Participatory Learning and Action: a three-minute introduction

Participation is the cornerstone of socially just sustainable development and poverty reduction — and it has remained central to IIED’s work for four decades. In the 1970s, during the ‘green revolution’, it became clear that the boosts to agricultural production were not benefiting many of the world’s poorest rural communities that depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Enabling these communities to participate in planning and implementing their own development became a new priority and IIED played a key role in developing and spreading methods to do just that, including Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA).

In 1985, RRA pioneers and practitioners across the world — among them IIED’s Gordon Conway and Robert Chambers from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) — came together at a workshop in Thailand to further explore participatory development and design a range of tools and tactics for implementing it. They called these techniques Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), and an international community of practice was born.

Experience and expertise in this new field was evolving quickly. Documenting it and sharing it became the task of the IIED-IDS conceived journal for practitioners called RRA Notes/PLA Notes.

Renamed Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) in 2004., the journal's archive continues reach new audiences with its perspective on challenges such as adaptation to climate change and youth and governance in Africa.

More details: http://www.iied.org/pla.