Why Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage?

When local actors embark on a local economic development initiative, they want results, and they want them quick. Conventional approaches, however, often involve huge up-front investment in terms of time and money, it often takes long for proposals to come up, the proposals are not always practical and compatible with the local mindset. We have created PACA as an action- and results-oriented methodology which is based on principles of rapid and participatory appraisal. Its basic elements are the following:

• The initial diagnostic should take no more than one to two weeks, and the results are presented and discussed immediately after that.
• Local actors must be involved in the diagnostic – not just as participants in workshops and respondents in interviews, but also actively, as interviewers and part of the research team. Their active participation facilitates the transfer of methodological and conceptual know-how, and it motivates and empowers them to continue with the initiative once the external consultants have left.
• External consultants play an important role in the first diagnostic, and they must be prepared to back-up local actors later on, but the main work in implementing concrete activities has to be done by local actors and institutions.

Successful local economic development initiatives depend, first and foremost, on the motivation, dedicatedness, and insistence of local actors. Identifying their latitude and motivation for action is a crucial task of a PACA diagnostic, and any practical proposal must closely relate to the capabilities and the motivation of local actors.

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