Untaming aid through action research: Seeking transformative reflective action

The future is unknown and outside of our control. Plan and develop programming iteratively and over long time frames to offer meaningful support to people’s lives

While researchers forged operational agreements about activities and objectives for pragmatic reasons, over time they (re) negotiated the ideal future state—e.g. women’s economic status and relationship to men, how to protect adolescent girls from violence and loss of autonomy, etc.—seeking advances that resonated with local stakeholders’ actual needs. This required continual adaptation to changing circumstances even when demands emerged that were initially off the menu.

For example, when communities requested support to improve soil fertility—an area that was outside of World Fish expertise—the program team shifted significant resources to be responsive to this need. According to the authors, this request

highlights a common challenge facing many agencies in development—when the local community asks for a service that they do not generally provide. This inability of external agents to respond appropriately to needs on-the-ground is one of the reasons that people in this area of Malaita are marginalized in the first place

Seferiadis et al. explain that interventions that address complex issues such as poverty alleviation and unequal gender relations require longer timescales to generate positive spirals as the basis of sustainable change. Our researchers’ ability to immerse themselves in local spaces, slow down and think long enabled them to develop trusting relationships and more relevant interventions than are possible with short-term interventions and horizons.

Tangible progress emerges from new social connections between previously separated or loosely connected agents. Develop new connective tissue and social capital

Our authors showed that relationship-building was not only a prerequisite to action, but was in fact one of the most important outcomes of their work. For example, Seferiadis et al. note that improved livelihoods from IGAs were dependent not only on new skills and tangible resources, but on the ability to develop networks of social relations. As one project participant said:

People who have lots of friends, who communicate freely with others, they progress. But people who are poor, who cannot communicate nicely, their progress is not like that. They don’t know other people; they cannot get information.

The cultivation of social capital was also prominent in the Solomon Islands project, where project partners increased their access to networks of rural farmers and to each other, and where coalition members are now inviting each other to join each other’s workshops. Apgar et al. tie these outcomes to their use of Theory of Change (TOC) methodology, which helped them understand early in their planning process that the ultimate success of their work depended on building a coalition across organizations and sectors that do not usually work together. Johnson reveals that new social relationships and ways of construing the other—in this case adults’ and policy makers’ views on the value of children’s and youth’s evidence—played an important role in community processes becoming more supportive of young people’s flourishing. Jernsand argues that starting slow and spending many weeks and months building trust and mutual knowledge, sans logframe or project plan, made future collaborations speedier and prepared the ground for difficult conversations about, for example, gender relations.

Surfacing conflicting accounts and engaging diverse knowledge is more relevant than “best practice.” Commit to inquiry and learning in specific contexts

All our authors hold the idea of best practice lightly, preferring to seek opportunities based on a deep study of local context and relevance. Johnson and Apgar et al. in particular highlight how surfacing assumptions and engaging diverse knowledge from new stakeholders were key preconditions for shifting important conversations.

Johnson’s work in Nepal shows how context strongly influences the impact of participatory mechanisms. Increasing young people’s participation depended very directly on first

understanding the places and spaces that [children and young people] inhabit: political, cultural and physical context, including beliefs and attitudes towards childhood and children, and the relational power dynamics with peers and adults in communities, both in their everyday lives and in how they interact in [participatory action research] PARs.

Apgar et al.’s Solomon Islands project also paid critical attention to context by articulating an equity principle to focus on the poor and marginalized, and then by deeply studying “social norms and power dynamics at play in the context of the interventions and paying attention to who was and was not participating.” Discussions on a rubric for defining quality partnership opened up important conversations not only on how current relationships stood, but more importantly on the need “to move from a ‘consultation’ mode of participation to building co-researcher relationships, representing acknowledgement of the need to move along a participation continuum.” The authors note that critical reflection with diverse actors in their PAR processes led to expanding research into areas previously overlooked (such as nutrition) and broke down some long-standing barriers to organizations working together.

Transformation is not always the right approach. Seek opportunities for incremental change to confront culturally embedded practice in a safe and feasible manner

Seferiadis et al. argue that women in Bangladesh did not wish to engage in confrontation with their husbands or communities. With women navigating the boundaries, the project supported empowerment and stimulated change in harmony with dominant customs instead of aiming at radical, sudden transformation of women’s lives. Methodologically, this was aided by the use of participatory visualization methods, which allowed the women to reveal only what they wanted to reveal, including important evidence of empowerment. During a Photovoice activity, one woman staged a photograph with her husband in which she was giving him money, representing her new power to earn income and contribute to the household income. Similarly, in Ethiopia, Lackovich-Van Gorp avoided cultural backlash. She listened to local women who made it clear that men could not be involved in the action research discussions, as the conversation itself was subversive. Creating a safe space for collaboration with the participants was the most important methodological choice in this sense, followed by use of a positive deviance approach (PD): PD promoted subtle behavior change that did not create discomfort in the community “by uncovering hitherto unknown community solutions that, given their local origins, [were] more socially and culturally acceptable than imported ‘best’ or ‘good’ practice, or pilot innovations.” PD changed only what was absolutely necessary to nudge the problem in a positive direction.

Diverse, untapped local knowledge is the most relevant knowledge for local change processes. Use methodology to develop safe and participatory spaces that engage tacit and explicit perspectives and ways of knowing

We must go beyond the tactics of specific methods ¹ and think more strategically about overall design. Johnson shows that innovative participatory methods, for example, are ineffectual without addressing intergenerational relationships and power dynamics between children and adult decision-makers. To dig deeper into assumptions in a TOC development and review process, Apgar et al. make a case for engaging in critical reflection alongside tangible interventions, while simultaneously building skills for ongoing real-time reflection and learning. They caution us to be ready for tensions that arise when bringing diverse actors together and building new ways of working collectively to reach the most marginalized. They emphasize the need for high investment in capacity development of designers and managers of project monitoring and evaluation who, they argue

must be embedded in implementation processes and working along-side facilitators, to learn themselves how to make a complex idea work in context and to facilitate experiential learning of local teams as they open up potentially transformative pathways.

How might we come to terms with danger and threats that emerge during processes of change?

The need for incremental change to confront culturally embedded practice in a safe and feasible manner resonated with Elisa Martínez. But incrementalism, Martínez notes, still exposes positive deviants to public surveillance and so to significant dangers. Because women’s visibility is never apolitical in patriarchal contexts, she implores us to work proactively and plan defensively with members of the community who may come under this form of scrutiny. In his appreciation of the Dunga experience, David Week questions if social transformation or transformational learning are relevant goals from the perspective of local actors. He highlights how Jersand’s elucidation of tensions between internal dynamics of community development and the imposed constraints of external agents (e.g. financial, technical, academic) may help others mitigate expectations to generate “transformational change” in advance of knowing the concrete situation and lived experience of particular communities.

How do we remain focused on altering unjust systems and the power relations that underpin them?

If gender inequality is a significant driver of women’s poverty and marginalization, Skip Bivens asks, what gets lost by not reflecting on the unjust nature of those relationships? Should action research introduce critical reflection about the systemic challenges participants face, even in a sensitive context? At what point is an incrementalist approach apologist? In a similar vein, Martínez fears that if we hold structural transformation too loosely, we may place too much responsibility on women and girls to speak up for themselves (albeit in acceptable ways), while leaving systems of cultural and economic relations that that oppress them intact.

How might we reframe participation as engagement to develop local solutions?

Week points out that communities have their own development trajectory prior to, greater than and continuing after, the minor intervention that constitutes a development project. Therefore, bringing stakeholders together to discuss problems, make plans, try things out—and in the process get to know, adapt to and cope with each other's interest—is overtly political and stands in contrast to a common development norm. Drawing from the Catholic Social Teaching concept of subsidiarity, Guy Sharrock explains that although much project strategy is dictated from above, people who are closer to the problem have a better understanding of the issues at hand. There is therefore significant untapped potential for delegating community members and field-level staff as the most important decision-makers for determining the strategic direction of interventions. Week argues that if a development project is successful, it is because outsiders—not community members—have become effective “participants.” Together, our practitioner reviewers call for a new definition of successful or effective participation, one that equates it with the generation of acceptable local solutions via ongoing reflective practice. Action research is essential here because of the need for equalizing power relations and, so, producing more honest conversations about ownership and expertise.

How might we make the case that longer time horizons and new measurement approaches are needed for addressing underlying causes of poverty and marginalization in increasingly complex, rapidly evolving contexts?

Bivens suggests that showing examples of incremental learning and project design adaptation makes a persuasive argument for emergent project design, one which leaves the future usefully open. Nevertheless, in an aid environment that demands quick results, Andrea Roderick asks: “How can we cultivate the space for meaningful engagement of those who are typically on the edges of decision making in society? How do we remain true to addressing the underlying causes of poverty and marginalization in increasingly complex contexts that are evolving rapidly?” She explains that potential benefits from the use of action research embedded in local development processes can only be harnessed if practitioners/researchers and decision-makers share an understanding of how this kind of research differs from mainstream research methodologies and products, and how they should be measured. Sharrock adds that TOC processes can help, but only when understood as both a process and a product. We should evaluate TOC on whether its use encourages ongoing critical, or evaluative thinking—motivated by an attitude of inquisitiveness (and a belief in the value of evidence)—without becoming myopically fixated on target achievement. He warns that we must remain alert to the conceptual and operational limitations of the TOC-based approach, particularly given the contextual pressures to use it instrumentally without affecting actual planning behaviors.