Who counts? : the quiet revolution of participation and numbers

Abstract

Participatory approaches and methods can generate quantitative as well as \nqualitative data. Mainly since the early 1990s, a quiet tide of innovation has \ndeveloped a rich range of participatory ways, many of them visual and tangible, by \nwhich local people themselves produce numbers. The approaches and methods \nhave variously entailed counting, mapping, measuring, estimating, valuing and \nscoring, and scaling, together with comparing and combinations of these, and have \nhad many applications. \nThe methodological pioneers in going to scale in the 1990s rarely recognised the \nsignificance of what they had been doing. The pioneers of the 2000s have shown \ningenuity, skill, patience and courage, sometimes in the face of opposition driven by \nconventional reflexes. Participatory numbers have been taken to scale most notably \nthrough participatory surveys with visuals and tangibles, through aggregation from \nfocus groups and through wealth and wellbeing ranking. There have been breakthroughs \nin producing national statistics, and also on subjects and with insights \ninaccessible through questionnaires. \nStatistical principles can be applied to participatory numbers.1 Ways have been \nfound of overcoming the vexing problem of commensurability between \ncommunities. As with all ways of finding out, there are trade-offs, in this context \nnotably between participatory open-endedness and standardisation for \ncomparability. \nThe question ‘who counts?’ raises issues of ownership and power. Participatory \nMonitoring and Evaluation (PM and E) has taken many forms, with varied degrees \nof ownership and empowerment. Whether participatory statistics empower local people is sensitive to official attitudes and acceptance and whether these lead to \nchanges in policy and practice that make a real difference. Questions are raised of \nthe mix and balance of extraction and empowerment, and whether and how the \nquiet revolution of participatory approaches and methods can get the best of both \nqualitative and quantitative worlds. \nKeywords: empowerment, innovation, methods, participation, statistics, qualitative, \nquantitative.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 93 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.