ALARA Monograph 3 Donors as stakeholders in Community-Based Participatory Action Research: Praxis as typology in framing their roles

While the Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR) literature is
extensive, it does not adequately explore the donor-participant relationship. In this monograph,
we argue that the future of CBPAR can be strengthened if donor roles as participants in this form
of research and action can be better elucidated, community participants and academic partners
can be more deliberate in their decisions to pursue external funding and include donors as
partners in their work, and thereby make the potential of the donor-participant relationship and
its consequences explicit for all stakeholders. We argue that these considerations ensure better
leveraging of the potential power of CBPAR.
CBPAR shows significant promise as a form of research and action that may be
successfully leveraged in order to address significant social issues. However, this form of inquiry
requires adherence to particular sets of values and often deviates from the format followed by
more conventional research paradigms. CBPAR has significant resource requirements that often
fall outside of the capacity of communities. Thus while CBPAR may have significant promise as
a form of research that could help donors advance their social change aims, participants in this
form of inquiry and action often have a complicated relationship with the donor community. In
this monograph we argue that this relationship has not been sufficiently explored. We argue that
donors have a significant impact upon the kind of CBPAR partners may undertake as well as the
ways in which this kind of research and action is executed. Hence, we argue that the impact
donors have upon CBPAR should be further examined. We propose a typology of donors and
examine the impact of each donor type upon CBPAR.