Abstract | World Café (WC) and Appreciative Inquiry (AI) are two increasingly popular approaches to participatory research and policy-making that also frequently define themselves in relation to community development. They both seek to create environments in which participants' shared activity and inter-subjectivity enable positive responses to problems and challenges. WC and AI offer interesting and innovative approaches in research but present a number of problems within the field of community development. Several key issues are raised including the risk of imposing an interpretation of structural problems as ‘misperceptions’, a troubling and potentially stigmatizing interpretation of ‘empowerment’, and questionable assumptions about social change. |
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