Methodology

This project examines community sentiment and understanding of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville's independence readiness benchmarks. The project involved documenting a series of community dialogues that utilised participatory monitoring tools to allow participants to explore challenges, promising practices, and priority actions specific to their community. 

Each dialogue was run over a single day and included 1-3 activities.

Project Design

Participatory Rural Appraisal and Monitoring Tools

This project implements principles of participatory rural appraisal to encourage open dialogue, shared reflections, and collective problem-solving.

Participatory rural appraisal is a concept used to promote community participation in a structured and flexible manner. It is based on a norm that participation among varying community groups is an effective way to stimulate both conversation and development. 

Regarded as an effective entry point tool towards dialogue creation, it fosters the relationships and builds capacities of communities to develop a deeper understanding of issues and identify solutions to address these issues. 

The project initially developed a series of eleven tools (activities) to explore the six pillars of the Bougainville Peace Agreement. This was amended to align with the six benchmarks of independence readiness as established by the Autonomous Bougainville Government. 

Each tool included a participatory monitoring form to collate and record community understanding and sentiment on progress towards the six benchmarks. The monitoring framework was developed with consideration that results from the dialogues needed to be: 

• independent and consistent (i.e. that two different facilitation teams conducting the dialogue in the same community would get the same result), 

• inclusive (i.e. that activities were accessible and that all participants had the opportunity to engage),

• comparable across locations and over time, and

• easy to record while in the field. 

To record the results, UNFPA explored several options for offline, digital data collection. The application was chosen and refined throughout the validation, training, and trial, with additional changes able to made during the implementation phase.

Project Implementation

Validation Workshop

A validation workshop took place in April 2025. Participants trialled the participatory tools. These tools were then further contextualised and detailed facilitation notes developed to ensure the consistency and reliability of results.

As a result of the validation workshop, three core tools were identified:

• World Cafe

• Power Walk (or Privilege Walk)

• Holistic Health Hibiscus

In addition to these three core tools, facilitators would be able to choose one or two elective tools to include in their dialogue. 

Participants in the validation workshop trialled two data collection tools: Google Forms and Kobo Toolbox. Participants preferred Kobo Toolbox, both for the user interface and the capacity for offline data collection. An initial version of the participatory monitoring forms were built in Kobo Toolbox for further trial and revision. 

Facilitator Training

Facilitator training was held in May 2025. Facilitators were trained to deliver each of the core tools and selected elective tools.

During the facilitator training, the team reviewed the materials required for each dialogue. They also revised the instructions for each tool to improve clarity and ensure dialogues could run efficiently. To record participants' understanding of the benchmarks, several methods were tested:

• Participants marking their understanding from 1-5 on a butcher's paper: It was thought that responses would be swayed by being able to see previous marks.

• Facilitators recording each participant's understanding when they signed in using a Kobo form: This would link a participant's rating to their demographic information, enabling disaggregation of rating data by age and gender. However, when tested this took approximately 5-6 minutes per participant and, with 20-30 participants, would take too long in a field setting.

• Participants writing their understanding from 1-5 on a post-it and placing it in an envelope for each benchmark: This ensured confidentiality, though would require more materials. 

Ultimately the third option was selected as the most practicable. 

Facilitators were trained to use the Kobo Collect app and tested the functionality of various fields, including photo uploads and geolocation data. Several changes were made to the app during the training to improve the layout, question order, and question logic.

Trial Community Dialogue

A trial dialogue was held as part of the facilitator training in May 2025. The purpose of this trial was to field-test the tools and the monitoring app and to make necessary adjustments. A key finding from the trial dialogue was the amount of time required to complete each tool with the expected number of participants. 

Following the trial, the following amendments were made:

• The order of the activities would be moved so that the World Cafe was held before the Power Walk

• Only the three core tools would be used, with the World Cafe being conducted for all dialogues and participants choosing either the Power Walk or the Hibiscus as their second activity

• None of the form fields in the app would be marked as 'mandatory' in case teams had to conduct activities out of order (and therefore needed to skip questions and return to them later)

Implementation

The community dialogues were held over one month from late May to late June 2025. Two teams conducted the dialogues which covered 25 community governments across 12 districts. 

Analysis

Data was collected through:

• Kobo Collect app

  • Demographics form (1 per participant, entered by the facilitation team from the paper sign in sheets)

  • Participatory monitoring form (1 per dialogue, entered by the facilitation team)

• Facilitator notes

The data was reviewed in Kobo Toolbox (with duplicate or incomplete/test entries removed) and cleaned in Google Sheets. The quantitative data (demographics, ratings) was imported into Flourish studio for visualisation and the qualitative data was analysed by the project team to identify trends in the challenges, promising practices, and recommended actions prioritised in the dialogues, noting trends according to the age of participants and location of the dialogues. 

Analysis was conducted to draw insights on community sentiment with respect to the six independence readiness benchmarks as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Community Dialogues Manual

The results of the community dialogues will inform the development of a community dialogues manual that delivers a series of community listening tools contextualised for Bougainville. 

Innovations, Limitations, and Ethics

Innovation

This project blended practical participatory rural appraisal tools with digital solutions to data collection. These solutions enabled the facilitators to utilise familiar and low-tech community activities that were accessible to rural communities and to diverse demographics of participants, while reducing the time and burden of reporting after the dialogues were completed. Results were available to project managers within hours of each dialogue being completed, with analysis undertaken throughout the implementation stage. 

This project was agile by design, with amendments being made into the first week of the implementation stage to strengthen the efficiency of the dialogues and depth of engagement. This approach enabled continuous contextualisation and empowered facilitators to build ownership of the community dialogue program. 

Limitations

For this initial series of dialogues, facilitation teams provided community leaders with general guidance on the demographics to be included in each dialogue. While the geographic distribution of participants and the gender representation of participants over the 25 sessions broadly corresponds to the available census data (Papua New Guinea Census 2011), the demographic make up of each individual dialogue is not statistically representative of the local community. That is, some dialogues could have an over-representation of youth, older persons, women, men or other cohort. In future sessions, community leaders could be provided with more specific quotas for each cohort. However, the practicability would need to be discussed with each community leader. For example, could it reasonably be possible, in the local context, to refuse people from participating if a quota is exceeded?

Data was reported on a community basis. That is, facilitators collated the data from the participants into a single report for each dialogue. As such, information is not disaggregated by gender or age. Data can be disaggregated by region and district to facilitate analysis by geographic area. 

Ethical Considerations

Psychological safety: Facilitators were provided with guidance to mitigate psychological harm, as dialogues could bring up conversations on violence and abuse. Facilitators notified participants of potential sensitive issues that could be brought up in the sessions and gave participants space to remove themselves from sessions that were confronting to them. 

Consent: At the start of each session, participants were asked for their consent to be photographed. If a participant did not want to be included in photographs, facilitators would make sure not to photograph them. The facilitators required verbal consent, as opposed to written consent, to ensure dialogues could be inclusive of participants of all literacy levels.

Age restrictions: All participants were adults over 18 years of age. 

Privacy: Venues were chosen with consideration for the privacy of participants. In addition, participant names were not recorded in the participatory monitoring app, only their age group (e.g. 25-34), their gender, and whether they have a disability.