Health Promotion International, Vol. 17, No. 3, 285-286,
September 2002
© Oxford University Press 2002
RESOURCE REVIEW |
Partners in Planning. Information, Participation and Empowerment
Susan B. Rifkin and Pat Pridmore, Macmillan Education Ltd, London, 2001
1 Welsh Institute for Health and Social Care University of Glamorgan Pontypridd CF37 1DL The central thesis of this book is succinctly expressed (more than once) in this aphorism: ‘Information is KNOWLEDGE, knowledge is POWER, sharing knowledge is EMPOWERMENT’. This rather neatly captures the great strengths of the book, and also its limitations.
First, the strengths. As a handbook for people wanting to extend their repertoire of techniques in participatory planning—or wanting to get involved for the first time—one could hardly wish for a better starting point. It takes the reader through brief descriptions of various common methods and techniques for facilitating such involvement. The methods include various qualitative approaches, such as interviews, focus groups, observation and reviewing documents; the techniques focus on a ‘basket’ of tools, from well-being, preference and pairwise ranking, matrix scoring and resource maps, to seasonal calendars and drama. It then brings these various elements together in a chapter devoted to ‘doing a participatory needs assessment’, and a final chapter which looks at some of the practical obstacles that have to be overcome.
The description of techniques is particularly good. By their nature, they can quite adequately be described in two or three pages each, and the range here is excellent; most readers will find several that are new to them. Possible applications for each are also described, and the reader is left with a strong desire to go straight out and use them! Guided further reading provides an easy way to acquire the additional information that one would probably require before actually starting to use the approaches described.
The chapter on participatory needs assessment is based on World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, which Susan Rifkin helped to develop. This is a tried and tested approach that offers the reader a useful framework for the entire process, from initial review to the development of the final action plan, which can then be adapted to suit local needs.
The text is greatly enhanced by a variety of presentational devices. It is peppered with boxes headed ‘From experience’, which draw on the authors’ lifetime of work in this area, with handy ‘Training exercises’, and with cartoons. It successfully eschews jargon, and is generally written in an easy, fluent style.
Given these great strengths, it is perhaps a little churlish to point out what the book does not do. Nevertheless, it does work on a rather benign assessment of the context in which such participatory methods may be employed. The assumption is that well intentioned professionals too often adopt a paternalist approach to planning, which works on the (unjustified) assumption that the ‘expert knows best’. Few would disagree with this. The next stage of the argument, however, is more contentious. It maintains that sharing information between the professionals and the lay people, in a mutually respectful way—drawing on their complementary skills and knowledge—will generate new knowledge, which will in turn confer power and ‘empowerment’.
Leaving aside the assumptions about well meaning professionals (presumably those who read this book are, by definition, well meaning?), the notion of power upon which this is based is perhaps a little naïve. We know that power operates across a variety of dimensions, and that following the work of Lukes (Lukes, 1974
), lay participants will have been manipulated before taking part in participatory planning, and that their deliberations will be manipulated afterwards. As Crenson memorably expressed it: ‘there is more to local politics than meets the eye’! (Crenson, 1971).
The book pays relatively little attention to these problems; there is little attempt, for example, to assess the effectiveness of these techniques in producing significant, long-term change. It also barely considers the difficulties of recruiting lay participants into the process, an issue which many will find to be a major obstacle (at least in the UK). This perhaps deserves a chapter in its own right (most of the ‘From experience’ sections are taken from work in Africa and Asia).
Rifkin and Pridmore have provided a clear, wide-ranging, authoritative and enjoyable handbook for those wishing to become more effective participatory planners. It is not an examination of the dimensions of power, and one must take on trust the effectiveness of what they advocate, but progress does not come from waiting for a non-existent, perfect solution.
REFERENCES
Crenson, M. A. (1971) The Unpolitics of Air Pollution: a Study of Non-Decision Making in the Cities. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 178.
Lukes, S. (1974) Power: A Radical View. Macmillan, London.
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