During an academic workshop on co-construction through participatory methods, I had a brief discussion with a participatory researcher from the Global North about the impact of Participatory Action Research (PAR). She argued that it is not the role of researchers to contribute to significant transformation in marginalised communities. She suggested that outputs co-produced with communities can themselves be meaningful and transformative, referring to a booklet they had co-created with a poor and rural community in Colombia. 

I agreed with this argument only partially. While this material and the process through which it was produced are valuable, I pointed out that communities like the one where she conducted her participatory research continue to live in conditions of deep poverty and exclusion. This is particularly striking given that researchers from different parts of the world have regularly conducted research in these communities since the signing of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP in 2016. Despite participating in numerous research and development participatory initiatives, many communities have seen little tangible improvement in their everyday lives. While these processes, especially PAR processes, may strengthen the social fabric, raise awareness of possible pathways for transformation and help participants to gain confidence, people’s material conditions often remain unchanged. The problem is not research being conducted in these contexts, but rather, research that fails to consider the expectations, emotions and needs of the communities involved.  

A mural in Chaparral illustrating the challenges generated by the armed conflict and the hope for peace.

That was precisely the case in Chaparral, the site of my doctoral fieldwork, a conflict-affected municipality in the South of Tolima, Colombia. In 2024, 24.8% of Chaparral’s population lived in multidimensional poverty, with a considerably higher incidence in rural areas (29.9%) than in the urban centre (18.0%). Rural households faced particularly high levels of deprivation in access to improved water sources and sanitation: 52.9% lacked adequate access to improved water sources, compared with 6.2% of urban households, while 37.4% lacked adequate sanitation, compared with 2.3% in urban areas (DANE, 2025).  

The communities in Chaparral did not necessarily expect the participatory processes carried out in their territory to bring about a structural transformation of the power relations underlying these profound inequalities. Their expectations were often grounded in everyday needs, such as expanding access to public services, improving the production and commercialisation of agricultural products, increased opportunities to participate as a workforce in development programmes, access to employment and establishing sustainable home gardens to provide food for their families. 

Following the signing of the Peace Agreement, the people of Chaparral shifted from interacting with the State primarily through the Army to an extensive intervention by various social and political actors. Civil servants from different government agencies, academics from Colombian and international universities, NGOs, civil society organisations and international cooperation agencies became regular visitors to the territory. Several social leaders told me that these interventions usually consisted of training sessions, workshops, project socialisation meetings or academic research. Attending these activities required people to invest time and money that could have been spent with their families. Many participants felt that nothing changed; their investment in the participatory process did not produce useful outcomes. One young urban leader captured this disappointment when he told me: 

We were like beauty queens, going from event to event, posing for photos, but nothing changes. Everything stays the same (Norbey, youth leader, interview, 30 March 2023).  

People in Chaparral were experiencing participation fatigue: they were exhausted by repeatedly participating in invited spaceswithout seeing meaningful improvements in their quality of life. Furthermore, the lack of meaningful and transformative participatory processes may have intensified the emotional burden of  frustration and disappointment caused by years of state neglect. Gloria, a social leader and member of the Chaparral Women's Network for Peace, explained it this way: 

When I was president of the Community Action Board in La Marina, I had to deal with many body recoveries. As a teacher, I also lost many former students who were killed as false positives1. After so many years of war and conflict, this reality still has not reached the government. People have come from Germany and everywhere else to study what happens in this territory, but nothing changes for us (Gloria, social leader, interview, 20 April 2023). 

Gloria is subtly complaining about state neglect, but also about the actors who came to the territory to conduct research, extract knowledge for their own benefit and then left without contributing anything to change the ongoing violence. This quote reflects sadness and frustration with the lack of practical solutions to the violence that has historically affected Chaparral. Although researchers cannot be expected to transform such complex situations given their limited time and resources, they can contribute by connecting communities with decision-makers and supporting capacity-building efforts that generate concrete improvements in people’s lives, with such efforts explicitly incorporated within project budgets. 

It would be utopian to believe that participatory processes carried out over a short period of time can transform the realities produced by decades of structural violence. However, if participatory processes are not designed and implemented with a genuine commitment to improving people's daily lives, they risk becoming extractive rather than transformative. For Latin American scholars such as Orlando Fals Borda, PAR was never simply about meeting research objectives or producing academic papers; it was about investigating reality in order to transform it. This transformative ambition continues to be diluted by tokenistic forms of participation that, through the uncritical use of buzzwords such as “co-construction”, risk stripping communities’ dreams and expectations of their transformative potential. 

Despite the extensive literature on how participatory processes can be conducted in ethical and transformative ways, there are still important lessons to learn. As researchers committed to meaningful social change, we need to continue exploring how to design and conduct research in contexts affected by structural violence and participation fatigue, and how to translate communities’ understandings of transformation into concrete outcomes that respond to their priorities and aspirations. We should also ensure that participation does not become another extractive practice, asking communities for their time, stories, and emotions while offering little in return. In a world marked by deep inequalities and the rise of authoritarian governments, it is essential to ask how researchers can contribute to redistributing budgets and resources more equitably, democratising decision-making processes, connecting actors across different levels of power and orienting participatory processes towards outcomes that generate tangible benefits for communities. 

Versión en español - Nada cambia para nosotros

Diana María Ramírez Sarmiento (PhD Development Studies, 2021-26), Assistant Professor, Faculty of Legal, Political and International Studies, Universidad de La Sabana, email: diana.ramirez9@unisabana.edu.co

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/diana-maría-ramírez-sarmiento

References  

Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE). (2025). Pobreza multidimensional en los municipios PDET: 2024. Retrieved from https://www.dane.gov.co/index.php/estadisticas-por-tema/salud/calidad-de-vida-ecv/encuesta-nacional-de-calidad-de-vida-ecv-2024  

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