IN ORDER to increase community participation in decision making and planning for community forestry, it is essential that local people be able to communicate their perspectives on forest resources to government agencies and that those agencies in turn are able to understand and respond to those perspectives. This requirement has led to the development of research and monitoring methodologies that enable governments, NGOs, and researchers to learn from and with local people.

Since the late 1980s, several Asian NGOs and academic institutions—notably, MYRADA and the Aga Khan Rural Support Program in India, and the Institute for Philippine Culture and De la Salle University in the Philippines—have been key players in the development of new social science methodologies for NGOs and government agencies. The Ford Foundation has supported initiatives by these and other organizations to bring those methods into the mainstream of forestry practice. Activities have included the development of participatory research methods for land-use planning, the introduction of process documentation in program monitoring, and training in social science approaches for forest department staff.

Participatory Research Methods

Participatory methods depend upon the active involvement of local people in generating, analyzing, and applying knowledge. Examples of participatory methods include group preparation of maps, models, seasonal work or planting calendars, rankings of the wealth of group members, and other types of field observations in which villagers join with researchers to collect and analyze information. One important type of participatory research is known as participatory rural appraisal (PRA). PRA grew out of an earlier approach, known as rapid rural appraisal (RRA), which was developed to elicit local social and technical knowledge in the design of development programs. In moving from RRA to PRA, development planners and researchers began to collect and analyze data with the local people, rather than extracting information and analyzing it elsewhere. Under PRA methods, because information and analyses are retained by communities, they can then be used for a variety of local