaluators carry anything like the professional credentials of healers or actors, for they are, in the ideal instance, the beneficiaries themselves. But the analogy makes the point that participants in collective research take on the role of shamans; they elicit facts, however arcane or formless or apparently irrelevant, and by organizing them with sharp and meaningful contours, they then create, for themselves and others, a moment of truth.

The Road to Democracy

Ultimately, participatory evaluations aim to promote democracy—no less and no more—the implicit assumption being that the more that disenfranchised people become enfranchised, the more robust their social and economic institutions will be. Furthermore, this spells prosperity. There is a string of associations here, beginning with collective research entailing, among other things, collective knowledge, equitable social institutions, and productive economies, a string of associations that commands attention. One of the few authors to trace these associations and argue strongly for them, largely in this order, is Robert Putnam in his book filled with hard evidence, Making Democracy Work (1993). His book speaks directly to the philosophy of participatory evaluations and to the social theory that advocates them.

Putnam's study compares the recent history of northern and southern Italy—the productive provinces around the democratic Milan, on the one hand, with the poor regions of the South, on the other. The question is this: is there something in the social patterns of these respective regions that accounts for their dramatic difference in economic productivity? His evidence is convincing, for politics in the northern provinces bubbles up from myriad soccer associations and police clubs, voting groups, and other voluntary associations, where individuals participate and make their opinions felt. In the north, people act energetically for themselves and for the collective weal. Not so in the south, where the boss rule of patron-client politics subverts democracy and where, discouraged by fatalism, citizens accept the consequent social rigidities by paying corrupt officials and keeping their heads in the hard-rock crevices of an inflexible social life. Why should they vote? Their membership in soccer clubs and village life is little more than a version of paying protection to their political chiefs. It is no surprise that the economy of the north bustles, while the economy of the south flags. There is an important lesson here about development.

The lesson is that economic growth begins with energetic local organizations, locales where individuals can feasibly activate a social network. Where individuals participate in local activities, the gamut of economic possibility grows. Citizens can make their presence felt because there is a safety net to dispel the notorious fatalism of poor people, because they will meet with fair officials from a position of strength, and because in a social environment where there is a civic consciousness, government will provide more and effective services. Where citizens hide from the state and others, the possibility of economic activity narrows, resources are squandered in corrupt extractions, and their efforts are rewarded only if they, in turn, extract the same protection from their fellow citizens. Building local organizations that work democratically and fairly, therefore, seems to be a turnkey for local solvency.

But there is the omnipresent matter of feudalism throughout the postcolonial world. Patterns of ownership and privilege in the villages of poor countries commonly favor a few people and, in doing so, discourage personal initiative among the vast majority of poor who live there. This is an extremely important fact for understanding and dealing with world poverty. Infusions of physical infrastructure, better roads, better irrigation, or productive agricultural inputs will not greatly change these social preconditions of poverty; nor will externally imposed leaner national budgets or better trade balance at the national level. On the contrary, these interventions more commonly reinforce the concentrations of wealth for privileged families. New schools and cleaner water may make the lives of the poor less miserable, but they are unlikely to alter the social circumstances that make unsanitary living conditions endemic. As long as large numbers of individuals and families have little inclination to seek opportunities for personal betterment, they will respond with the kinds of behavior that deepen the roots of poverty. Farmers will cultivate without the motivation to expand production, household heads will continue to seek refuge in the bonds of dependency that suffocate motivation in the first place, and households will continue to rely on large families as the only strategy for increasing household wealth or ensuring survival.

Viable village or neighborhood organizations can change these social environments and provide the majority of persons with the opportunity to participate in a gainful activity. No one knows how to create viable organizations, and barring an unlikely development in social engineering, no one will ever know; however, once such organizations are created, a built-in habit of reflection (participatory evaluation) will reinforce such organizations by promoting equity, and once equity is accepted, accountability is ensured. For all that the mumbling evaluators do about accountability, none of them ever succeeds in increasing it in any measure unless there are equitable groups with decent forms of self-government. Call it whatever—elections or discussion groups, consensual decision making, or participatory evaluation—in spirit they are all the same, for in spirit, they all activate a social conscience and vitiate the invidious social differences that Amartya Sen accurately notes makes all the difference in dismantling poverty.

For all its simplicity, the concept of participatory evaluation contains a complex and wide-reaching promise for social justice. If the art of participatory evaluation is to create a moment of truth, its ultimate role is to reform. By conscripting a community in the simple and sensible act of knowing more about itself, it also engages the members in changing the way they behave politically, for participatory evaluation is a model for democracy and inevitably introduces a democratic routine that everyone can practice. It is indeed a real alternative to conventional evaluations as we know them, for it generates information about projects that is useful and leads to healthy project reform. But the value of participatory evaluation is that it sets in motion a process of social reflection that can lead to social change in ways that traditional concepts of development have failed to do.

References

Chambers, R. 1994a. "Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Analysis of Experience." World Development 22 (9): 1253–68.

———. 1994b. "Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA): Challenges, Potentials and Paradigm." World Development 22 (10): 1437–54.

———. 1994c. "The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal." World Development 22 (7): 953–69.

Fals-Borda, O., and M. A. Rahman, eds. 1991. Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research. New York: Apex Press.

Freedman, J. 1994. "Participatory Evaluations, Making Projects Work." Dialogue on Development Technical Paper No. TP94/2. Division of International Development, International Centre, University of Calgary.

Myrdal, G. 1968. Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. 3 vols. New York: Pantheon.

Narayan-Parker, D. 1988. Kenya: People, Pumps and Agencies. New York: PROWESS/United Nations Development Programme.

———. 1989. Indonesia: Evaluating Community Management. New York: PROWESS/United Nations Development Programme.

Putnam, R. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Uphoff, N. 1988. "Participatory Evaluation of Farmer Organizations." Agricultural Administration and Extension 30: 43–64.

———. 1992. Learning from Gal Oya: Possibilities for Participatory Development and Post-Newtonian Social Science. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

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