Participatory Action Research – Research-Participatory Diagnosis

‘Participatory diagnosis’ is a deliberate effort to seek out the views of people on what is going well and what is not going well, what might be major problems and stumbling blocks for the medium-term future, but also what are things that bind people together and provide common ground.

Participatory Action Research is inspired by a social philosophy that sees the production and control of knowledge as a dimension in power relations, be it the power of the researcher, the “expert”, the policy maker, or in general the ‘decision-maker’. Powerful actors can shape and dominate what should be discussed and how, what is recorded, highlighted or censored etc. PAR was developed also as a critique to the formal, expert driven, top-down ‘development’ projects.

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