Participatory Action Research - Challenges

Challenges

PAR offers a long history of experimentation with evidence-based and people-based inquiry, a groundbreaking alternative to mainstream positive science. As with positivism, the approach creates many challenges (Phillips and Kristiansen, 2012) as well as debates on what counts as participation, action and research. Differences in theoretical commitments (Lewinian, Habermasian, Freirean, psychoanalytic, feminist, etc.) and methodological inclinations (quantitative, qualitative, mixed) are numerous and profound (see Chevalier and Buckles, 2013; Gergen, 2009; Greenwood and Levin, 1998; Heikkinen et al., 2001; Johannessen, 1996; Masters, 1995; Nielsen and Svensson, 2006; Shotter, 2012). This is not necessarily a problem, given the pluralistic value system built into PAR. Ways to better answer questions pertaining to PAR’s relationship with science and social history are nonetheless key to its future.

One critical question concerns the problem-solving orientation of engaged inquiry — the rational means-ends focus of most PAR experiments as they affect organizational performance or material livelihoods, for instance. In the clinical perspective of French psychosociology, a pragmatic orientation to inquiry neglects forms of understanding and consciousness that are not strictly instrumental and rational (Michelot, 2008). PAR must pay equal attention the interconnections of self-awareness, the unconscious and life in society.

Another issue, more widely debated, is scale — how to address broad-based systems of power and issues of complexity, especially those of another development on a global scale (Burns, 2007; Chevalier and Buckles, 2013; Mead, 2008; Werner and Totterdill, 2004)? How can PAR develop a macro-orientation to democratic dialogue (Gustavsen, 1985) and meet challenges of the 21st Century, by joining movements to support justice and solidarity on both local and global scales? By keeping things closely tied to local group dynamics, PAR runs the risk of substituting small-scale participation for genuine democracy and fails to develop strategies for social transformation on all levels (Bebbington, 2004; Hickey and Mohan, 2005). Given its political implications (Chambers, 1983), community-based action research and its consensus ethos have been known to fall prey to powerful stakeholders and serve as Trojan horses to bring global and environmental restructuring processes directly to local settings, bypassing legitimate institutional buffers and obscuring diverging interests and the exercise of power during the process. Cooptation can lead to highly-manipulated outcomes (Brown, 2004; Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Cornwall, 2004; Rocheleau, 1994; Rahman, 1998; Triulzi, 2001). Against this criticism, others argue that, given the right circumstances, it is possible to build institutional arrangements for joint learning and action across regional and national borders that can have impacts on citizen action, national policies and global discourses (Gaventa and Tandon, 2010; Brown and Gaventa, 2010).

The role of science and scholarship in PAR is another source of difference (Stoecker, 1999). In the Lewinian tradition, "there is nothing so practical as a good theory" (Lewin, 1951, p. 169; see Gustavsen, 2008). Accordingly, the scientific logic of developing theory, forming and testing hypotheses, gathering measurable data and interpreting the results plays a central role. While more clinically oriented, psychosociology in France also emphasizes the distinctive role of formal research and academic work, beyond problem solving in specific contexts (Dubost, 1987, pp. 90–101). Many PAR practitioners critical of mainstream science and its overemphasis on quantitative data also point out that research based on qualitative methods may be theoretically-informed and rigorous in its own way (McNiff and Whitehead, 2009). In other traditions, however, PAR keeps great distance from both academic and corporate science. Given their emphasis on pluralism and living knowledge, many practitioners of grassroots inquiry are critical of grand theory and advanced methods for collaborative inquiry, to the point of abandoning the word “research” altogether, as in participatory action learning. Others equate research with any involvement in reflexive practice aimed at assessing problems and evaluating project or program results against group expectations. As a result, inquiry methods tend to be soft and theory remains absent or underdeveloped. Practical and theoretical efforts to overcome this ambivalence towards scholarly activity are nonetheless emerging (Chevalier and Buckles, 2013; Reason and Bradbury, 2008).