Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque :
This is all about sustainable rural development in Bangladesh through participatory approach. This is the only efficacious mechanism to go deepest into the village community, its hopes and aspirations, problems and prospect. In recent years sustainable rural development has become the prime concern of the government and Non-government organizations. Only Participatory approach anchored in participatory components of action research can promote consensus building, identify key agents of sustainable development, and organize human potential and capacities. The state is the main actor creating an enabling environment for sustainable rural development through its key institution like Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development (BARD). NGOc through its participatory methodologies play second fiddle to non so far as sustainable rural development is concerned
Rural development ceases to be sustainable without reference to the involvement of major stakeholders and beneficiaries in policy formulation and policy implementation process. In recent years the national and donor agencies, too, have been at the forefront of the growing international consensus that participatory approach and sustainable development are indivisible. The belief is that developing capacity building or learning by doing through participation can be and should be the primary way to eliminate poverty.
It is increasingly realized that only participatory approach underpins understanding of the beneficiaries understanding their predicaments. It gratifies villager’s needs for self-development. Also it paves for social mobilization and wider network of communication involving the cross section of the rural populace. The policy goal, as it is clearly visible in recent policy dialogue, put the last first through participation in mandatory areas of development
A plethora of studies on participatory approach for community organization have appeared in recent years ((Brown, 1985. Finn,.1994.Foucault,. 1980, Freire, 1978, .Sohng, 1995.) Participatory approach is people-centered (Brown, 1985) as because the process of critical inquiry is informed by and responds to the experiences and needs of people involved. Participatory approach is all about is about empowerment which is crucial to the construction of reality, language, meanings and rituals of truth; power functions in all knowledge and in every definition. Power is knowledge and knowledge creates truth and therefore power (Foucault, 1980). Participatory research is also about praxis. It recognizes the inseparability of theory and practice and critical awareness of the personal-political dialectic.
Participatory approach to learning is a central part of a research process. Research is not done just to generate facts, but to develop understanding of oneself and one’s context. It is about understanding how to learn, which allows people to become self-sufficient learners and evaluate knowledge that others generate. Good participatory research helps develop relationships of solidarity by bringing people together to collectively research, study, learn, and then act. There is no off-the-shelf formula, step-by-step method, or ‘correct” way to do participatory research. Rather, participatory approach is best described as a set of principles and a process of engagement in the inquiry.
The key note of participatory approach a participatory and democratic learning environment that provides people (especially the underprivileged) the opportunity to overcome what Freire has called the “habit of submission”-the frame of mind that curtails people from fully and critically engaging with their world and participating in civic life (Freire, 1978). It is only through participation in learning environments in which open, critical and democratic dialogue is fostered, Freire suggests, that people develop greater self-confidence along with greater knowledge.
Robert Chambers (1983) in his seminal work Rural Development: Putting the Last First provides insightful notes about participatory action research. . The central theme of this book is that rural poverty is often unseen or misperceived by outsiders, those who are not themselves rural and poor. The author contends that researchers, scientists, administrators and fieldworkers rarely view from the fringe.
A key methodological feature that distinguishes participatory research from other social research is dialogue. Through dialogue, people come together and participate in all crucial aspects of investigation, education and collective action. It is through talking to one another and doing things together that people get connected, and this connectedness leads to shared meaning. Dialogue encourages people to voice their perspectives and experiences, helping them to look at the “whys” of their lives, inviting them to critically examine the sources and implications of their own knowledge. In this context, dialogue allows to awaken participants’ voices and cultivates their participation as critical, active agents of change. This is particularly essential in the light of many social forces of domination at work in the lives of people from socially and culturally disenfranchised groups.
The role of the researcher in this process is a facilitator of the learning process. The researcher is not an expert who is assumed to have all the knowledge and gives it to the people who are assumed not to have any knowledge. Rather, it is a facilitator who sets up situations that allow people to discover for themselves what they already know along with gaining for themselves new knowledge. In this process, the researcher not only learns from the participants, but also engages in dialogue by posing questions:
What are the conditions of participants’ lives?
What are the determining features of the social structure and social relations that contribute to creating their life patterns?
What choices do they make, and why do they believe those are good things to do?
What are the possibilities for their experience and action?
The researcher’s sharing of his or her perceptions, questions in response to the dialogue, and different theories and data invite the participants to critically reflect upon their own experiences and personal theories from a broader context. Ideally, in such a setting, the expert knowledge of the researcher combined with the experiential knowledge of community members, create an entirely new ways of thinking about issues.
This is the meaning of conscientization, which Paulo Freire has helped popularize. Critical consciousness is raised not by analyzing the problematic situation alone, but by engaging in action in order to transform the situation. Dialogue acts as a means for fostering critical consciousness about social reality, an understanding based on knowledge of how people and issues are historically and politically situated.
Communication is a key methodological concern in participatory research. It draws upon creative combinations of written, oral and visual communication in the design, implementation and documentation of research. Grassroots community workers, village women, and consciousness raising groups have used photo novella (people’s photographic documentation of their everyday lives) to record and to reflect their needs, promote dialogue, encourage action, and inform policy. Researchers use theater and visual imagery to facilitate collective learning, expression, and action. Other forms of popular communication are utilized such as collectively written songs, cartoons, community meetings, community self-portraits and videotape recordings.
Critical knowledge development calls for a creative blend of traditional methods of inquiry and new approaches. Use of alternative communication methods in participatory research has both pushed researchers to re-examine conventional methods and opened up the possibility of using methods that previously would not have been considered legitimate.
Now-days much has been written about sustainable development.
We define sustainable rural development in terms of sustaining livelihoods, reducing poverty, protecting and regenerating environment, intergenerational justice in resource use, conservation of bio-diversity, expansion of green and bio-technologies, institutional viability, resound economic growth, social and political stability. Developing capacities for good governance underpins all participatory elements in sustainable development process.
By now campaign for sustainable rural livelihoods (CSRL) has organized a shadow climate change tribunal as a part of its series of events on climate change. The tribunal is expected to provide necessary directions on the issue of climate change afflicting the poor, especially women and child.
Of late OXFAM has undertaken extensive activities on climate change working with the government and the people. This to think of sustainable rural livelihoods. Agriculture is the key to rural livelihoods; according to the size of the farms, small and marginal farmers are the key to agricultural production. And agriculture is an interaction between people and nature.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Professor, Department of Public Administration, Chittagong University)
