We used to draw maps in the shade beneath a house on stilts, just a few steps from the murky village canal. During mapping workshops, all of Kernahan seemed to be clustered between the rough-hewn stilts: children tumbled and wrestled on the mud floor while women eyed the mapping team from the wooden benches. Young fishermen, encrusted with mud and weary from a long day in the swamps, elbowed their way up to the map, a huge white sheet of paper painstakingly filled with landmarks, place names, and fishing spots in a multitude of colors. Usually I could hear the whistling of the trade winds in the marsh grasses, but during workshops, there was just the din of men's voices, the shrieks of children, and sometimes, the excited crowing of roosters.

I had come to this small community of fisherfolk and rice farmers, nestled within the sight and sound of the Caribbean sea on the east coast of the island of Trinidad, to document the local fishing traditions. Plans had been proposed by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and environmental organizations to create a national park in the Nariva Swamp, the wetlands that surround the village. Yet no one knew what the people of Kernahan felt about such a park. At the same time, very little was known about their fishing traditions, especially where they went to catch the ubiquitous cascadu, the catfish that lives in the area's muddy, shallow swamp waters. Did the fishermen fish within the proposed national park area? If so, where? And how would these fishing traditions affect the national park?

To begin solving these complicated issues, I decided to involve the people in the area to help make the maps. We recruited local people with a solid understanding of the village environment--mostly fishermen, who travel and canoe in the swamp area on a regular basis--as cartographers. I furnished the local map makers with a sheet of paper, blank except for a few landmarks derived from an official government map. After some hesitation and a few false starts, they began drawing the first-ever map of their fishing grounds. Instead of being a scientific map such as those produced by professional geographers, theirs was a conceptual map, drawn by hand from memory and representing the way the villagers--not outside scientists--view their environment.

Later, I would use cartographic technologies, including the Global Positioning System, to produce a second map. On this map I would pinpoint the outer perimeter of the village's fishing grounds, using standard map coordinates familiar to geographers and natural resource managers worldwide. In the future, these maps could be used by villagers and the Government to negotiate a zoning system for the Nariva Swamp National Park. Such a plan would protect the swamp environment while safeguarding local subsistence needs. For instance, fishing might be allowed in certain zones during part of the year, while in other areas, fishing and hunting might be banned permanently.

The Nariva Swamp mapping project held keen interest for me because it differed in significant ways from a typical geographical study. To begin with, the local villagers, environmental experts in their own right, would be working in partnership with a university-trained geographer. In addition, the project had a clear, applied focus: to create a map that showed local fishing grounds and could be of use for national park planners. And finally, it was designed to educate and empower the villagers to participate as equals with the Government in planning the park. After all, as many ecologists have noted, when local people participate in planning environmental protection programs, they are more likely to support these efforts. This is a well-known reality in Trinidad and Tobago and has led the Government to encourage the community's active participation in a number of environmental initiatives.

"We are currently developing Trinidad and Tobago as an ecotourist destination," says Cliff Hamilton, tourism director at the Trinidad and Tobago Industrial Development Corporation. "This has made conserving the Nariva Swamp very important for the country. We want to encourage people to experience this unique wetland." In pushing this new industry, however, the Government is deeply aware that much of its success ultimately will depend on the degree to which local communities accept and support these plans and are given the opportunity to participate as full partners in the environmental development planning process.

Participatory Action Research Gains Ground

Although governments throughout the Americas subscribe to the principle of local participation in environmental protection efforts, such participation is often more in name than in actual practice. Researchers still focus almost exclusively on quantitative data collection and statistical modeling of ecological systems. Local people are at best questioned informally about environmental problems and concerns and at worst are excluded from the actual research and planning process. The strategies that drove the Nariva Swamp mapping project--the villagers' equal partnership in the research process, the action-oriented nature of the goal, and the potential for a communal sense of ownership and empowerment--are still not common in environmental research and planning. However, these features are the defining characteristics of Participatory Action Research (PAR), an emerging research approach that seeks to integrate local people as equal participants in the research process.

The history of PAR extends back several decades, to research conducted in Africa, India, and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, often in the field of literacy education and usually with a radical, anti-colonial bent. More recently, Western researchers in community health, nutrition, psychology, and other social science disciplines have begun to incorporate the principles of Participatory Action Research in their own work. Still, PAR is not well known outside a narrow academic circle. Many of its practitioners do not even consider themselves participatory action researchers and have little contact with other researchers with similar orientations. What ultimately unites these researchers is not their research methodology, but their attitudes toward research.

To understand this point, it is important to consider the way researchers are educated. Researchers are trained to value their own, formal knowledge gleaned from senior professors, course materials, and publications above local, informal, and anecdotal knowledge. They are not taught to consider their research a process of learning, both for themselves and for the local community. And they are not encouraged to view possible social action--a nutrition project, an environmental plan, a health care initiative--as a necessary and essential outcome of their research projects. This means that scientists who follow PAR must adopt an attitude towards research that in many ways contradicts the rigors of their formal university training. This is not an easy conversion.

Dr. Stephen Small, a professor of health and family studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, faced this dilemma of attitude and professional priorities. He was trained as a traditional developmental psychologist, which meant numbers, surveys, and statistical analysis took precedence in his work.

"But I was not only interested in science," he says. "I also wanted to make the world a better place. However, I soon realized that the methods I used were not adequate to improve the situation for families in Wisconsin. The information I provided to local communities didn't seem relevant to them. People didn't believe the data that I gathered about teenage alcohol use and drug abuse applied to their communities."

To make his research more meaningful to local communities, Small spearheaded Wisconsin's Teen Assessment Project (TAP), a community-led study designed to educate local leaders about the behaviors, perceptions, and concerns of local teenagers. The first surveys were conducted in 1989, and more than 60,000 students in 40 Wisconsin counties have completed the surveys to date. Why did TAP succeed where other approaches had failed? According to Small, it was because the community identified with the process. Local leaders, by having the opportunity to help design the surveys in such a way that they reflected each community's uniqueness, also viewed the data produced as having singular relevance for them. And having accepted the data's relevancy, they felt a deeper responsibility to act on the findings. This willingness to act has led to greater community awareness of the issues facing teenagers throughout Wisconsin and to more reality-based programs to address youth problems such as drug and alcohol abuse.

PAR for a New Course

One of the common features of TAP and most other Participatory Action Research projects is their preventive, rather than curative, nature. Instead of focusing on stopgap measures, these projects address the root causes of problems. One example is Claudia Nieves' worksite health promotion project in Guatemala. Nieves, a communications specialist with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, conducted her research project while still a graduate student at Cornell University. Through a series of interviews with workers in mid-size companies in Guatemala City, Nieves was able to identify factors that would motivate workers to participate in worksite health promotion projects. For instance, workers told Nieves that other family members--especially wives--needed to participate in nutrition programs, too. Also, despite the contentions of managers, employees did not object to having to pay for their share of the program. Aided by such specific data generated by Nieves' PAR project, these companies now view worksite health promotion programs as a valuable tool to increase employee morale and productivity.

"By using PAR, I was able to give employers new insights into their own organization," says Nieves. "I was able to provide managers with ideas, not from me as an expert, but from their own employees. Usually in health promotion, decisions are made in a top-down fashion. But such a top-down strategy often leads to lack of support or even resistance."

The limitations of traditional top-down strategies are now prompting health scientists to reconsider the ways community development programs are administered. According to Dr. David Pelletier, professor of nutrition policy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, researchers are increasingly beginning to appreciate the value of local knowledge in program planning and design. "Until now, vertical problem-solving was most common in nutrition and other health promotion programs," says Pelletier. "In the past, communities did not contribute to solving community problems. It is now generally felt that communities should have a greater role in health planning. Without such local engagement, our best efforts may go awry. We need critical pieces of information about the local culture and social infrastructure, which we can only get from the communities themselves."

This new philosophy is also beginning to permeate international public health institutions such as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), explains Dr. María Teresa Cerqueira, regional advisor in health education and community participation with PAHO's Division of Health Promotion and Protection. Cerqueira, who has used PAR in her own health promotion research in Mexico, is involved with a curriculum development project for a consortium of 39 Western Hemisphere universities. The idea is to assess the benefits of PAR in health promotion education, especially in terms of a new thrust to combat community violence. "We need new skills and new models to understand the social factors that encourage destructive behavior," Cerqueira says. "The old psychological models are no longer sufficient."

The curriculum development project is an example of the transition currently underway in PAHO and other organizations working in health and community development, continues Cerqueira. "PAHO is changing," she says. "More and more people are talking about PAR. But nevertheless, we continue to live within a contradiction. PAR might be more accepted in the health professions in general, but very few people are trained in PAR at their universities. This makes for a slow change."

Until Participatory Action Research becomes a common-sense, widely accepted approach to health and social science research, it remains but one method to understand human behavior. As PAR enthusiasts are the first to point out, participatory action research is not the panacea, the magic key that will unlock all the mysteries of human behavior. Whether fishermen in the Caribbean, factory workers in Guatemala, or teenagers in Wisconsin, human societies are just too complex to understand fully. "The longer I work in this field," says Small, "the more I realize that the methods we use to study people are simply not adequate. Our ability to understand and affect the lives of human beings really hasn't developed that much. But PAR might be the best method available to us for now."