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Preface
In this groundbreaking piece by the Sri Lankan economist and participatory researcher
Sirisena Tilikaratna, he distils the main characteristic and attributes involved in
stimulating self-reliant development through the creation of different cadres of
sensitised agents external animators, internal animators and external-internal
animators.
Drawing on over 20-years of experience in participatory development in Asia he
outlines the processes through which sensitised agents gain the necessary skills and
knowledge to perform their roles and the varying modes of operation that they require to
embrace if they are to hold true to this form of work.
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Grassroots experiences from many developing countries have demonstrated that the spirit
of self-reliance, which often lies dormant in people who live in poverty and deprivation,
can be activated by appropriate stimulation using sensitised agents.
With such stimulation, the people concerned tend to take collective initiatives
creative and assertive actions to improve their socio-economic-cultural status.
This paper summarises lessons derived from four aspects of such self-reliant development
experiences, namely:
- The nature and mode of stimulation;
- The process by which sensitised
agents have been created to play such a role;
- The different kinds of self-reliant actions
that people have initiated following such stimulation; and finally
- The issue of
sustaining such initiatives on a broader front.
The discussion is based primarily on experiences in South and Southeast Asia.
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Stimulation of the poor and deprived to undertake self-reliant initiatives requires two
essential steps.
The first is the development of an awareness about the reality in which they live. In
particular, they need to understand that poverty and deprivation are a result of specific
social forces rather than an outcome of some inherent deficiency on their part or even fate.
Second, based on such critical awareness, they need to gain confidence in their collective
abilities to bring about positive change in their life situations and to organise
themselves for that purpose.
A stimulation of this sort implies a specific mode of interaction with the people, the
essence of which could be summarised as the breaking up of the classical dichotomy between
subject and object (manipulation and dominance) and its replacement by a humanistic mode
of equal relation between two subjects (animation and facilitation). Such a mode of
interaction would be fundamentally different from that adopted by a political party worker
or a conventional development worker. The essential differences may be summarised as
follows:
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Starting from where people are their experiences, knowledge, perceptions and
rhythm of work and thought (rather than from a preconceived political agenda or an
externally conceived set of assumptions). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Stimulating the people (animation) to undertake self-analysis of their life situations
(a self-inquiry into the economic-social-cultural environment in which people live) and
helping them derive from such self-inquiry facts, figures and conclusions to serve as an
intellectual base for initiating changes (rather than the use of a closed framework of
analysis or a social analysis carried out by outside intellectuals). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Assisting the people to organise themselves and to create their own organisations
peoples organisations which are non-hierarchical in structure and democratic
in operations and which can effectively be used as instruments of action to create change
(rather than organising people into externally determined structures to serve goals set by
outsiders). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Facilitating the actions for change as decided by the peoples organisations, in
particular assisting them to deal with logistical and practical problems which the people
by themselves may not initially be fully equipped to cope with (rather than implementation
of externally conceived projects/programmes). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Stimulating and assisting the peoples organisations to carry out self-reviews of
their activities as a regular practice, to assess and learn from successes as well as
failures and to plan future actions (rather than monitoring and evaluation carried out by
outsiders). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Conscious measures taken by the external agent to make his/her role progressively
redundant in order to pave the way for and thus ensure self-reliant capacity build-up of
the peoples organisation (rather than attempting to provide leadership and patronage
or to project ones image). |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Such a phasing out would necessarily require assistance in developing their own cadres
(internal animators and facilitators) who could eventually replace the external agents.
Moreover, selected internal animators/facilitators will be used for the expansion of the
self-reliant development process (to cover new villages/communities), thereby reducing the
dependence on external agents as well as the cost of external animation (rather than the
use of a large number of external agents, which is costly and often requires high recourse
to foreign funds). |
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Adoption of a mode of interaction with the people as described above requires the
availability of a cadre of sensitised agents who have gone through a process of rigorous
learning based on exposure to concrete experiences and self-reflection, as against formal
training and instruction. Analysis of several country experiences reveals that potential
persons have originated from:
- Socially conscious and active segments of the middle class who have had some practical
experience in social activities, have gone through secondary or higher formal education
and are generally in the age category of twenty-five to forty; and
- Those who have begun to critically reflect on whatever activist roles they had been
playing earlier and were looking for more relevant or fulfilling roles in society.
The learning process undergone to develop potential cadres should be distinguished from
formal training courses where the trainee becomes an object of training and a depository
of knowledge delivered by a trainer. The main elements of the learning process as revealed
from practice may be summarised as follows:
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | The starting point is a collective reflection on the analysis of the experiences that trainees
already have in working with communities and their existing knowledge of micro and macro
social situations. Such a critical review of existing knowledge and experiences provides
an opportunity for each trainee to engage in self-criticism and self-evaluation, to
initiate a process of unlearning as well as new learning. |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Beginning from such an initial self-reflective exercise, the trainees are exposed
to concrete field situations by living among selected communities in order to gather
socio-economic information through informal discussions with the people and through direct
observation as a base for understanding community life. |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Such an exercise in basic data gathering enables the trainee to identify those
categories of the poor and deprived. Through interaction with such groups, the trainee
seeks to stimulate them to identify issues of common concern, collect the relevant data on
these issues and assist them in analysing the data that will enrich an understanding of
their own life situations. It requires a sustained effort on the part of a trainee
to be able to set in motion such a process of self-inquiry by the people. |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | While engaged in such field exercises, the trainees meet regularly (at least once
a month) as a group to share and analyse their experiences among themselves as a
collective learning exercise. This transference from field action to collective reflection
is an important method for the trainees to improve the quality of their work by
learning from each others experiences. |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | While there can be no definitive time table, concrete experiences suggest that trainees
generally take at least six months to achieve a breakthrough in learning and action,
that is, to acquire the basic skills for stimulation and demonstrate some concrete results
in the field. At this point, the trainees would begin to show varying degrees of
success in stimulating the people, with whom they had been interacting, to organise
themselves so to initiate changes. The progress is not necessarily even, some would lag
behind others. |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | As an important part of these field exercises, the trainees also should identify
these individuals from within the community that possess the potential skills in animation
and facilitation, and should assist in improving such skills. Creation of internal or
community cadres is an important requirement for the ultimate phasing out of external
cadres. |
Thus it is seen that the creation of sensitised agents is a process that involves
sustained field experiences coupled with back-and-forth exercises for collective learning
spread over a number of months. It is a delicate human resource development that cannot be
short-circuited or compressed into a short-term training course to be delivered in a
classroom.
Given their formal education and middleclass origin and aspirations, the external
animators tend to go through many tensions in their work with the people, for example,
comparisons with peer groups, middleclass lifestyles, demands of the family and careerist
tendencies. These factors make it difficult to retain many external animators for long,
resulting in a high turnover. Experience shows that after about four to five years of
work, a sense of fatigue sets in, at which point many of them seek job change. Moreover,
since they have to be paid salaries and allowances at least comparable to going market
rates, their use in large numbers is a costly matter. This would lead to overextended
budgets often requiring increased dependence on foreign donors.
In order to avoid both a high dependence on external funds as well as the problems
created by high turnover, it is necessary to confine the cadre of external animators to a
modest number of carefully selected and committed persons. This would invariably mean that
Self-reliance Promoting Organisations (SPOs) will need to depend
increasingly on selected internal animators (cadres of peoples organisations) to
expand the process of self-reliant development and to increase its coverage
geographically.
While some internal animators would be confined to the activities of their own
peoples organisation, there would be others willing to cross the village boundaries
to spread the development process in adjacent areas. Such persons may be labelled as Internal-External
animators (IEAs), as distinguished from the external ones of the Self-reliance
Promoting Organisation (SPO) and internal ones to the peoples organisation. They
represent an intermediate category, being those from among the cadres of a peoples
organisation willing to undertake external animation by going beyond the boundary of their
respective peoples organisations. The use of their services on a part-time basis
would require payment of a replacement income (alternative daily income foregone plus
travel cost) which would greatly reduce the cost of external animation.
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Sparked by the stimulation provided by sensitised agents, the kind of actions that
organised groups of people have initiated vary depending on the particular
socio-economic-cultural context that is, the nature and extent of the deprivations,
concerns of the people and the availability of political and social space for desired
actions. The diverse variety of actions that have emerged may be analysed under four
inter-related types, namely:
Defensive actions by the poor are
basically aimed at protecting the existing sources, means and level of living against
erosion and encroachment by the actions of other interest groups or by governmental
policies or projects. Examples are dislocations and displacements of people and loss of
their customary means of living as a result of such development projects as big dams for
electricity generation, agribusiness and mining operations, the gazetting of hunting,
forest and nature reserves and slum and shanty clearance projects. Other examples include
adverse effects of the introduction of modern trawlers on small fishermen; environmental
damage caused by some projects or certain so-called development projects. Actions by
organised groups have taken a variety of forms, such as protest campaigns, making
representations to public authorities, negotiations for compensation, resort to legal
remedies and other direct actions.
Assertive actions refer to assertions by
the poor deprived of economic, social and other rights available to them under
governmental legislation, policies and programmes as well as what they collectively
consider to be their legitimate entitlements. Experiences show that governmental
legislation and policies intended to benefit the poor and deprived e.g.
rights of sharecroppers and tenants, minimum wages, delivery schemes and poverty
programmes do not automatically reach the poor unless the latter are organised and
able to act as pressure group to assert their rights. Through organisations of their own
making, the poor have enhanced their receiving capacity as well as their claim-making
capacity for such rights and public services. Assertive action has a further dimension:
assertion vis-à-vis private vested interests that attempt to make extractions from the
poor through process of unequal exchange exorbitant interest charged on credit
supplies, low prices paid for peasant produce or high prices charged for inputs used by
peasants. In social contexts where such income transfers (from poor to rich) are an
important factor in the poverty of the peasantry, organised peasant groups have initiated
collective actions to enhance their bargaining power as opposed to mercantile or landed
interests. Or they have de-linked from them, initiating alternative (co-operative) methods
of credit and marketing arrangements thereby retrieving formerly lost economic surplus.
Constructive actions refer to projects
of a self-help nature initiated by organised groups to satisfy the group needs by
mobilising their own resources and skills with or without supplementary assistance from
outside. Such activities could take a variety of forms:
- Infrastructural works, such as feeder roads, simple irrigation works and similar
physical structures;
- Economic projects, such as consumer good stores, schemes for credit and marketing, and
small industries;
- Social development projects, such as drinking water wells, housing improvements, and
health and education programmes; and
- Cultural activities of different sorts.
Innovative or Alternative actions
represent initiatives of organised groups to experiment with and undertake development
styles and activities that could be alternatives to some elements of mainstream development
processes. These may be:
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Technologies that are ecologically sustainable and more appropriate to the environment
and culture of the people |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Organic farming, biogas projects and indigenous practices of health care |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Recovery and revival of indigenous cultural elements that suffered under cultural
invasions |
![bullet](_themes/nature/nabull1.gif) | Evolution of innovative organisational forms and methods of community action that are
democratic and participatory in character, and also capable of checking the growth of
elitist forms of leadership within organisations |
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Experiences vary as to the extent the above-described actions have proved
self-sustaining or have led to a continuing improvement in the socio-economic status of
the poor and deprived. While some have shown more durable results, others have stagnated,
lacked continuity or failed to develop after an initial spurt of activity. Analysis of
concrete experiences reveal that sustainability of organised initiatives appears to depend
on four inter-related factors:
- The emergence of a group of internal animators;
- The practice of self-review by peoples organisations;
- The ability to move from micro groups to larger groupings; and
- An expansion of the action agenda to move toward a total or comprehensive development
effort.
The first important development must be the emergence of a group of
internal (community) cadres who possess the skills to animate their fellow men and women.
They require skills to facilitate group actions (and thus multiply the development beyond
village boundaries or a particular peoples organisation) and to progressively reduce
the dependence on external cadres. External cadres, who tend to persist without the
creation of internal cadres, consciously or unconsciously create a new form of dependency
among the people. This is particularly the case when such external cadres also function as
some sort of delivery agents, for example, for credit and other inputs. A progressive
increase in the ratio of internal animators to a given number of external agents is in
fact an important indicator of capacity build-up for self-reliance. As we have already
observed, the existence of a pool of internal animators becomes an important source of
internal-external animators, thus reducing the cost of external animation.
Second, for the emergence of a viable peoples process,
self-review of activities must become a regular practice of peoples organisations.
Self-review is an action-reflection process, which evaluates the ongoing actions by the
people themselves, enabling any corrections or adjustments therein as well as providing a
base for conception and planning of future actions. Moreover, it is an important
instrument of assertion vis-à-vis outsiders (including the external animator) as well as
their own leaders. Self-review helps improve peoples actions, assert their autonomy
and creates conditions for democratic functioning of peoples organisations.
Third, the process of development that initially emerges is rooted in
small-sized base groups that often encompass members having common interests or are
subject to similar disabilities. There are many actions that such small groups can take by
themselves to improve conditions. But a point is reached when the feasible agenda for
autonomous action becomes exhausted and stagnation tends to set in. Hence the continued
ability of such organised entities to make advances depends on their ability to forge
links with one another and to evolve into larger organisations through appropriate
groupings with the objective of expanding the available space for actions. This is the
only way by which organised groups are able to move on to a higher plane of action and
thus open up even newer possibilities for action. In order to tackle larger issues of
common concern, which are beyond the capacity of any single group acting alone to deal
with, there is a need to grow bigger, to enhance bargaining power and to emerge as a power
to be reckoned with within a given social context. This tends to be an organic development
in the case of groups that have attained a relatively high level of consciousness through
an action-reflection process. Such groups are actively seeking ways to expand the space
for assertive and creative actions. Broader groupings emerge as a logical
necessity, a felt need. When group formation on a broader front fail to emerge,
micro-level initiative (after a point) tend to stagnate and even fizzle out or become
co-opted into the ongoing mainstream.
And finally, there is the need to broaden and deepen the action agenda
by progressively moving from initial issues of concern to a total development effort
an integrated advance on several fronts which could make a significant impact on
the life situations of the people concerned. The initial actions may be, for example, defensive
or assertive ones (as described above), which should then be followed by constructive
and innovative actions in order to create a base for continuing life
improvements. With the formation of larger groupings or organisations in a given
geographical area, a sizeable base would be available to facilitate the formation of
comprehensive plans that could stand as alternatives to the mainstream development activities
and programmes. Such alternative development plans, based as they are on visions, values,
priorities and aspirations of conscientised groups, could be used as instruments for
bargaining with governments or public agencies for a legitimate share of resource
allocation. In this way organised groups need to progressively advance to a stage where
local/regional planning for a total development effort, embracing economic-social-cultural
dimensions, could be initiated. In this final analysis the ability of participatory
initiatives to multiply, expand and grow in the face of overwhelming pressures emanating
from the mainstream dependence, alienation, atomisation, consumerism and
environmental destruction will depend on the proven success in developing
innovations and alternative methods, practices, ideas and plans capable of making a
significant improvement in the life situations of the poor on a continuing basis.
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Action and Knowledge Breaking the Monopoly with Participatory Action Research,
Edited by Orlando Fals-Borda and Muhammad Anisur Rahman, Intermediate Technology
Publications, London, 1991, pp 135 145. ISBN 1-85339-098-4
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