Participatory Approaches to Community Change: Building Cooperation through Dialogue and Negotiation Using Participatory Rural Appraisal

Abstract

Participatory methodologies that take as their starting point a commitment to social and economic justice, as well as empowerment, are central to meeting the challenge of peace building. People-centered or transformative participation focuses on issues of power and control. It is concerned about the nature of a community and not simply the technical and managerial aspects of organizations and participation in them. From this perspective, participation is about power and particularly about an increase in the power of the disadvantaged. It requires a capacity to identify those who are weaker and disenfranchised within a community and to empower them through shared knowledge and experience. Participatory approaches to social change have numerous roots in the social movements and transformative theories of the 1960s and 1970s. Among its sources is a community mental health meeting in May 1965 known as the Swampscott Conference on the Education of Psychologists for Community Mental Health. From this conference emerged the field of community psychology, now a flourishing subset of the American Psychological Association. Community psychology has shed its exclusive mental health image to focus on social issues, social institutions, and other settings that influence groups and organizations. The goal is to optimize the well-being of communities and individuals with innovative and alternative interventions designed in collaboration with affected community members and with other related disciplines inside and outside of psychology (Duffy and Wong 2000, p. 8). In fact, many community psychologists attempt to translate social science knowledge into social change, developing methods of intervention in social systems that fight social problems directly. Although it is difficult to obtain agreement on the part of community psychologists to a single definition of the field, one of its main tenets is the principle of participation by ordinary people in the decisions of various social systems that affect them (Murrell 1973, p. 14). Herein is a critical connection between participatory methodologies such as PRA and the broad field of community psychology.