Rapid Rural Appraisal Methodology Applied to Project Planning and Implementation in Natural Resource Management

Anthropology and Development

“…Enter Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), a multidisciplinary set of techniques adapted from social science interview and survey methods-initially designed to meet the diagnostic needs of Farming Systems Research. More recently, RRA has been adapted to provide relatively comprehensive sociocultural, economic, and ecological assessments of the population of a project area for the purposes of development project planning and implementation (Molnar 1991). RRA methods are frequently portrayed as comprising a menu of options from which to select and combine depending on the research project's information needs, local characteristics, and resource/time constraints.…”

“…Typically these options include secondary data reviews, direct observation, semistructured interviews, group interviews, mapping exercises, and so forth. 19 According to Molnar (1991), these Rapid Rural Appraisal methods share four important characteristics. First, they are (as the name implies) rapid-allowing for research results to be made available quickly to decision makers.…”

“…RRA is therefore well suited to such tasks as identifying interesting questions, designing sampling strategies, assessing logistical needs, testing the appropriateness of survey questionnaires, and initiating rapport building (Bryant and Bailey 1991). Furthermore, the information generated through the use of RRA methods has proven to be most relevant where the researchers are themselves members of the project team, and not urban-based specialists with limited previous exposure to the area or vested interest in accurately assessing local concerns (Molnar 1991). The qualitative results of such research can be treated as hypotheses to be subjected to quantitative confirmation before these findings can be generalized to a larger population.…”

“…This last statement points toward two related pitfalls that the advocates of RRA have frequently paid insufficient attention to: namely, first, the tendency to gloss over the complexities and efficacies of the participant-observation techniques used by social scientists in both shortcut and long-term research situations and, second, the risk of promoting complacency when making judgments from limited data (Molnar 1991). Short time frames also enhance the risk that intense research schedules will lead to sloppy interviewing.…”

“…Practitioners of RRA have also come under pressure to design more systematic approaches to improve the quality of the information generated through the use of shortcut techniques, to clarify management expectations (i.e., time and cost requirements, attainable confidence levels), and to identify the training needs of project staff. But RRA practitioners are justifiably reluctant to allow agencies to determine methodologies, as checklist-type approaches are likely to miss central issues visible only to more flexible uses of RRA (Molnar 1991). Molnar has also identified a series of yet-to-beresolved methodological issues concerning the use of RRA in natural resource management projects: for example, when to prefer group versus individual interviews, what the valid indicators and proxies are, how not to miss the least visible groups during RRA, and what kinds of topics are inappropriate for RRA investigations (1991:12).…”