Robert Chambers

• Institute of Development Studies

This research, which was mainly concerned with the design and testing of management procedures for use by government servants in rural areas in Kenya, was carried out during 1971–73 in collaboration with Deryke Beishaw of the Overseas Development Group of the University of Norwich. It was linked with the Kenya government's Special Rural Development...

Normal bureaucracy tends to centralise, standardise and simplify, and to serve better those people and places that are less poor and more accessible. Field bureaucracies have done well (a) where simple standardised programmes have found uniform conditions – like the human body with smallpox and yaws eradication campaigns, or irrigated plains with g...

Knowledge systems for inclusively responsible food and agriculture must avoid the sort of errors and myths revealed by ground-truthing research. They have often to confront and transform powerful interests and the embedded Newtonian professional paradigm, which fits physical conditions that are universal, controllable, and predictable. Canons of ri...

This review of the discussions of a workshop analyses indigenous technical knowledge (ITK), examines its potential for rural development, and outlines implications and issues. ITK is compared with institutionally organised science and technology. It can be seen in terms of stock and process: a rich but underutilised stock of knowledge; and the pote...

Rigour can be reductionist or inclusive. To learn about and understand conditions of complexity, emergence, nonlinearity and unpredictability, the inclusive rigour of mixed methods has been a step in the right direction. From analysis of mixed methods and participatory approaches and methods, this article postulates canons for inclusive rigour for...

With relevance to India and more widely, this review article examines links between fecally transmitted infections (FTIs) and undernutrition, presents a new framework for understanding the relative nutritional significance of FTIs, and draws practical implications for professionalism, professionals and research. In India, despite many efforts and p...

The puzzle of persistent undernutrition in India is largely explained by open defecation, population density, and lack of sanitation and hygiene. The impact on nutrition of many faecally-transmitted infections, not just the diarrhoeas, has been a blind spot. In hygienic conditions much of the undernutrition in India would disappear.

Our world seems entangled in systems increasingly dominated by power, greed, ignorance, self-deception and denial, with spiralling inequity and injustice. Against a backdrop of climate change, failing ecosystems, poverty, crushing debt and corporate exploitation, the future of our world looks dire and the solutions almost too monumental to consider...

As a researcher in South Asia in the early 1970s, I was allowed to be seduced by the (then) neglected topic of water management and small-scale irrigation, which opened the door to a whole orchard of low-hanging fruit, much of it to be plucked simply by wandering around. This led later to time working on canal and other irrigation with the Ford Fou...

Robert Chambers returns with a new book that reviews, together for the first time, some of the revolutionary changes in the methodologies and methods of development inquiry that have occurred in the past forty years, and reflects on their transformative potential for the future.

What follows are a few individual reflections from the authors of articles in this IDS Bulletin on why they used action research approaches and/or some of the critical issues that they see as important.

The evolution and spread of PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal or Participatory Reflection and Action) and CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) have involved activities of sharing and co-generating knowledge which can loosely be considered a form of Action Learning. Key activities for this have been sequences of participatory workshops which have...

Professional understandings and definitions of poverty have changed. For economists and planners in the decades of development, poverty was widely taken as poverty of income. The term income-poverty, which implicitly acknowledges other dimensions of poverty, was not to my knowledge used before the mid 1990s and the Social Development Summit of 1995...

Those of us who want to act for a better world and who intervene in the lives of others face ethical dilemmas. We have to decide where we focus and what we do. Poverty palliatives are seductive low-hanging fruits; causes of poverty are more difficult - roots to uncover and dig up. H.L. Mencken, wrote: ‘For every problem there is a solution that is...

For well over 30 years, Robert Chambers has written a series ofpath-breaking books and articles elaborating the methodology and practical skills required for working with rural people and to understand better their circumstances, mostly by encouraging them to articulate their own needs and situation. This is one of his earliest pieces, arising from...

In earlier analysis, two paradigms were identified in development professionalism, thinking and practice: one, often dominant, associated with things; and one, often subordinate, associated with people. Current development thinking and practice have diverged into two clusters, with procedures associated with the paradigm of things imposed by powerf...

The Handbook on Community-Led Total Sanitation by Kamal Kar with Robert Chambers contains comprehensive information on CLTS, its pre-triggering, triggering and post-triggering stages, as well as examples and case studies from around the world. This Tips for trainers extract reproduces the chapter on triggering communities. The extract describes a s...

There is great diversity in the way different groups of people are affected by seasonality and cope with it. Greater understanding of this diversity is required if policy and project interventions are to strengthen the position of poor rural people. The damaging periods of time can sometimes be very short, regularly crippling families in their effo...

Perhaps as many as 2 billion people living in rural areas are adversely affected by open defecation (OD). Those who suffer most from lack of toilets, privacy and hygiene are women, adolescent girls, children and infants. Sanitation and hygiene in rural areas have major potential for enhancing human wellbeing and contributing to the MDGs. Approaches...

This issue of Participatory Learning and Action on immersions has no precedent. There have been earlier issues devoted to special topics. But none of its 56 predecessors have focused as this one does on the heart of development awareness, commitment, and practice. The experiences described here inspire and disturb. They challenge us professionally,...

A word analysis of six UK government White Paper policy statements on aid (selected between 1960 and 2006) compares the top 20 words and key word pairs used in each document. Characteristic sentences are composed of the top 20s to represent the spirit of each paper. Results illuminate changes in the content of White Papers on aid, and point to tren...

In development thinking and practice, normal professionalism, power and personal orientations are linked with a paradigm associated with things. Paradigm here refers to mutually reinforcing concepts, values, methods, behaviours, relationships and mindsets. A shift of balance is needed to a paradigm associated with people. The realities experienced...

The words ‘poverty’ and ‘dimension’ are each used with many meanings. In this chapter, the meanings given to them are as follows: Poverty includes bad conditions and/or experience of life. This means more than simply material poverty or lack. It is the meaning implied by the statement with which the World Development Report (WDR) 2000/01 Attacking...

As PGIS is understood as a multidisciplinary practice it is meant to respond to a blend of different moral rules. This guide to good practice is intended to provide non-exhaustive guidelines for making appropriate ethical choices for those practicing or wanting to practice PGIS. These guidelines are not meant to be exhaustive, as each culture and s...

PGIS is an evolved form of community mapping, the result of a spontaneous merger of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) methods with Geographic information Technologies and Systems (GIT&S). If used appropriately, PGIS practice may have profound implications and stimulate innovation and social change. PGIS aims at placing control on access and...

Recent debates about integrated impact assessment have tended to treat participatory approaches and methods as a fashionable frill added on to more 'expert' quantitative and qualitative investigation. This paper argues that, far from being an optional add-on, participatory approaches, methods and behaviours are essential for the new agendas of pro-...

Abstract In recent years there has been increasing interest in ‘integrated impact assessment’, using varying combinations of quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods. However participatory methods,have often been relegated to a,‘politically correct’ frill to the more ,serious task of ‘expert’ quantitative and ,qualitative research. It ha...

Activities called PRA, and its equivalents in other languages, have evolved from a confluence, sharing and adaptation of methodologies, methods and participatory traditions. Synergies have generated new things to do and new ways to do them, including visual forms of analysis. A conjunction of conditions has produced an explosion of activities and a...

Resulting trusts have received little attention in recent years and this may be because, until relatively recently, the law relating to resulting trusts was thought to be settled and uncontroversial. Most of the current academic writing about resulting trusts is found in established textbooks on equity and trusts, but these tend to provide little m...

As professionals have become more aware of errors and myths, and of the misfit between the reality they construct and the reality others experience, some have sought and developed new approaches and methods in their work. Insights and developments in action-reflection research, agro-ecosystem analysis, applied social anthropology, farming-systems r...

The PRA experience has led to insights and discoveries: that local people have largely unexpected capabilities for appraisal, analysis and planning; that the behaviour and attitudes of outsiders are critical in facilitation; that diagramming and visual sharing are popular and powerful in expressing and analysing complexity; and that sequences of PR...

The new high ground presents challenges. Nested in other changes, PRA confronts the dominance of uppers. Rapid spread top-down as a fashion has brought bad practice: dominant and superior behaviour, rushing, upper-to-upper bias, taking without giving, and arousing expectations which are not met. PRA done well generates synergies: the three pillars...

This paper explores how professionals’ universal, reductionist and standardized views of poverty differ from those of the poor themselves. Poverty line thinking concerned with income-poverty and employment thinking concerned with jobs, project Northern concerns on the South, where the realities of the poor are local, diverse, often complex and dyna...

The experience with participatory rural appraisal (PRA) suggests that a reversal of the normally dominant behaviour and attitudes of outsiders is crucial for participatory development. Personal behaviour and attitudes have, though, been neglected in seeing how to do better. The development enterprise is oriented "North-South" by patterns of dominan...

Much of the spread of participatory rural appraisal (PRA) as an emerging family of approaches and methods has been lateral, South–South, through experiential learning and changes in behavior, with different local applications. Rapid spread has made quality assurance a concern, with dangers from “instant fashion”, rushing, formalism and ruts. Promis...

The more significant principles of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) concern the behavior and attitudes of outsider facilitators, including not rushing, “handing over the stick,” and being self-critically aware. The power and popularity of PRA are partly explained by the unexpected analytical abilities of local people when catalyzed by relaxed ra...

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) describes a growing family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share, enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act. PRA has sources in activist participatory research, agroecosystem analysis, applied anthropology, field research on farming systems, and rapid rural...

Three types of agriculture can be distinguished – industrial, green revolution, and a third, complex, diverse and risk-prone agriculture. For this third agriculture, supporting perhaps 1.4 billion people, the transfer-of-technology (TOT) paradigm of industrial and green revolution agriculture has not worked well. A better fit is found with the comp...

Six years ago, the Farmer First workshop marked the growing strength of a new world view in agriculture. Put farmers needs and views first and the potential for growth and regeneration in complex, diverse and risk prone areas is far greater than previously supposed. In the past six years, there have been parallel and supportive changes in paradigma...