Rural appraisal: rapid, relaxed and participatory

The past decade has witnessed more shifts in the rhetoric of rural development than in its practice. These shifts include the now familiar reversals from top-down to bottom-up, from centralised standardization to local diversity and from blueprint to learning process. Linked with these, there have also been small beginnings of changes in modes of learning. The move here is away from extractive survey questionnaires and towards participatory appraisal and analysis in which more and more the activities previously appropriated by outsiders are instead carried out by local rural or urban people themselves.