PRA evolved from Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) during the early 1990s. RRA was itself an attempt to steer a middle course between brief unstructured visits to rural communities which bore a risk of bias towards more accessible areas and more powerful interests ("development tourism"), and questionnaire surveys which were costly and time-consuming to analyse. RRA sought methods which were rapid and cost-effective but allowed outsiders to tap into the indigenous knowledge of farmers.

PRA took this further by encouraging farmers not only to give information, but to determine the methods and categories used to get information, and to participate in the use of that information. It has spread rapidly so that it is used virtually worldwide (in developed as well as developing countries), by a variety of institutions (large donors and governments as well as NGOs and researchers), in a variety of sub-sectors, and for a variety of objectives (research, project identification, project planning, project monitoring). At the same time the menu of "PRA tools", primarily visualisation techniques, has grown. A growing body of PRA training techniques means that outsiders from many backgrounds and disciplines can participate in PRA (e.g. administrators and natural scientists as well as social scientists). PRA can be practised either as a one-off event (at various stages of the project cycle) or as an extended process which allows feedback and mutual learning between farmers and outsiders, and direct local input into development planning. Some would argue that only the latter can truly be called PRA, but in practise many institutions use "PRA" to refer to one-off, informal information gathering, without any subsequent process of participatory planning.