Listening to Individual Voices

From the article:

"Within communities who have traditionally been dependant on their surrounding environment for their livelihood, there exists a huge amount of wisdom about the resources themselves, as well as different ways to manage and sustain these, and about the way these resources and their management have changed over time. While there are many different ways to record and communicate such environmental knowledge, the purpose of this article is to present a methodology that Panos London has been using since 1993: the oral testimony."

In this article from LEISA magazine, Vol. 22.1, Siobhan Warrington explains the reasons to use oral testimony and the inherent challenges. Oral testimonies in this article are considered to be the result of open-ended, in-depth interviews, usually carried out on a one-to-one basis using a topic list and key questions focusing on development themes, and then recorded and transcribed word-for-word.
Community involvement and capacity building are objectives reached by training local organisations and people to record and disseminate the testimonies of those usually excluded from the international development debate, often those marginalised by illiteracy, poverty, gender, disability, caste, religion or ethnic identity. The author distinguishes this process from participatory group processes, which work towards finding agreement. Here the process highlights individual opinion, often differences of opinion. As such, it complements and illuminates quantitative research by "...challeng[ing] the generalisations of development literature and explain[ing] to planners and policymakers about what it feels like to be at the sharp end of development."

Advantages to this method include the fact that interviewers and testimony narrators (interviewees) are from the same or similar communities, allowing for cultural and language understanding. Critical to the process is the ability of the interviewer, as an insider, to be open, willing to learn, and non-judgemental. Rather than reflecting the sector approach of development interventions, the testimonies, according to the author, show the hidden connections between these sectors as they exist in a person's life, for example, between environmental changes and economic decisions, or between the environment and health. This not only increases representation among the marginalised, but adds new learning and validates the legitimacy of expressing one's view. It is a method of accessing the viewpoints of women in cultures where they are underrepresented.

Panos uses a 4-phase process including a 5-day training workshop, an interviewing phase of 3-4 interviews with subsequent translation, a review meeting to check quality and process, and dissemination. Dissemination of the testimonies includes returning testimonies to individuals and to communities through community meetings, radio programmes, newsletters, and local language booklets. At the national level, it includes roundtable meetings with policymakers; quality media coverage; and national language booklets. Panos does international dissemination through radio docudramas, booklets, and an online archive Mountain Voices, and as testimony extracts in key debates, events and publications.


The challenges included in this article are:

• the challenge of training interviewers to obtain high quality oral testimonies;
• the time and quality issues of transcription and translation;
• a longer than ideal gap between the recording of the testimonies and the sharing of them with different audiences, sometimes overcome through creation of a short community newsletter; and
• the "fundamental and on-going challenge to make the most of the testimonies; getting more effective at communicating the testimonies in order to influence change and development."