Objectives: After a few decades focusing on macro-planning, hardwareoriented, elistic, and centralized development strategy, the international organizations responsible for development studies, have recently proposed a local development policy as for achievement to sustainable and humanistic development approach and to eradicate the poverty and deprivation in rural and urban marginalized areas. This new strategy is widely based on and supported by social participation, empowerment, local groups’ contribution, NGOs, local councils, local experts, governmental representatives, and influential local agents. Thus, this paper deals with participatory appraisal in rural and marginal

  regions of Bahar City located in Hamadan Province to explore the rural needs and solution through local knowledge and human/institutional potentialities.

  Method: This paper employs the participatory action research methodology

  which is philosophically based upon non-positivist paradigms including of

  pragmatism, interpretive approach, and critical perspective. While focusing on theoretical and methodological underpinnings of participatory action research, the position and role of participatory rural appraisal in local development will be discussed. In this methodology, the researcher is a facilitator and moderator who extract and reinterpret the people native point of view. This research took about one year in which researcher conducted in-depth interview with key informants such as local council and native peoples, participant observation and reviewing formal reports.

  Findings: The findings include a various range of needs, problems, priorities and solution proposed by local peoples. These are: educational and health facilities, solving unemployment, focusing on women and youth needs and infrastructural possibilities. It also demonstrated that the youth and women need / priorities were quite different form public requirements. For example, they stressed on improving leisure time, library access and professional jobs for girls. These issues indicate that the new generation has a new set of requests, demands and solutions.

  Results: the results demonstrated that the peoples are reflexively aware of their needs and priorities. The action research strategy showed that people could suggest many local strategies to deal with their surrounding based on their endogenous knowledge and capacities. It also revealed that the power structure, play a determinant role to determine the rural needs and solution. In this case, the interest-groups tried to reflect and represent their demands as public issues. So, most of development planning served their traditional interests. In this respect, this research was able to reflect the actual condition of life among residents and represented the social world through their eyes. Regarding to shortage of participatory rural appraisal studies, the researchers recommend establishing a technical support unit as a medium between governmental development agencies and target groups. These sorts of studies may help consider the socio-cultural characteristics of local communities as opportunities and contexts for development planning.