Participatory Action Research and Support for Community Development and Conservation: Examples from Shade Coffee Landscapes in Nicaragua and El Salvador

This Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) research brief describes the process of participatory action research (PAR) using examples from work on shade coffee landscapes and community development in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The research intends to demonstrate the steps of the PAR cycle through two case studies that approached the PAR process from different starting points and critically discuss PAR’s challenges, concluding by proposing several guiding principles for this approach.

The PAR cycle (diagrammed here) originates in action research (AR), social research carried out by an action researcher and members of an organisation or community seeking to improve their situation. The steps in the process of action research based in participation (PAR) are:

• Looking: Starting with people and a problem in a place
  
• Reflecting: Learning during the change process
  
• Acting: Changing during the learning process
• Sharing the experience and expanding the network
• Creating an Action - Reflection - Action Cycle
  

This research analyses power, privilege, and participation among researchers and members of coffee cooperatives, including their networks of trade relations, relatives outside of their countries who remit money, and extended contacts. As stated here, "Communities are full of uneven power relationships, conflicts, rivalries, and of course cooperation and collective struggle as people make a living and make that living meaningful... The community members who can mobilize more powerful social networks for moving economic, social, and natural resources will wield more power than others. Often a PAR project will include as one of its goals providing opportunities for the poor and marginalized people to express their voice and create changes in their own lives. However, this will not happen if a PAR forum fails to acknowledge existing ideas about identity and current power inequalities."

The document emphasises starting with as much transparency as possible. (In this case, researchers made clear that their work would benefit them by earning them degree credentials in the United States university system.) Once the potential benefits of the research for the community or cooperative members were also made clear, the challenge became setting up a continuing cycle. The approach was interdisciplinary due to the needs of addressing environmental and development issues, linking social and agro-ecological research. In the case of El Salvador, it necessitated multi-scale analysis to visualise the actors and dynamics of spatial, geographical, and political forces. Focus groups and semi-structured interviewing allowed for data collection and triangulation, along with conventional methods of scientific measurement. There was a need to integrate the economics of market extremes and farmer requests for ways to buffer their livelihoods from these extremes. The action steps of the project included, in the case of El Salvador, training on organic coffee farming, alternative markets, and livelihood diversification, as well as links to new market networks, farmer-to-farmer exchange networks, universities, internship programmes, a community agroforestry non-governmental organisation, and international cooperative agencies. In the case of the Nicaragua project, where Fair Trade markets were already established in some areas, the research analysed the financial return for the cooperatives and the impact of income distribution on communities, such as children attending school regularly. Findings were distributed to communities via face-to-face meetings. The resulting action steps in Nicaragua included farmer-to-farmer training on quality coffee production for Fair Trade markets, links to those networks, and an infrastructure to host student interns, as well as an education space for journalists, scholars, religious leaders, and activists.

The following recommendations evolved from the PAR research:

• "Commit to strengthening the political empowerment of its local partners.
• Focus on the institutional development of community organizations and human capital, through the development of local capacities.
• Be committed to the learning process of local actors, allowing them to take leading roles, even when they make mistakes. Learning from mistakes is a key part of the process.
• Avoid paternalism and the creation of external dependency.
• Be long term, dynamic, and use a complexity of networks and contacts.
• Prioritize long-term processes, not short-term projects.
• Invest in relationships of mutual trust with local actors."