The quiet little village of Jagatra Devi lies deep in the hills of Nepal, a few miles off the "Siddhartha Highway." Just a few years ago I’d have had an hour’s hike from the highway to the village; today, it takes but a few minutes on a newly paved access road traversing the 27 kilometers to the construction site for Kali Gandaki dam. This $450 million hydropower project is the largest development undertaking in the country’s history.

At the end of the road, massive bulldozers busily carve out earth and rock for the powerhouse, de-sander basins, and other facilities, while state-of-the-art drilling machinery is boring a 6 km tunnel through the mountain to feed the 144 MW turbines. Over a hundred vehicles, from Land Cruisers to twenty-ton dump trucks, ply the roads as nearly a thousand laborers from across the country work two ten-hour shifts, day and night, in a country where jobs are few and opportunities rare. Here, women still rise at dawn to hike far into the forests beyond the villages to cut firewood or fodder for their animals; when they return home hours later, the women appear as walking trees, so huge are their burdens of leaves and grass.

Easily one hundred businesses now line the new roads, and "boom towns" mushroom next to thatched cottages and terraced slopes plowed by oxen and harvested by hand, where per-capita annual incomes are below $200 on average and even less in remoter villages. With the arrival of this enormous project and the flood of outside workers have come serious health and sanitation problems. An outbreak of cholera during the last monsoon, for example, cost two lives.

Standing in the dusty village schoolyard, I am surrounded by animated and very angry villagers who are demanding more jobs, a water supply, a clinic, and a health worker. The villagers have rejected out of hand any suggestion that they join in and take part in these ventures, loudly arguing that the project should be doing these things for them; moreover, if we don’t agree, they say they will call a strike and block the road to the site, just as they did six months ago.

The growing darkness and light rain reflect the gloom my three Nepali colleagues and I are feeling as we envision yet another village protest turning into a strike that will grind the project to a halt. Tapping me on the shoulder, my partner suggests we get out of town before people start throwing stones, a not uncommon occurrence since major construction began less than a year ago.

At that point we are halfway through what had begun as a most successful meeting using an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) process we had specially adapted for working with such villages. Elsewhere in this rugged country the results have been outstanding. Poor, remote, and demoralized communities have rallied with enthusiasm to break the cycle of poverty in which they were trapped. But not here in Jagatra Devi. Here, the villagers demand the project do it all for them.

I am discouraged and puzzled. Confident our appreciative approach would overcome the villagers’ negative attitudes, I fully expected they would join with us in partnership to address their problems, working with us to protect the natural environment upon which their own livelihoods depend. But now all I see is a roadblock that will add to the delays and obstructions that have already cost the project as much as $1 million.

A basic tenet of Appreciative Inquiry is the power of belief—something well understood in this deeply religious country of Hindus and Buddhists, in whose religions I have found surprising parallels between this modern organizational-development model and the ancient principles of theological harmony. Already my partners are in the vehicle, motioning me to come. I hesitate, fearing the crowd may turn even uglier yet reluctant to give up. Then I decide: if I hold to that powerful AI principle, I must give this effort one more try. In fact, I’d better start over.

Putting my arm over the shoulder of the village leader and going back to the first step in the process: Discovery, I ask him to show me all those development projects his people had undertaken on their own. "You described these at the beginning of the meeting," I say, "but I’d like to see them for myself." His scowl turns to puzzlement, then—begrudgingly—he agrees.

Followed by a restless but curious crowd, he leads me to the sparkling little temple they refurbished the year before. Clearly proud of this temple, the villagers begin to explain its history to me. A few smiles appear, as I listen carefully and ask about how they organized its restoration.

From there we move on to a series of water-taps the villagers installed so women would not have to walk to the old source down the hill. By the time we reach the bottom of the gully, where I am proudly showed the latest project—a collection tank for irrigation water—a dozen enthusiastic voices are making sure I understand that they built this entirely on their own, with each family contributing labor and stones and the village council providing the cement. At this point, all hostility has vanished.

"Are all your projects done this way?" I ask. "Of course," comes the reply, "and that’s how we operate the new community forest we started so we wouldn’t have to go so far for fodder and firewood. We take turns patrolling the boundaries so that no cattle or goats get inside and eat the young saplings. Even I take my turn every month!" exclaims the headman.

"Well," I reply, "isn’t that what we were talking about when the meeting broke up? You’ve done all these things on your own, and yet I thought you said the project should do everything for you. Or was I mistaken?" Smiles and laughter spread through the crowd. "Why, of course we’ll do our part, just as we always have," shouts one of the village elders, grinning as he recognizes how things went off-track at the meeting. "Let’s go back and gather the others," says the headman, "and we’ll get this straightened out." "Sounds good to me," I reply, "and I’m sure we can find some seedlings from our nurseries to help expand that community forest..."

Although forty minutes later the rain is pouring down, all around me people are laughing, dancing, singing, and celebrating our new partnership. The villagers have all pledged to pitch in from their side, and any talk of demands and strikes has vanished.

Four months have passed. Although our team is still trying to persuade project leaders to find a way to address the real water shortage in the area, we finally come through with the promised saplings. It is World Environment Day, and we’ve asked each of the six main villages adjoining the project to organize a small celebration surrounding the tree planting. We arrive to find both the village and the once-grubby boom town spotlessly clean and decorated with banners. As welcoming committees place garlands around our necks, they ask us to plant the first trees ceremonially. There are speeches, poems, songs, and dances that celebrate the environment. In each village several hundred seedlings are planted.

The monsoon is here in full force, heavier than I can ever recall, with torrents of rain rushing down the steep terrain. The gutters along the access road overflow. Within a month the slopes along the road fail in over sixty places between the dam and powerhouse sites. Landslides take away three homes, bury fields, and threaten the stability of the entire road. No longer do we fear a strike; there have been no incidents in any of the villages where we conduct our appreciative planning meetings. Instead, we worry the road may collapse. We appeal to project management for funds to engage villagers in a "Road Neighbors" program to plant and protect trees along the roadside. Although it creaks and groans, the bureaucracy yields not.

As we search for solutions, a delegation of villagers from nineteen small communities along the road arrives with a proposal. The petitioners ask the project to give them responsibility for planting and protecting the road, unaware of our own hopes along similar lines. Embarrassed that we have no budget approved, we apologize to the delegation. "No matter," they reply, "we need this road and can protect it better than you can. Long after this project is finished, our children and grandchildren will still be here. We will watch and protect the trees that protect the road. Just give us the seedlings, and we’ll plant them now before the rains stop."

By the end of the monsoon, the roadside and other barren and degraded areas throughout the area bristle with 80 thousand young seedlings. Villagers have initiated their own program of "social fencing," fining anyone whose cow or goat eats a seedling and rewarding those who apprehend offenders. What began as a celebration of World Environment Day has turned into World Environment Month, as plans for additional village nurseries and new village forests develop. Community health and sanitation activities are moving forward, and villagers are busy building latrines and protecting their meager water supplies. This year has seen no cases of cholera. Project management has initiated a feasibility study for a new water supply for the area, and plans for irrigation are being examined. Protest has turned to partnership. Tested under fire, a new way of building bridges for the promotion of development has proven its merit.

A dramatic shift took place in that Himalayan village: from a threatened strike to song and dance, to commitments to a new project planned and run by the villagers themselves, and to an unusual partnership between traditional rural people, for whom time is a fluid commodity, and a "command-and-control" megaproject operating on tight timelines.

The meetings just described represent an entirely new way of working with communities, one which seeks the root cause of success rather than the root cause of failure. Instead of focusing on problems and problem solving, it looks for and celebrates success. In that contentious meeting, symbolic of the atmosphere of confrontation pervading community-project relationships, our commitment to steer dialogue back toward seeking and understanding success transformed the entire nature of relationships. And these relationships later contributed to an extraordinary community-initiated plantation program.

Through that experience we were able to help rural people and development practitioners [ourselves] reverse negative attitudes and generate, instead, the pride and self-reliance upon which successful rural development must be built.

For the past four years I have been developing, testing, and adapting participatory-research techniques in Nepal, to enhance the capacity of participatory rural appraisal (PRA)-based approaches. Drawing upon collaborative work begun with Robert Chambers in Botswana in the 1970s, I have tested the blending of concepts from several schools of organizational development theory.

These PRA-based techniques, drawing in particular from appreciative inquiry, with input from asset-based assessment, and future search models, have shown positive results in helping villagers replace fatalism and resignation with pride in their achievements, confidence in their ability to set attainable goals, and success in achieving those goals.

In its earliest incarnations, PRA had made an impact on national policy, the natural environment, and the lives of villagers, whose own ideas and knowledge had led to programs that helped not only themselves but also the natural environment upon which their livelihoods depend.

My commitment to reassessing the PRA tools I knew so well came from a disturbing discovery. After a thirty-year absence from Nepal—a country which had attained world renown for its active commitment to PRA and participatory approaches to small-farmer irrigation, to community forestry, and to community-based buffer zone management of national parks—I found little change in many mountain villages. Most disillusioning of all was to find the same or even stronger negative self-images and discouraged attitudes among villagers that I had encountered decades before.

With some of the world’s most advanced and successful participatory programs, and widespread acceptance of PRA approaches evident in Nepal’s small-farmer irrigation and community-forestry programs, villagers were still among the poorest in the world. Moreover, they also seemed to lack pride in their achievements and, sadder still, confidence in their power to change their situation without major help from outside. The traditional self-reliance of Nepal’s remote communities appeared to have been replaced with a dependency syndrome that—given both declining donor investments and political, financial, and administrative obstacles in Nepal—did not bode well for the future.

Beginning in 1994, as I hiked from village to village in the hills I had known so well as a volunteer years ago, I began to search for the roots of the negative and self-defeating attitudes of these rugged and independent Nepalese. Our project was built on participation, and PRA was widely known and practiced. People were being consulted and involved in all phases of the project, and numerous assessments of local problems and resources had been conducted using the best-known PRA techniques introduced by skilled practitioners.

But something was missing. With a decade of popular and professional literature, and innumerable conferences, empowerment had become a buzz-word. But, however resourceful and active in development programs they might be, the people I saw often appeared far from empowered. When entering a village, one of the most common greetings heard, after a polite welcome, was a litany of problems prefaced with remarks about the remoteness, poverty, ignorance, and backwardness of the village: this, whether the village was a ten-day hike into the mountains or a five-minute walk from the major highway.

While pondering the anomaly of negativity and dependency in the villages, as project manager with The Mountain Institute (TMI) I became involved with a series of organizational development (OD) workshops. The Institute was being transformed through its participation in the GEM Organizational Excellence program. GEM workshops used appreciative inquiry to discover individual and organizational strengths, dream of what would be even better, design a process for getting there, and deliver a program of action built upon personal commitments. I found the results energizing, and they contributed to a new atmosphere of optimism, teamwork, innovation, and renewed commitment in our organization.

Looking into the roots of the approach as well as other OD tools such as Future Search, I joined a colleague in an effort to introduce Appreciative Inquiry into TMI’s work in Nepal, including management, planning, and team building among our diverse staff and partners. The results, which were encouraging, contributed to higher morale and self-esteem among staff members and to more-productive planning sessions.

I then turned directly to the potential for linking PRA and AI principles to address the dependency pattern I was observing in the villages. Following upon the successful role AI had played within TMI, my colleague tested the introduction of AI principles into a village training program in Sikkim with promising results. With such evidence in hand, I made a personal commitment to return to the villages on a full-time basis and explore the potential of the appreciative approach for building self-esteem and teamwork.

In November 1996, I embarked upon a program of extensive research, design, field testing, and adaptation of different PRA-based approaches, onto which my TMI colleagues and I grafted concepts from appreciative mobilization and team-building approaches. From this came a rather simple concept that summed up where we were headed: