Processes, training modules and evaluation 

General guidance for implementation

1. Definition of PAR 

Participatory action research (PAR) provides the action research component of Systemic Action Research. It is the phase of the work that moves from understanding the situation (collecting life stories and lifestory analysis) towards actions that generate further learning and desired changes. 

It is designed to enable (diverse) groups to meet over a period of time to consider evidence and generate or revise theories of change about interventions; plan and program innovative solutions; test the solutions in real time, and then evaluate them. The cycles of action and reflection continue until a robust model of action is developed, trialled and can be scaled. 

Activities of PAR groups vary depending upon the context and scale of initiatives that are possible and desirable. As they begin at the community level, they are often oriented towards self-help and mutual aid activities, but will also contribute to the development of local institutional solutions. Other work will focus on advocacy and representation to policymakers. Interventions will range from small-scale solutions to local problems, awareness-raising, behaviour change initiatives, and large-scale pilots. There is an explicit intention with PAR to scale the impact of the activities over time, both in terms of the level of popular participation as well as the institutionalisation of change.

The quality criteria shown in Box 1 articulate what we mean by ‘strong’ participation – and provide overarching guidance for what we strive for with PAR in the programme. They should be applied through carefully considering groups in context while recognising that PAR requires reflexivity to adjust along the way. There is no blueprint and rigid guidance. The list below describes 6 key quality criteria (Apgar and Douthwaite 2013, Burns and Worsley 2015)

 Quality Criteria for PAR groups

1. Ownership: the process is owned by the participants themselves who define their real-life problems and opportunities to be addressed through PAR. In practice this means that the PAR groups decide what themes they want to engage with and what question they wish to address, as well as gathering their own evidence of the issue to then inform their own actions.
2. Equity: facilitators recognize multiple voices and power relations and to ensure equity, are mindful of who is participating and how they are participating. In practice this requires skilled facilitation that supports all voices to be heard and group members to be engaged in generation of actions in ways that are appropriate to them.
3. Shared analysis: the process emphasizes jointly shared responsibilities for data collection and most importantly analysis to support improved understanding and improved action. In practice this means analysis is not done by the facilitators or researchers without group members, but rather is facilitated collectively.
4. Innovative thinking: having identified the issues groups need to identify possibilities for actions, be clear about their assumptions and be able to articulate them as theories of change.
5. Action: groups are able to organise action to operationalise their ideas, test their assumptions and assess the effectiveness of their action,
6. Feedback: results are used beyond the group process, so that potentially transformative change is possible for group members and others they engage with. In practice, this means that the groups own their own documentation and learning, which is co-owned by the programme, and they can use it for their own ongoing work or share it more broadly. It is our role to support not just programme learning but also the learning that continues to create change on the ground. 

1.1 Training module relating to this:

Purpose of module: to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of what we mean with PAR. 

• Brainstorm what PAR means for the participants of the training, including sharing of examples from past work from all partners
• Come to a shared understanding of what PAR means in the context of your specific SAR project.

2. Moving into PAR groups

In SAR, themes and potential theories of change for PAR emerge from life story analysis. PAR groups are then initiated around those themes. Several types of groups are possible depending on the composition that is appropriate in each context. Typically 6-8 group members provides the best balance of diversity and practicality, though the number of participants can be varied.

2.1 Types of groups and their advantages and disadvantages

TYPE of Group	SELECTION CRITERIA	DYNAMICS TO CONSIDER
Multi Stakeholder groups	People who are affected by the issues  or are able to influence it	Multi stakeholder groups Heterogeneous  so considerable trust is required
AR groups based around existing organisations or groups	The group has expertise in the theme or networks that enable the AR process to engage effectively with the theme	Trust is high to begin with but existing power relations need to be navigated
Identity based groups	A homogenous target group who are affected by the issues	Groups can gell faster and design can be more focused
Parallel groups	Different groups addressing the same theme but running in parallel. They could be any of the above types	How can the findings of these different groups be joined up?

Multi stakeholder groups (focusing on specific issues or content)

Selection of participants is likely to be a combination of people who are affected by the issue and people who have skills or influence to contribute to its potential solution.

Advantages: 

• Multiple perspectives on the issues are really good for generating innovation
• This allows changes in different parts of the system which often opens up new opportunities and pathways for action

Disadvantages:

• Difficulty of managing power relationships, which can prevent joint learning and generation of innovative solutions if not appropriately recognised and managed.
• New heterogenous group so considerable trust building required 

Examples:

• Directly following the narrative analysis discussions take place about who should be in the group to make the group work 
• Neighbourhood/village based, local NGOs identify the villages who identified the core participants within the villages
• (Mali) a network of mobilisers who identify the people based on criteria based on what and why they should be 

Identity based groups  

Selection is based on targeting of key groups who have a stake in the issue eg. local neighbourhood (or village) community members, children, ethnic groups…)

Advantages:

• Allows groups to build their own confidence, and sense of identity
• Focuses the work on those who are most directly (and often most negatively) affected by the issue

Disadvantages:

• It is difficult to for them to see how factors beyond the community which they are part of impact on their situation
• As a result it may be difficult to see who are the others the group needs to engage with (even if they are not in the group)
• They might miss important cross cutting issues if the group is homogenous. 

Existing organisation based groups 

Selection of the group is based on their access to the stakeholders, and their proximity to geographical locations. Participants will be drawn from organisations networks (but they will need to be supported to widen the net). (these could be formal or informal)

Advantages: 

• People are on the ground have existing knowledge of the issues and established relationships which can be mobilised and have already built trust with some groups
• Trust is likely to be high to begin with, and the action research group may gell faster
• Geographical presence on the ground 
• Possibly with staff (or volunteers) and systems of organisation and communication already established.
• Sustainability of processes which are developed in the action research process

Disadvantages:

• These groups often have established ways of working and or seeing issues which may not be resonant with how we want to work.
• The organisations interests may not map very closely on to the exact issues that communities and other participants want to explore
• There are often ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ of these groups- so there is a risk of lots of people being excluded (especially the most marginalised as they are often not part of existing groups).
• There is a danger that the group defaults to bringing in participants who are known into them.

Parallel groups

These are groups that are addressing the same themes but are running parallel because they may have individuals that cannot be in the same groups together due to religious, casts, gender reasons. Participants could be selected in any of the above ways

Advantages:

• Allows groups that are geographically separated to work on the same issues 
• Allows groups which have different interests (eg children and money lenders) to work separately on the same issues
• Allows groups that are in conflict to work on the same issues
• Different starting points working on the same issues is good for generating different perspectives and innovations. Each group is likely to approach the issue in a different way and generate new proposals and suggestions. 

Disadvantages:

• Needs more resources

Note

• There needs to be a good learning architecture to link the groups and share learning that recognises power dynamics between parallel groups.

2.2 Entry requirement for PAR group members

There are some initial guidelines/criteria that can be used to determine who should and who should not be a member of PAR groups. Most often in SAR, participants for these groups are drawn from involvement in lifestory collection and analysis. Noting that, due to the emergent nature of PAR groups, these cannot be fully set beforehand and will also depend on the group.

• People included should have an interest in the issue
• People need to be willing and want to be in the group voluntarily. 
• People need to take it seriously
• People can represent different perspectives on issues identified during life story analysis (or different arts of the system)
• The group needs to include people who can answer the questions or contribute to solving the specific issue identified by the group. 

3. PAR group stages

A typical action research process involves multiple meetings and unstructured and informal processes of engagement over a period of between nine and eighteen months. Our learning from previous projects suggests that it is necessary to go through the following phases in building action research groups (Apgar et al., 2017; B Nanda et al., 2019; Burns et al., 2020; Prasad Sharma et al., 2019):

• Contextual research to understand the issues and consequently the different foci of action research groups (in SAR this is lifestory collection and analysis)

• Generation of ideas for action and accompanying Theories of Change
• Generating potential indicators of success (if necessary)
• Implementation of actions and monitoring and assessment of intervention outcomes
• Refining actions and developing new actions based on the assessment of the early phase actions
• Bringing significant successes into cross action research learning groups with a view to scaling.

3.1 Trust building

Trust is an important mechanism to make participatory action research groups work. It is therefore important to have time set aside to build relationships and trust within the group and with the facilitator and documenter. How long this takes depends on various factors, including whether the group already knows each other, initial mistrust that may exist towards NGOs or research, or existing relationships between the facilitator and the community. A big part of the trust building process will involve the facilitator (and documenter) spending time with the people who will be participating in the group. For groups that will be formed based on a certain geographical locality, this can also involve the facilitator spending time in that locality to build trust with building. Additionally, the trust building process can be enhanced through various methods and tools to deepen and speed up this process. Processes, mechanisms and tools that can be used to strengthen this trust building process include:

• Arts-based approaches (e.g. participatory theatre, painting, photovoice, participatory video)
• Life-skill and or education building/ book keeping/ reading and writing/ healthy cooking
• Being present – Try to be there and be seen to be there 
• Casual meetings in informal settings eg in tea shops, during festivals, on the streets: “–to get to know people informally and avoid the community feeling that we only come when we want something”. Eating with people etc. 
• Disclosing to people something about our own lives and life experience. This makes us human and means that we won’t be seen only as representative of institutions
• Doing things together can be even more powerful than talking together. Eg community garden; or helping people with their work 
• Physical trust building games like – being held by others who are holding a rope. Close your eyes, lean back and hold the rope – release the hand. 
• Doing sports together is fun and can help to build a feeling of team.
• Peer to peer approaches with young people. We can build trust with some people who can in turn build trust with other people. 

For PAR groups that were formed from the life stories processes relationship building can be done with the facilitators and the members of the group further deepening the themes, going back to the people who share their story to check these themes and to identify champions within the community that can work with them on addressing the themes.

Existing groups who will undertake PAR may already have strong trust between the group members, but trust may need to be built between the group and facilitators. It is also likely that there may be a process needed to combine the existing activities of the group with PAR processes.  

3.2 Local evidence gathering

Once the group has been established, they may collect additional evidence specifically related to the themes that were priorities during life story analysis.This process will make identifying the issues to be addressed more concrete and generate more ownership over the issues that the action research group will identify. The local evidence gathering starts the action research cycle and the action that the group will take is based on the evidence that is gathered. Evidence is collected using the same ife story collection approach that we have employed previously. It is also possible to use more targeted approaches for specific issue-related information, including:

• Participatory mapping
• Interviews
• Observations
• Surveys
• Photo voice
• Participatory video
• et cetera…

3.3 Solutions-oriented actions

Based on the previous life story analysis and further evidence collection, the groups will start generating ideas for actions. When generating ideas for actions the group is expected to refer to the theory of change they developed in life story analysis, detailing how they think that their actions will contribute to addressing the issues that they have prioritised. The groups in some cases will monitor and evaluate the intervention outcomes, in which case they should set potential indicators of what a successful action looks like as well as think about the kind of information they will need to gather it to undertake this assessment. Following the implementation and assessing of the outcomes of the actions the group will then further refine their action or develop new actions based on the assessment. It is important to note here that the participatory action research is a process cycle and not a one-off action.

3.4 Training modules relating to the PAR group stages

Purpose of the module: Detailing / operationalising what happens in each stage and the tools that can be used. For the facilitators, emphasising and integrating reflexivity

1. Community/trust building

• Emphasising that this process takes time and is very essential
• The role of the facilitator in this process
• Discussing tools and methods that can be used.
• Providing examples in which these tools and methods have been used

2. Gathering local evidence

• The reason why local evidence gathering is important
• What kind of evidence need to be gathered
• Discussed tools and methods that can be used
• Providing examples in which these tools and methods have been used

3. PAR Cycle(s)

1. Plan action (including development of ToC)
2. Take action
3. Assess impact
4. Evidence about what is happening 

4. Facilitation

Each PAR group will be facilitated by a trained facilitator. Each facilitator will facilitate one PAR group. How the group is facilitated is likely an important contributor to the success of the group. It is important for the facilitators to understand their role, which is as a joint leader to facilitate quality and critical conversations and support reflexivity in the group. The facilitator is not the leader of the group. For the facilitation to help the group to deepen their understanding of the local issues that they are looking to address, it is important that the facilitator understands their role of open dialogue and critical reflection. It would be ideal for facilitators to encourage all participants in the group to take on a role within the group. This contributes to a sense of ownership over the issue and the actions the group will take. Having said that, facilitation styles may change over time as the group might take over and start doing their own facilitation. In fact, facilitators are encouraged to identify local champions in the group who can be supported (and trained) to slowly start taking over the facilitation of the group. 

Facilitators also have an interlinking role between the different PAR groups, the other facilitators and the wider programme team. For instance, the facilitators can link the PAR group they are facilitating with technical expertise that the group might need to implement their actions. 

4.1 training modules related to facilitation

Purpose of the module: provide facilitators with the right knowledge, skills and tools for effective PAR facilitation.

Including how to create a safe communication space. Facilitators need to understand their role to open dialogue and facilitate critical reflection. Emphasise difference between leader and facilitator

• Facilitators need to understand their role to open dialogue and facilitate critical reflection.
• Emphasise difference between leader and facilitator
• Roles and responsibilities of the facilitator
• Facilitation models 
• Facilitation styles 

5. Documentation of PAR groups 

It is important that the processes and outcomes of the PAR groups are documented carefully so that both the group and the programme can learn from the process.  The documentation is also necessary in order to identify which innovations can be scaled up. Each PAR group will be documented by a trained documenter. 

5.1 training modules related to documenting system

Purpose of the module: to provide the documenter’s (and the facilitators) with an overview of the documenting system and finalise the system through co-development. 

• Detailing the elements of the documenting system and how and when to use them 
• Agreeing roles and responsibilities
• Clarifying how data will be analysed and used to support multiple objectives