Chambers and what matters on the ground

In 1997 Robert Chambers wrote a seminal book entitled ‘Whose reality counts: putting the first last.’ Chambers was one of the founders in development thinking who insisted on a different approach to research. Chambers attacks the roles of institutions that create huge disparities by entrenching poverty and privileging some, rather than all. The book explains poverty and inequalities and proposes areas where personal choices can make all the difference. For Chambers, development practitioners are called on to adopt a bottom-up approach to research rather than a top-down approach. This was diametrically opposed to the colonial heritage where knowledge was appropriated by colonialists and indigenous wisdom and know-how were ignored.  Chambers' work is highly relevant when considering citizen science (CS) which suggests a process of co-generation of knowledge and ‘decentering’ the central and key role of the scientific process in the knowledge production process (Goldin et al. 2021). 

Chambers can be considered as the ‘father’ of participatory action research. Why does this matter when thinking through research integrity? Participatory action research is designed in such a way that people are no longer objects of research but are subjects whose voices are respected and whose knowledge is considered as essential to a better understanding of a given research context. There are many tools and techniques in the participatory action research toolkit and these will be presented in more detail in the next section of this module. Importantly, in achieving research integrity – the method and process of research are as critical as the endpoint.