Institutional Venn Diagram
Also known as: Chapati Diagram, Institutional Relationship Diagram, Venn Diagramming, Organizational Mapping
An institutional Venn diagram, often called a chapati or relationship diagram, is a participatory rural appraisal tool in which community members represent the organizations and institutions in their lives as circles and arrange them to show importance and relationships. The size of each circle reflects how important or influential the institution is, and its position — how far from the community and how much it overlaps with other circles — shows how close and how connected it is. The finished diagram is a community-drawn map of its institutional landscape and the social distance between people and the bodies that affect them.
Key highlights
- Visualizes the relative importance, closeness, and overlap of institutions in a single intuitive picture the group co-creates.
- Surfaces which bodies are central and which are marginal from the community's own point of view, not the analyst's.
- Reveals gaps, overlaps, and strained or missing relationships in the institutional web that lists cannot show.
- Low-literacy and tactile, using movable circles that invite negotiation and make stakeholder analysis participatory.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use an institutional Venn diagram when you want to understand, from the community's perspective, which organizations matter, how close or remote they feel, and how they relate to one another — for example in stakeholder analysis, institutional appraisal, or studies of governance and access to services. It suits settings with a discernible set of named institutions and a group that deals with them. It assumes participants can agree on relative importance and closeness through discussion. It is less useful for mapping interpersonal networks (use sociometric methods), for very large institutional fields, or where the politics of naming institutions makes open discussion unsafe.
Strengths & limitations
- Visualizes the relative importance, closeness, and overlap of institutions in a single intuitive picture the group co-creates.
- Surfaces which bodies are central and which are marginal from the community's own point of view, not the analyst's.
- Reveals gaps, overlaps, and strained or missing relationships in the institutional web that lists cannot show.
- Low-literacy and tactile, using movable circles that invite negotiation and make stakeholder analysis participatory.
- Size and distance are qualitative judgments, not measurements, so the diagram is interpretive rather than quantitative.
- Results depend strongly on who is in the room; different groups will draw markedly different institutional maps.
- Sensitive power relations may go unspoken, especially where powerful institutions are present or represented.
- It captures a perceived snapshot and does not show how institutional relationships change over time.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Why is it called a chapati diagram?
Because the circles representing institutions, drawn or cut from paper and laid out overlapping on the ground, look like chapatis — round flatbreads — scattered and overlapping on a surface. The nickname stuck within the PRA community as a friendly, low-jargon name for the institutional relationship diagram.
What do circle size, distance, and overlap each mean?
Size represents the importance or influence of an institution, with bigger circles for more significant bodies. Distance from the community circle represents social or practical closeness, with nearer circles more accessible. Overlap represents the strength of the relationship between institutions, from separate (no contact) through touching (some exchange) to overlapping (active cooperation or shared membership).
How is this different from a stakeholder network map?
A formal stakeholder or network map usually plots actors and labelled ties, often quantitatively. The Venn diagram is a participatory, qualitative tool in which the community itself encodes importance through size and relationship through overlap, prioritizing local perception and shared negotiation over precise network metrics. The two can complement each other.
Sources
- 1.Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
- 2.Chambers, R. (1997). Whose Reality Counts? Putting the First Last. London: ITDG Publishing.ISBN 9781853393860
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Institutional Venn Diagram. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/anthropology/venn-diagram-institutional