Participatory Poverty Assessment Effort in Food Security and Extension Policy: Evidence From Indonesia

Background

PPA initiates a participatory method that thrives in the viewpoint of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). They become key to mechanisms for advance policy agency by embodiment of the community’s participation. PRA has been seen as a family of approaches and methods to enable local people to share and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, and to plan and to act (Chambers, 1994). It emerged in the early 1990s building on insights and methodological innovations from various study methods. Agro-ecosystem analysis provided the series of diagramming, mapping, scoring, and grading methods of the different natural processes; insight provided by the work of practical and development anthropologists and those of field research in farming systems emphasized villagers’ capability in conducting their own personal analysis; and most notably there was the development of Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) (Ruggeri Laderchi, 2001).

Conservative poverty estimates, together with equally conservative financial and qualification estimates, have been criticized for leading to external enforcement, and for not taking into account the views of poor people themselves. The participatory approach’s purpose is to change this and to enable the people themselves to take part in decisions about what it entails to be poor and the level of poverty (Chambers, 1994, 1997). The implementation of PPA, evolved from PRA, is described as “a rising family unit of approaches and methods to enable local people to distribute, develop and analyze their understanding of living and circumstances, to plan and to effort” (Chambers, 1994). Originally, it was intended for small projects, then the World Bank, to complement to its poverty assessments, scaled up PPA. By 1998, the World Bank’s poverty assessments included a participatory aspect. A widespread multi-country workout (of 23 countries) was similarly incorporated as conditions for the World Development Report, available as Voices of the Poor (Narayan, Chambers, Shah, & Petesch, 2000). According to Cornwall (2000), there are three types of PA: (1) those connected with self-determination and empowerment; (2) those linked with raising the effectiveness of programs; and (3) individuals’ emphasis on common learning. The role of participatory movements as defined by the World Bank, particularly in their poverty assessments, has tended to be compliant. It adopts PPA so that the poor will join forces with programs rather than to modify the pattern of the programs themselves (type 2), and the Voices of the Poor emphasizes the third type.