Tool: Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage (PACA)

PACA (Participatory Appraisal of Competitive Advantage) is in the narrow sense a set of tools used to come up with a diagnostic of the competitive advantages and disadvantages of a locality (e.g. a district, town or township) or a sector (such as tourism, agriculture or the formal business community) combined with concrete, practical proposals to stimulate the local or regional economy. One of its key features is the mobilisation of local stakeholders from the public and private sector as well as civil society to take on ownership of the assessment of their local economy as well as of the resulting initiatives to improve the locality. In the wider sense it is a participatory, bottom-up and pragmatic approach to LED that aims at building momentum by identifying and implementing quick wins, which in the medium term build up to effective and sustainable LED dynamics in the communities. The PACA approach has been developed by Mesopartner, a German consultancy group, in the context of German and other mostly donor-sponsored development projects in the course of the last ten years in 16 countries including Brazil, South Africa and Sri Lanka. The approach is continuously adjusted and expanded in each of these countries according to local circumstances.