Let me offer a hypothesis for which I have no evidence. It is that the PICA approach is not yet sufficiently user friendly. When I look at Bush’s framework from the point of view of projects in the field, my sense is that the large list of goals and their generality is overwhelming and will induce a profound sense of inadequacy among people who might, in fact, be able to apply it if they better understood its particular relevance to their project. One reaction to feeling intimidated can be bureaucratic efforts to comply without internalization any of PICA’s deeper goals. The scheme, and Bush’s discussion in his response to Hoffman, is comprehensive in that it lists political, social, cultural and economic goals and emphasizes the importance of the political context in which a project is working. But a practitioner wants to know where does one begin? How does one prioritize? How does one know what parts of the PICA scheme are not relevant to their work? How can projects decide what not to do at any point in time? These questions aren’t addressed sufficiently and yet they are central to any project’s use of PICA. By suggesting to projects that everything matters and that all domains are interconnected, PICA, as Bush presents it, can be disempowering and produce frustration.
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