Pergamon SOl43-6228(96)00024-O Applwd Geography, Vol. 17, No. I, pp I-Y, 1997 Copyright 0 1997 Elsewr Science Ltd Printed in Great Britam. All rights reserved 0143-6228197 $17.00 + O-(10 Learning from the people Participatory rural appraisal, geography and rural development in the ‘new’ South Africa Tony Binns Schooi of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer; Brighton BNI 9QN, UK Trevor Hill and Etienne Nel Department of Geography, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6140 South Africa Top-down rural development strategies in Africa have generally not succeeded in raising living standards among the rural poor. It is argued that inappropriate development strategies have stemmed from methodologies that fail to appreciate the whole picture in rural communities, and in particular ignore local people’s perceptions, needs and understanding. Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) represents a significant step forward in the design of methodologies and a selection of these techniques is evaluated. Many PRA methods have much in common with the field research methods that have been used by geographers over many years to interpret people-environment relationships. A research investiga- tion in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, suggests that geographers could have an important role to play in this area of applied research and, in particular, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa there is an urgent challenge to be met in promoting rural development in poor, former black Homeland areas. Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Keywords: PRA, geography, development, South Africa It is widely acknowledged that past rural development strategies have failed to raise living standards significantly in African rural communities @inns, 1995). They have typically adopted centrally driven, top-down approaches, often failing to appreciate the skills, perceptions, knowledge and aspirations of those whom the programmes are designed to assist. All too frequently in the past, it has been assumed that development programmes implicitly embodied objectives of poverty reduction and that positive progress would be achieved through the process of ‘trickle down’ from richer to poorer regions and communities. However, to date there have been many instances of such programmes failing to reach the poor, particularly those living in remoter rural areas (Easter, 1995). It is suggested here that one of the key reasons for the failure of many rural development schemes stems from the fact that they are derived from inappropriate methodologies which have failed to fully comprehend the dynamics of rural life. More specifically, these methodologies have failed to understand the complexities of the socioeconomic and cultural contexts in which indigenous livelihood and production systems function. Such limitations have sometimes arisen through the utilization of methodologies with a strongly econometric bias (Hill, 1986) and an obsession with the search for universal solutions, rather than trying 1