Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action

Overview

The Mountain Institute employs a process known as Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action (APPA ) both in the field and as a facilitation tool for communication among the staff. APPA is a highly participatory planning process that significantly extends the more traditional rural development tools such as Participatory Rural Appraisal. APPA was developed by The Mountain Institute as a community action and learning tool, and has been applied successfully by a number of organizations, such as the Snow Leopard Trust, Porters Progress and The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). APPA is based on two simple complimentary premises:

• What you seek (in a community, organization or individual) is what you find: " if you look for problems you will find them; or conversely if you look for successes you will find more successes."
• What you believe is what matters most: "if you have faith in your vision or ideas for the future, and these are believable, then you will be able to achieve success (substantial progress) without waiting for government or an outside donor to take you there."

The major characteristics of APPA that contribute to successful community planning and implementation are stakeholder participation, the community-based approach, and sustainability through community empowerment and capacity building.

Developent of the Methodology    Return to top

The development of the Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action methodology is an on-going process. The four steps or phases in APPA are known as the “4Ds of Discovery, Dream, Design and Delivery. These phases constitute the sequential process of participatory Community-based Tourism planning that builds upon local or regional tourism assets to develop a collective vision and the plans, confidence and resources to achieve that vision – or Dream - and empowers communities with skills and plans to achieve it.

Appreciative Inquiry seeks out the very best of “what is” to help us jointly imagine “what could be” The Mountain Institute has developed and piloted an approach to planning and management that combines the framework of Appreciative Inquiry and the tools of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) into Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action (APPA). As a methodology, APPA’s objective is to find and emphasize the positive, successes, and strengths as a means to empower communities, groups, and organizations, to plan and manage development and conservation. During this process participatory learning is for all stakeholders and is an empowering activity for all participants. This approach promotes policies and activities based upon the capacities, skills and assets of participants and environments, and which are creative and innovative.

Principles of APPA     Return to top

Principle 1 – Success Factors - Focus on finding and building upon the root causes of success and motivation among participants as individuals and groups.

Appreciative Inquiry uses a planning and management cycle of Discovery, Dream, Design and Delivery that builds upon those capacities, resources and life-giving attributes that we value. As a starting point, we typically seek to discover and record the skills and assets of who we are and where we work and live:

• Find a success story of local enterprise and conservation work
• Community working together for a shared vision
• Strengths, successes; things people feel proud about

Based on these values and assets, Appreciative Inquiry also asks us to build dreams of what we want for our communities, our environment, and ourselves. Challenging but realistic dreams are important since they guide and inspire the design of our actions, motivate and excite us, and are more likely to lead to successful delivery of the possible.

Principle 2 – Participatory Learning - As a process, APPA builds upon the practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and group dynamics disciplines that have influenced rural development over the past 20 years.

Participation empowers people through acquiring and affirming knowledge, and through building ownership of jointly planned actions. The philosophy and practice of participatory learning as part of sustainable development is critical to APPA. Traditional PRA tools have been modified to help investigate the above questions, and to guide the planning and management process. Examples include, trend lines of attributes such as garbage, wildlife sightings, forage availability, forest cover, etc. are projected to 10-20 year horizons, schematic maps of future community and natural resources status, mapping of current and potential ecotourism resources, ranking of ecotourism attributes, e.g. sites, services, etc. A similar approach is adopted during the evaluation of community conservation and ecotourism activities, when the focus is on “What worked well, and what needs to be improved”.

Principle 3 – Sustainability – The combination of principles that build upon and mobilize participants’ skills, resources and active participation help ensure sustainability of the approach and the resources and communities for which actions are planned.

The APPA process is very much one of finding and implementing actions to address opportunities and issues, as it is one of building local capacities to continue learning and taking increasingly active roles in decision-making. What we have found is that Appreciative Inquiry provides a visionary framework for planning and action, and makes participatory learning tools even more informative, effective, and empowering.

APPA In Practice: Community-based Tourism Return to top

Community-based Tourism for Conservation and Development Tourism is an industry that primarily focuses on attracting visitors to a product or series of products. Frequently these products are based around assets, such as scenery, natural features, cultural features and events and so on. In efforts to promote community-based tourism for conservation and development, the appreciative approach combined with the empowering nature of participatory learning, appears to have significant value and relevance for practitioners and participants alike. APPA provides a planning and management framework that gives participants:

• The opportunity to turn attributes and assets into attractions;
• The basis for developing marketing objectives and strategies that are critical to the success of Community-Based Tourism ;
• Opportunities to build skills for conservation and development;
• Building local capacities to plan, assess and implement tourism activities; and
• Opportunities to look for sustainable linkages between conservation and economic development in empowering ways

Where can I find links to RECOFT Courses? Other documents? New information? Training Manuals?

Community-based Tourism for Conservation and Development: A Trainer's Manual

This manual for trainers developed jointly by TMI and RECOFTC incorporates TMI's field-based experiences in Community-based Tourism (CBT) development in South Asia along with RECOFTC's interactive learning experiences. The main purpose of this manual is to provide training or facilitation guidelines for individuals, organizations or institutions that have an interest in building knowledge, skills, and experience of field workers either by using CBT Development or the Appreciative Participatory Planning and Action (APPA) approach. The training activities contained in this manual are designed to help participants develop the understanding and basic skills necessary in order to apply the concepts of Community-based Tourism development effectively and efficiently. Experiential learning techniques have been applied to encourage contributions from all learners and participants in order to gather experience, reflect on their learning, and generalize their own understanding and concepts for further application in different contexts.

This CBT Training Manual should be used with the CBT Resource Kit developed by TMI as the field manual. Click here to download the CBT Resource Kit.

The CBT Trainer's Manual is available from The Mountain Institute. The cost is $25 + Shipping & Handling.

Contact: Executive Assistant, The Mountain Institute, 1707 L Street, NW, Suite 1030, Washington D.C. 20036, USA or email <summit@mountain.org>

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