THE POTENTIAL OF MOVING PICTURES DOES PARTICIPATORY VIDEO ENABLE LEARNING FOR LOCAL INNOVATION?

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceLearning is essential for local innovation and enhancing the ability of the rural clients to discover new solutions to prevailing challenges. Equally, the growing complexities of the challenges in the theatre of agriculture and rural development require multi-actor learning process. Participatory communication through face-to-face interaction remains an important approach to support local people's innovation capacity. Is there any mean other than face-to-face interaction that enables learning for innovations? Video has been used for several decades, however, in most cases instrumentally as a mass media for expert information dissemination. In recent years the interest in the alternative use of video, mostly known as participatory video, has grown. This study attempts to understand the potential of participatory video to support learning for local innovation by reviewing available literature about the cases of participatory video in the field of agriculture and natural resource management. A deductive coding approach was employed in order to identify the potentials of participatory video. The documented cases we found in the literature suggest that participatory video has a substantial role for both vertical and horizontal flow of local knowledge and information in a multi-actor setting. It creates a ‘safe space' for communication where different actors are able to articulate their perceptions. What follows, actors get an opportunity for reciprocal learning process. Participatory video facilitates communication for the marginalized segment of developing nations in Asia and Africa to represent their knowledge and skills and to link these to other knowledge bodies such as scientific, formal, managerial and bureaucratic. Participatory video stimulates reflection and experimentation by creating new impetus for learning within and across stakeholder (actor) groups. Nevertheless, potentials of participatory video depend on careful analysis of social competencies of facilitators, institutional ambience and role of intermediaries and facilitating organizations. We also proposed future research angles on these issues