CHAPTER 1
The role of video in participatory development
Why should an agency like Oxfam be interested in using video as a tool for social development? Video has the potential to retrieve the experiences and reflect back the voices of under-represented people. It can provide an accessible record of testimony, discussions, and activities. Groups and individual participants can use these audio-visual records to discuss and reorganise their opinions and concerns, and they can re-record and add information. When they are satisfied that they have represented what they want to say and show, they can take their information and re-present it to others. Video tapes can act as a conduit for communication between grassroots communities and those whom under-represented groups would not normally be able to address.
Unfortunately, the advantages of the participatory uses of video do not automatically resolve all the problems of management, planning, timing, sustainability, training, and facilitation that affect other approaches to participatory learning.
Participation and development
To appreciate the significance of the pilot project in Ky Nam Commune, which was set up to investigate the potential of video as a tool for learning, it may be helpful to consider it in the context of recent and current thinking about participatory development.
In the 1960s and 1970s, debates about the meaning of 'participation' were associated with a growing body of theory about grassroots development. Educationists such as Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire devised radical learning programmes with people living on the margins of society. They introduced new and liberal methods of teaching to encourage poor people to think critically about the reasons for their oppression and exclusion. Freire introduced the notion of learning as a process that could lead to social transformation.
Rather than using pre-printed textbooks in adult literacy classes, Freire encouraged learning groups to develop their own materials, based on the daily reality of their lives. This methodology represented an opposition to traditional approaches to learning, which Freire called 'the banking system of education', and replaced it with a process of dialogue between teachers and learners which Freire called 'critical pedagogy'.
Freire's objections to a 'top-down' mode of learning in which marginalised people are treated as passive recipients of knowledge were reflected in a move among development agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to devise methods of working with poor communities which would actively involve them in identifying and solving their own problems. Rural people's ability to survive in harsh climatic, social, and economic conditions argued for the need to reassess and respect local knowledge and expertise.
Development agencies and university researchers began to devise processes, known as Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), which addressed the issue of how outsiders might gain knowledge and insights from rural people, while enabling local communities to have access to the results. The use of survey questionnaires, administered by external researchers, was seen to place a disproportionate value on factors that were quantitative rather than qualitative. It also tended to produce information that was biased by the social position, context, and gender of the respondents. And inevitably it reflected the cultural assumptions of the researchers. RRA methods, although still essentially extractive, marked an important step in development research methods, because their exponents posed the question: whose knowledge counts?
By the mid-1980s the terms 'participation' and ^participatory' were beginning to be used by development professionals in conjunction with RRA. It was claimed by the advocates of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) — Robert Chambers and others — that the processes enabled farmers to become the principal 'owners' of information gained through a whole range of participatory methods, designed to enable villagers to focus on and discover things about their own lives and needs:
A PRA process ... seeks to enable outsiders to learn, through the sharing of information in a manner which enhances people's analysis and knowledge and leaves them owning it ... for example, through participatory mapping of a watershed, where the map is used by villagers to plot current conditions and plan actions, and retained by them for monitoring action taken and changes; or through mapping and surveying degraded forest, deciding how to protect it and what to plant, and then managing the resource ... the aim is to enable people to present, share, analyse and augment their knowledge as the start of a process. The ultimate output sought is enhanced knpwledge and competence, an ability to make demands, and to sustain action. Instead of imposing and extracting, PRA seeks to empower.
In PRA, or PLA (Participatory Learning Approaches, or Participatory Learning and Action) as it is now generally known, the learning activities undertaken by local people in the local context are designed as a focus to promote critical thinking, and it is the discussion which such a focus provokes that leads to the real sharing of information and knowledge. Researchers use maps and diagrams drawn in dust on the ground, or group walks and discussions that take place along the routes familiarly taken to grazing grounds or water-sources, to enable women and men to share their knowledge of their own landscapes and to decide together the issues or topics they need to research further. From the global perspective of the whole village, they are able to discuss who owns which land, who produces what, which crops are best grown where, and so on. As a result, an overview of the social, economic, and environmental world of the village is built up by the village participants, and the focus of the later participatory research activities is developed from this perspective. The layers of the onion of village relations, conflicts, gender issues, health problems, wealth and poverty can gradually be peeled back and examined.
Problems with participatory approaches
A great deal of debate has focused on the definition and refinement of PRA/PLA processes and practices. At times it seems that there is an ever-expanding industry of participatory training and research. It is an industry that is not without its critics. David Mosse, for example, has warned that a set of given techniques is of secondary value to an understanding of the complex social and political environments in which they are applied.
The mechanical application of PRA/PLA 'methods' or 'activities' (the mapping exercises, diagrams and so on) is one potential problem. Another is that the mere use of PRA/PLA methods is no guarantee that external bias will be eliminated and that local conditions — social, cultural, and political — will be respected. Researchers and project officers need extensive and sensitive training before they can safely use the methodology of PRA/PLA.
Often, far from producing an experience of mutual learning, initial PRA/PLA training gives trainees the impression that they are being asked to undertake a time-consuming piece of research with people of much lower educational standards than themselves. The information elicited from mapping and diagramming, it seems to them, could be produced more easily through conventional interviews. Often PRA/PLA is introduced as a one-off experience, and there is no chance for trainees to see it as one of a number of ways of working with villagers over an extended period. PRA/PLA is not a short-cut to information-gathering; rather, it is a long-term process involving sequences of learning and reflection between village people and outsiders. It is not always easy for trainees to appreciate that the aim of PRA/PLA is for villagers to undertake a progressive exploration of their own knowledge and contexts, in a way that elicits new insights and enables them to decide and 'draw down' the outside help and expertise they need. Such an approach requires flexibility as well as careful analysis of the outcomes of each day's activities, so that those of the following day can be understood and agreed by villagers as a progressive development and sharing of knowledge and planning throughout their community.
Another fundamental element of PRA/PLA, discussed in nearly every context as a potential pitfall, is the interpretation made by field-workers of the research and information produced by local people. There is a growing concern, among even the originators of participatory approaches in development, not only about the training of facilitators, but also about the organisational context in which PRA/PLA is operated. Robert Chambers writes of the operation of participatory approaches by field-workers within specific cultural contexts: 'Responsibility rests not in written rules, regulations and procedures, but in individual judgement.
PRA/PLA should be a flexible tool, yet much of the literature describes sets of checklists and methodologies. The handbooks, in their concentration on how to operate PRA/PLA methodologies, fail to emphasise that the most radical and also the most difficult aspect of PLA is that it should be used as a means of focusing, rather than determining, the topics of dialogue between participants. But this open-ended approach to the selection of topics or agendas, and the need for local people to appropriate or take over their own learning, fit awkwardly into the agendas and time-scales, logical frameworks, budget cycles, and report-writing demands of development agencies. The outcomes of PRA/PLA can and should be unpredictable. Inevitably there are tensions between local needs and the demands of funders and donors, who require reports to be submitted in a different language, in accordance with a schedule which may bear no relation to local realities. These are the considerations that have produced critical questions about where villager participation begins and ends.
Using participatory approaches In Vietnam
In the cultural and political context of Vietnam, there has been a great deal of debate about whether Participatory Rural Appraisal and participatory approaches to development are even possible. Both the Confucian philosophy and the Marxist ideology are paternalist and authoritarian (though Marxism explains this as a temporary phase on the road to socialism). A patrilineal and patrilocal kinship system reinforces Confucian principles throughout Kinh society in Vietnam. The influence of the Communist Party extends through local Party committees to national government. For Oxfam's staff in Vietnam, participation should and must include the participation of the government. As one member remarked: 'When we refer to community, we mean people and government together.'
In Vietnam, community participation in government is a traditional part of cultural life. But political and social custom describe the expression of individual difference as anti-social and counter-productive. By contrast, an essential feature of PRA/PLA is the exploration and definition of difference through wealth-ranking, gender analysis, and so on. In such a climate, will villagers in Vietnam be able to participate freely in research processes designed to enable them to set the agendas for their own development?
Participation and communication
Participation, representation, and communication by people on the margins of society, their relationship with government and with development agencies, and the ways in which such communications and representations are received and responded to are at the very heart of social development — but they also represent its weakest point. It is not only that the concepts are contested, but there are differing perspectives, too, about the levels of participation involved. Participatory approaches must lead us to question where participation begins and ends, and so to consider issues of representation and communication.
Development communications
It is interesting to note that the history of development communications has, like the history of development itself, thrown up a number of conflicting approaches to the issue of participation.
Melkote has written critically about the 'bullet theory' of communication: the idea that radio broadcasts with development messages would create a climate of acceptance which could be followed up by extension workers. These 'agents of change' would provide detailed training in new techniques, together with resources to make modern innovations possible. It was a programme which had worked in Europe under the Marshall Plan, following the devastation of the second world war. The disappointing outcome of a similar programme to reach the poor of the South was put down to a strange failure to accept innovation and modernisation on the part of Third World peasants.
Although the 'bullet theory' of development communications was seen as essentially educational, it was the antithesis of contemporary pedagogic theories about participatory development, which, under the influence of Paulo Freire, were formulating new attitudes to the processes of teaching and learning in marginalised communities. Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' claimed to enable poor and powerless people to break the 'culture of silence'. It linked a process of learning and teaching with action and reflection, leading to the development of a critical awareness about the way the world works. This Freirean critical pedagogy offered one of the keys to what is now known as the 'participatory learning' approach to development.
However, the failure of those involved in participatory development to engage with the spread of the mass media must be seen as a lost opportunity. It has meant that the alternative uses of such media for local representation have not been explored within the contexts of participatory development. It has led to a lack of imagination in the use of the technological by-products of the mass media, such as audio and video recorders, by development practitioners. The development of 'good practices' in relation to the participatory uses of the recorded media has been neglected.
Radio and television programmes designed to inform farmers and others through development 'messages' still represent a tiny proportion of broadcast media world-wide. Yet both radio and screen-based media have continued to reach rapidly expanding audiences, and, in the words of the media writer Tehranian, this has led to the 'globalisation of the local and localisation of the global'.
How has this neglect of the development of the participatory uses of the media come about? What happened to Marshall McLuhan's grand claim that the new electronic media would create a 'global village', enabling the world's inhabitants to communicate directly with one another? The weakness of this concept is that it ignores the effects of a global system in which the consumers of programme content are simply at the bottom of the hierarchy of what has become known as 'the world information order'.
At the same time, by ignoring the potential of the technological advances of the mass media for overcoming the barriers to communication posed by the need for written literacy, development professionals may have conspired in the abuse of the basic human right to freedom of expression. It could be argued that the uses of the media for minority representation neither begin nor end with satellite communications. Rather, clues to the media representation of those on the margins of society lie in their uses of the spin-offs of high technology. The small media of communication (video cameras, audiocassette machines, copying machines, e-mail, and computers) are, as Tehranian points out, 'making an equally powerful impact on revolutionary and reformist social movements'. He cites the non-broadcast use of videocassette material during the periods of resistance and change in Iran, South Africa, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Muslim republics. These 'alternative' uses of the new technologies indicate an acutely felt need for representation on the part of those who find themselves in situations of repression, as well as demonstrating their value for clandestine information-exchange and communication, and for the work of human-rights monitoring.
Representation and video
Video can enable under-represented and non-literate people to use their own visual languages and oral traditions to retrieve, debate, and record their own knowledge. Moreover, these recordings may enable excluded people to enter into negotiation with those in power over them, and to challenge the representations of others (even those within their own groups: the representation of the family offered by men, for example, might be challenged by women).
Practising representation needs to begin at village level, and to address the questions of who is being represented and who is listening. Villages are not homogeneous, conflict-free communities. They can be divided by class, caste, gender, wealth, power, and education. Using video to explore representation is valuable because, at one level, its pictures act as a mirror. Participants can see and hear themselves talking and they can retrieve what was said, in the way that it was said. They, and the facilitators of the process, can also notice who is absent. The picture can be discussed and analysed.
