Robert Chambers - Cutting Edge Challenges for Mainstreaming Participatory Approaches

Robert Chambers gave a public lecture at the Hector Kobekkaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute last evening, organised by Mallika Samaranayake and IPID.  I was invited to provide a 'felicitation' address in a felicitation ceremony that  preceded Robert Chambers' lecture on the above subject, and included talks by Mallika, Professor Madduma Bandara and Professor Hiran Dias.  Below you will find the full text of my felicitation speech -but before that some random gleanings from Chambers' talk!

Definition:  ERR - Egocentric Reminiscence Ratio - increases with age and with alcohol consumption, is higher in men than in women

Quotation from Doctor Zeuss - "Adults are obsolete children"

 

Qualitative methodologies have the 'rigour of democratic interaction'.

Quotation from Gandhi - " We must become the change we wish to see"

and now, my 'felicitation address':

It is a very great privilege for me to have  been asked  by Mrs Samaranayake to say a few words at this felicitation of  Professor Robert Chambers.  Unlike most people at the head table, and several in the audience who have worked closely with Professor Chambers  over the years and know him personally, I have only had the opportunity to see him ‘live’ as it were, on two occasions – both very memorable, and both leaving quite indelible marks on my memory  and having a significant influence on my work.

The first occasion was in the early eighties, when I was at the beginning of my career in development and working as a project coordinator at the Lanka Mahila Samiti.    I walked into one of Robert Chambers’ lectures at, I believe, IWMI, slightly late, just after it had started.  I could hear his voice, but I could not  see him.    You must remember that this was a time when most ‘lectures’ were delivered in a relatively boring fashion by experts talking from behind a lectern.   Robert Chamber’s voice was not coming from the lectern it was actually coming from the floor, where he was demonstrating some kind of participatory method.     I was a bit bemused by it all, but rather pleased that much of what he said validated my own approach to my work in the Mahila Samiti.  The participatory approach actually cost me my job at the Mahila Samiti, and I went on to join the Intermediate Technology Development Group, ITDG or Practical Action as it is now called – an organisation started by another great figure in development, Fritz Schumacher,  the author of  Small is Beautiful.   It was here that I became more closely familiar with Robert Chambers’ writings – Rural Development: Putting the Last First and Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research, an edited volume of papers for which Robert Chambers was the inspiration and editor.   At ITDG I was able to unreservedly adopt the participatory approach to technology development with communities.  Those of us who worked at ITDG  Sri Lanka in those early days, have some great stories about how our participatory technology development  approach was received by the more traditional technologists.

The second time I saw Robert Chambers’ ‘live’ was in Cairo two years ago at a conference on monitoring and evaluation organized by 3ie – or the International Initiative for Impact Evaluations, an organisation which seems to be taking the development community by storm and setting the standard for evaluation.    By this time I was where I am now, at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), a think tank, where we are committed to conducting “rigorous research” and providing “robust evidence” for decision making.   I am afraid that ‘rigorous research’ and ‘robust evidence’ is increasingly  being associated with statistical analyses and with research methods borrowed from the natural sciences, as  donor governments are called to ‘prove’ the impact of their aid. 

The 3ie Cairo conference was full of proponents of this approach and much of the debate and learning was around randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, results based monitoring etc. Robert Chambers presentations and sessions were like a breath of fresh air!  He showed participants  at the Conference that a different approach to  monitoring and evaluation   and to development in general was possible, even desirable, and that participation did not necessarily mean less ‘rigorous’ or less ‘robust’

In between my two ‘live’ encounters  with him, about  30 years apart,  Robert Chambers has packed in an enormous amount of writing which it would take too much time, and much too much paper to describe.  You can always ‘google’ him.  His books, especially the seminal Putting the last first, and Whose reality counts?   are a must read for all development professionals.  You will also see that he had a hand in developing the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, that he supported the Indigenous Knowledge movement and initiated the concepts of Participatory Rural Appraisal (which we now know through its acronym PRA) and  Participatory Learning and Action (PLA).  And today, we see him backing the concept of Community Led Total Sanitation. 

Much of what we take for granted today in terms of participation, is a result of Robert Chambers’ initial thinking and it is as the ‘guru’ of participation that he is best known.  And a ‘guru’  he most certainly is.  But not a guru with a strong ‘guru mushtiya’ as we say here in Sri Lanka, where a teacher retains some of his knowledge so that the pupil is not able to completely know everything that he knows.  From his prolific writing we know that Robert Chambers is open to sharing what he thinks and knows  and his participation heritage is resplendent with people and institutions around the world, people and institutions like Mallika Samaranayake, and IPID here in Sri Lanka, who have learned from him and who continue to use, adapt and further develop the participatory methodologies that he pioneered.  

But I think to really value Robert Chambers’ contribution to development  thinking and practice we need to go beyond ‘participation’ and ask the question, ‘why’?  ‘why participation’?  When I interrogate Robert Chambers’ writing in this way I realize that by promoting participation in those early years what Robert Chambers really was doing was challenging the power structures that keep some people disadvantaged and poor.  He was challenging the economic, social and political power structures that disallowed some people to participate in the development process; but most importantly he was also challenging the power structures within the development and knowledge generation professions to which all of us belong, and pointing out that without a new professionalism and a new paradigm it would be that much harder to effect change.  This morning he added another aspect to the why?  which was to show that participation is able to uncover hidden and uncomfortable issues like menstrual hygiene, female genital mutilation, teenage sex issues…

Can we be forgiven for concentrating on the use of participatory method, rather than on ‘why’ of its use?  For not seeing the forest for the trees? And in some instances even perhaps ‘subverting’ the true purpose of participatory method and using ‘participation’ to justify/validate existing hierarchies?    I expect Robert Chambers would be generous enough  to forgive us – but in his writing he continues to assault  the concept of power and to challenge us to do so as well.    Coming as I do from  CEPA, an organisation that specializes in poverty research, and talking here at the Hector Kobbekkaduwa Agrarian Research and Training Institute  there is a reminder by Robert Chambers in an IDS working paper that he has written in July last year called  Paradigms, Poverty and Adaptive Pluralism.  It is a reminder  that I particularly value, which is particularly relevant for development research and  which I would like to share with you.   Robert Chambers reminds us  in this paper that  whose reality  counts is  still critical and he says (I quote)  

Because  this is about power, the power to define, to frame, to value. Are the  local, complex, diverse, dynamic, uncontrollable and unpredictable( lcdduu) realities of poor people to be experienced, appreciated and understood  by powerful professionals? Are they to count? Or are they to be seen through a blurred telescope from a distance, and then imagined and constructed as conveniently universalised, simplified, standardised, and stabilised?

It is for leaving us with this challenge that I felicitate Professor Chambers today.  Thank you, very much Professor !