| Livestock Research for Rural Development 14 (4) 2002 | Citation of this paper |
This article discusses certain major issues that confront attempts to
introduce participatory methodologies into livestock production research. It is based on information collected from
researchers and other stakeholders in Kenya and Tanzania, as part of activities to link
two projects, both funded by DFID's Livestock Production Programme: in particular during two workshops that brought together
Tanzanian and Kenyan researchers, in Arusha in April 1997 and
in Muguga in January 1998, interviews with researchers and
donors, and collection of literature during 1998 (Note 1).
It emerged early in the project that the concerns of researchers lay
as much or more with conceptual and institutional issues as with the choice of particular
research tools. We have attempted to
concentrate on issues specific to livestock research, but many of the issues of most
concern to livestock researchers are in fact generic to participatory research including
crop research. We have not aimed to produce a
manual for participatory research in livestock production. Materials are increasingly
appearing that can advise researchers on the conduct of participatory research (in a
general agricultural rather than specifically livestock context) (see especially
Sutherland 1998; Conroy et al 1999; Sutherland and Martin 1999) and there are also sources
that deal with the "PRA tools" suited to a livestock context (PRA being of
course only part of the process of participatory research) such as Kirsopp-Reed
(1994) and Waters-Bayer and Bayer (1994). Nor
has it been possible to review global experience of participatory livestock production
research, although we are aware of interesting experiences in
This introduction carries on to identify
the main institutional contexts in which research is carried out and is used; in other
words some of the main stakeholders in research. The
following three sections highlight three different, though interlinked, sorts of issues: conceptual, relating to the objectives and
definition of farmer participatory research, in general and in relation to livestock
production; methodological, relating to methods
that can be used at various points of the research project cycle; and institutional, relating to the constraints placed
on farmer participation by the institutions that fund it, implement it and use it.
Livestock production research, in a narrow sense, is carried out in
countries of the South primarily by NARS (National Agricultural Research Services) and
local universities, assisted in some cases by universities or other institutes from the
North, or international research centres. It may be funded by donors (in some cases using
Northern Universities as intermediaries or research managers) who may target their funding
in various ways. In a broader sense
“research” is also carried out by donor-funded development projects, and by
NGOs: these may also be regarded as users or “uptake pathways” for research in
the narrower sense. More detail is given below
of each of these categories of actor, and of the way they commission, implement, use and
interact with research.
Developing countries typically have dedicated national agricultural
research services (NARS; Note 2), separate from
teaching universities. These services may fall
under ministries of science and technology or under ministries of agriculture (as with the
Department of Research and Training in
Relations between NARS and southern universities may be synergistic,
but also, in certain circumstances, problematic and characterised
by conflict over scarce resources. NARS
relations with agricultural extension services vary widely; they may require memoranda of
understandings to govern relations between the two, especially if they fall under
different ministries. Where national extension
services have been designed wholly or partly along "Training and Visit" lines,
research-extension linkages will probably be formalised and
channeled through particular individuals.
Even where NARS (in the narrow sense) exist, national universities
may be major players in agricultural research. It
is very hard to generalise about their strengths and
weaknesses: they may be less bureaucratic and more innovative than NARS, or more concerned
with academic output at the expense of effective dissemination to farmers. They may have less access to research funds from
agricultural development donors, but may benefit in other ways from links to northern
universities and educational foundations.
Northern universities and other non-profit research institutions
typically carry out agricultural research in developing
countries under funding from development donors, less frequently from their own resources
or national research funds in their own countries. They
may maintain long-term relations with particular southern universities or NARS, which
enable, explicitly or otherwise, a degree of "capacity-building". Northern research institutions may display a
concentration on academic output and a limited view of their own role in development, and
may be subject to funding and other pressures. Northern
universities typically include study for a Ph.D. in their research projects - this may
have major advantages in providing incentives to scientists and building research skills in the long
term, but may also have disadvantages in reducing their flexibility to do more
participatory research.
IARCs include centres
of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and certain
others. Within the field of livestock research in East Africa ILRI is of course
pre-eminent, and ICRAF is also significant through its research on multi-purpose trees. IARCs enjoy
long-term relationships with NARS and southern universities, especially in the countries
where they are headquartered, relationships that can contribute to capacity-building. IARCs are
well-resourced and have some degree of core-funding, although they also increasingly have
to seek funds for specific projects from donors.
From a concern with highly strategic scientific research, the CGIAR centres have moved (not all at the same rate) to include a more
systems-based approach, and latterly an interest in participatory research.
Donors fund livestock research in various ways: through central research funds, through country research programmes or through development projects. Central research funds, of which DFID's Livestock Production Programme (LPP) itself is an example, have a mandate to fund research in a chosen field, in this case livestock production, across a number of countries. While different management arrangements are conceivable, in the case of LPP this has implied:
Country programmes, which are dedicated
to research within one country, may have less of a formal competitive element and may have
a stronger capacity building element for the host institution, in this case the NARS. Examples include DFID’s
and the Netherland’s support to the Kenyan Second
National Agricultural Research programme (NARP-II) and DFID
support to the Smallholder Dairy Research and Development project. There may be even more specific research projects
funded out of bilateral development funds, dedicated to a particular centre of the NARS or
a specific university. The Netherlands-funded
Lake Zone Farming Systems Research Project in
The development programmes of bilateral
and multi-lateral donors may carry out research, either in a relatively narrow sense, or
in a broader sense if monitoring and evaluation activities are included (as for example in
the GTZ Integrated Small Livestock Project in Kenya).
They may also play host to external researchers, supplying data, facilities and
support (Note 3).
They may also be users of the outputs of research.
Much the same range of relations to research characterises
NGOs. NGOs may be carrying out a great deal of
“research” in a broad sense, in that they actively investigate the production
systems in which they intervene, and may play host to more formal research. However, many NGOs see research in the more
traditional sense as something external to and irrelevant to their work (E. Kinsey of HPI,
pers comm., see also Morton et al
2002).
This section deals with the most general issues surrounding
participatory research, its definition, objectives, and relations to more traditional
agricultural research, and whether and why participatory methodologies are less developed
in the field of livestock production.
It was clear in the first project workshop at Arusha
that the term “participatory research” is a very emotive one, particularly when
contrasted, as it often is, with “extractive” research. There is a danger that an unrealistic ideal of
participatory research may be seen as unobtainable, and may in fact discourage researchers
in NARS and southern universities from increasing farmer participation. The comment by Okali et
al (1994) on the sharp either/or dichotomies often found in
discussions on participatory research is relevant here:
“a central theme which emerges from our
study is that the use of dichotomies...., that characterises
many aspects of the literature and discussion relating to farmer participatory research,
has been a major factor hindering both clarity of concepts and effectiveness of
implementation.”
It seems more appropriate to use a continuum of research types, such
as the by now well-known schema proposed by Biggs (1989).
As well as replacing a dichotomy with a continuum, this schema allows for a range
of objectives for research, all quite valid in the right contexts. It therefore encourages
a characterisation of research projects or programmes, rather than research activities considered in isolation. This is especially important if we accept, as the Arusha workshop did, that there are strong arguments for the
continuing importance of on-station research (Table 1).
Table
1: Researcher-farmer relationships |
|||
Contract |
Consultative |
Collaborative |
Collegial |
Farmers’ land and services are hired
or borrowed, e.g. the researchers contracts with the farmer to provide specific types of
land |
There is a doctor-patient relationship. Researchers consult farmers, diagnose their
problems and try to find solutions |
Researchers and farmers are partners in
the research process and continuously collaborate in activities |
Researchers actively encourage the
informal R&D system in rural areas |
Source: Biggs (1989) as presented in Okali et al (1994) |
|||
Using this scheme, it is clear that for the projects represented at
the workshops, the issues have been whether they as projects are closer to the
consultative or collaborative points of Biggs’ continuum, what advantages there would
be to becoming more collaborative, and how they, and future research projects, might do
so.
The objectives of “collegial” research, the most
participatory point of Biggs’ continuum, can be seen as those of strengthening
farmers’ own capacity for research and development (Farrington and Nelson 1997). During the research, there did not appear to be any
livestock research project in
“At a technological level, the aim of
farmer participatory research is to understand the main characteristics and dynamics of
the agro-ecosystem within which the community operates, to identify priority problems and
opportunities, and to experiment locally with a variety of technological
‘options’ based on ideas and experiences derived from indigenous knowledge and
formal science.”
Farmer participatory research in this area is, quite properly, a
means to an end: involving farmers in the sorts of ways under discussion is a means of
doing research which is relevant and whose findings will be adopted by farmers. With livestock research as with other research
sub-sectors, there is a real feeling that much research to date has not been relevant and
has not been adopted (Bangu 1994).
For the two DFID-funded projects, there was a particular need to
assess carefully the degree of participation that is required and is practical. It has been argued that farmer participatory
research is particularly appropriate to low potential areas (Okali
et al 1994). With respect to rainfall and
soils, the respective project sites, Kiambu District and
Kilimanjaro Region, can be considered ‘high potential’ at least within an East
African context. Its vicinity to
However, both Kiambu District and
Kilimanjaro Region are characterised by very high population
densities, small and fragmented holdings and a shortage of agricultural labour. Dairy producers
in both areas have not, up to the last few years, been well served by research
institutions, particularly the poorer strata that both projects identified and targeted. To this extent we remained confident that some form
of participatory approach is both necessary and possible. The fact that both projects were
mainly concerned with small-scale dairy production using crossbreds, which have been
introduced relatively recently, lessens the importance of indigenous knowledge, but by no
means eliminates it. It placed an added burden
on the projects to incorporate on-station work into an overall collaborative framework.
The ways in which participatory and on-station activities are ordered
and co-ordinated differ considerably between different
projects, which bears out the idea that it is projects or programmes,
and not research activities in isolation, that should be evaluated for their “degree
of participation”. It was strongly felt
at the Arusha workshop that there might be many different
combinations of “participatory” and “non-participatory” activities
that can deliver research relevant to farmers, modified by farmers and (hopefully) adopted
by farmers.
The Arusha meeting was premised on the
underdevelopment of participatory methodologies in livestock production as compared to
crop production and crop protection, and the participants agreed with this premise, as did
most other stakeholders interviewed. The main
reason put forward for this state of affairs related to the value of livestock. Livestock (particularly dairy cattle) are valuable
and ‘lumpy’ assets. The risk to a
farmer of using one of his/her cows in an on-farm feeding trial, in terms of foregone
production, loss of condition or worse, is likely to be much greater than the foregone
production from a relatively small control plot. ICRAF
for example do not carry out on-farm feeding trials comparing treatments and a control,
only different treatments, partly because of the ethical issues raised.
We can identify additional reasons for the gap between participatory
livestock research and participatory crop research. To
some extent these are features of on-farm livestock trials whether participatory or not,
but exacerbated if a participatory approach is desired:
·
the greater time scales involved in
livestock research: this is particularly true of breeding research, but also applies to
other research, which may, for example, require the entire growing cycle of a fodder crop,
followed by the entire lactation cycle of a cow.
·
small numbers of livestock, particularly
cows, leading to problems in sampling procedures, and in particular problems of
replication (non-participatory on-farm research can alleviate these problems by enforcing
standard treatments and controls across a range of farms, participatory research cannot). This makes it difficult to deal with the large
degree of between-farm and between-animal variability.
·
The practicalities of identifying and tagging animals, particularly smallstock, (which,
unlike crops, move) and the difficulties for farmers of managing individuals or groups of
animals differently on the same farm, especially in feeding trials, if animals are
normally fed together.
·
Basal diets against which treatments are compared may vary greatly
across farms and fluctuate dramatically for any one farm.
This reinforces the problem of small sample sizes and difficulties of replication
above.
As is discussed below, these problems are felt differently according
to the institutional contexts of research, and can be circumvented by a number of
methodological strategies (proven or speculative).
But in general they still amount to important and inherent difficulties facing
participatory livestock research.
In addition, there are a number of more contingent historical reasons
for the underdevelopment of participatory methodologies with livestock:
·
a smaller global
community of researchers, and a lesser probability of a ‘critical mass’ of
participatory-minded researchers emerging
·
the early contribution to participatory research made by a few of the
CGIAR centres with a crop mandate (IRRI, CIAT, CIP)
·
the lack of simple, dramatic and popularizable findings, comparable to the vindication of
intercropping by participatory crop research.
Beyond all these, Ashley et al (2000) argue
that animal production as a discipline is heavily oriented to working with single
production objectives and is inherently challenged by the multiple objectives of
resource-poor livestock keepers. The
discipline has been slow to understand or rise to this challenge, and urgently needs the
assistance of other disciplines to do so. This points to the importance of whole-farm, and ultimately of livelihoods,
research.
We must note here that the vocabulary of participatory research,
especially as presented here, is far from universally used, nor is it the only dimension
along which research can be evaluated. Netherlands-funded
research in particular tends to describe itself as Farming Systems Research or
Client-Oriented Research. Dutch researchers
and their colleagues also see a tendency for UK-funded research, even at the more
participatory end of the spectrum, to remain commodity-focussed
and in their view less relevant than research that takes a whole-farm perspective (De Jong, Musikira, pers.comm.).
The argument for a whole-farm perspective is very persuasive (see Schiere undated), and livestock research that successfully addresses
livestock problems of mixed farmers (be it in a consultative, collaborative or collegial
way) is very likely to have a strong farming systems orientation. The poor, as is now well known, keep livestock for
a number of reasons, including contributing to the productivity of cropping through manure
and draught power (Powell et al 1998). Many feed sources for livestock are likely also to
produce other benefits for poor households (see Lukuyu 2000 on
maize as feed and food, see Franzel et al 2001 on calliandra as a fuelwood source and a
soil conservation measure) or impact on their ability to achieve such benefits. For the majority of the rural poor, even when crop
and livestock production are not "integrated" in the classic sense of draught
power utilisation, fodder cultivation and manure management,
there will be sufficient positive and negative synergies between livestock production and
other farm activities to make a case for adopting a whole farm perspective.
However, the critique of livestock research from a farming systems
perspective can and should be broadened. Livestock
production has to be seen not only in a whole-farm perspective, but in a livelihoods
perspective. Livestock production is one possible livelihood strategy that the poor can
adopt, given their endowment in the various forms of capital, and the institutions that
shape their lives. There are trade-offs
in the use of those assets; the farming systems approach clearly indicates trade-offs in
land (natural capital) between fodder and other crops, but there are equally trade-offs in
the use of labour (human capital) and financial capital
between livestock production and a variety of non-agricultural livelihood strategies. Similarly there are synergies. Livestock can serve
as a form of investment, an asset used for
consumption-smoothing during seasonal troughs in cash-income, or can be marketed following
links established in the course of other livelihood strategies.
The adoption of livestock production technologies is influenced not
only by the farming system and other livelihood strategies, but also by policies,
institutions and incentives (Franzel et al 2001). Land tenure and milk marketing institutions and
pricing policies are obvious examples. Awareness
of such issues should be introduced into the research cycle at various points:
·
Researchers should be generally aware of the sorts of policies and
institutions that affect livestock producers
·
Policy and institutional factors likely to affect adoption can be
explored during initial PRAs
·
Such factors can be incorporated informally or formally (this applies
particularly to pricing) into ex-ante sensitivity analyses
·
As Franzel et al (2001) point out, farmer-designed and -managed on-farm trials can yield valuable
information on policy constraints, in combination with technical interventions or in their
own right.
A related issue is that, if overall circumstances (including policies
and institutions) are favourable, adoption of livestock
technologies may have "downstream" benefits not only on producer household
income, but on nutrition, gender relations, and secondary employment. Some livestock development projects (e.g. the
Kenya-Finland Livestock Development Project) make such downstream benefits very much part
of their project rationales. The extent to
which such benefits should be monitored depends very much on the overall objectives of a
project, but even research projects funded as such should be aware of such benefits and
the extent to which they may be uncovered in farmer-managed trials.
Another issue raised by Netherlands-funded researchers during
consultations was the relative absence of ex-ante
economic analysis in DFID-funded research. Netherlands-funded
research has a greater tendency to use ex-ante analysis, including sensitivity analyses,
to screen interventions for testing - for example, work on molasses-urea blocks was
dropped after such analysis. The comment can
be broadened to include economic analysis at various points in the project cycle. While adoption in the course of participatory
trials is itself an important indicator of sustainability, economic analysis can be very
important in establishing the prospects for broader adoption across locations or strata of
farmers. There are however many obvious
problems in conducting economic analyses in this way: the unreliability of quantitative
data obtained from farmers, the necessity to impute values to "free" resources
such as open grazing, family labour or manure, the problems of
heterogeneity within farming communities and of seasonality.
The trick must be to use economic analyses in the most appropriate and focused way,
and not beyond the limits of the available data. "Participatory
farm management" tools (Dorward et al 1997), which lie
somewhere between PRA tools and traditional quantified economic surveys, may be of value
here.
In this section we want to look at the issues that arise for
participatory research in relation to various stages of the project cycle - project
identification, baseline research, trials, evaluation, dissemination - and some of the
strategies advanced to make research more participatory at these various stages.
At the "collegial" end of the continuum (see above)
research problems would be identified in each target community through participatory
methodologies, ideally a leisurely and well-resourced participatory rural appraisal (PRA). For most research projects, direct investigation of
the needs of livestock producers will be only one element in a process that also includes:
·
the pre-determined priorities of research programmes
and those who fund them,
·
researchers' perceptions of what is scientifically interesting,
·
secondary information on producers' needs
at a national or regional level (for a particularly systematic and quantitative example of
the latter see McLeod et al 1998).
These elements can be of varying importance, and combined in
different ways. In addition, an understanding
of the needs of livestock keepers is likely itself to include:
·
a general ‘systems understanding’ on the part of the
researcher, and
·
needs explicitly articulated by farmers.
In the Tanzanian project the choice of research topic was left very
open in scientific terms, within certain constraints: that it should focus on feeding for
smallholder milk production, and accommodate the needs of an animal production PhD (Ashley
et al 2000). PRAs
were conducted in three locations to understand local livestock production systems and
their problems. The combination of this
process with desk studies of scientific literature was designed to identify scientific
"missing links" suitable for research, which could then be refined through
further PRAs. This
combination proved surprisingly difficult and involved an element of compromise.
In the Kenyan project the broad technical area for investigation -
intake - was identified in advance through a general reflection on the needs of Kenyan
smallholder dairy systems. However, there was
sufficient flexibility within the project to look at feed resource use more generally when
the PRAs highlighted that options to improve intake were
limited, since feed was scarce even during rainy season when fodder was relatively
plentiful. Precise topics within this area were then developed through a compromise
between PRA findings and what was scientifically interesting and feasible with the
financial and human resources involved. Initially
this resulted in a "purely" scientific research design, on alternation of diets,
carried out on station. This area of research
arose from observations that farmers were forced to alter feeds offered abruptly and
frequently as available labour and the seasonal nature of the
cropping pattern determined the feeds available. The
research was aimed at quantifying the negative effects of these practices and to develop
strategies to alleviate these effects. Later
in the project new possibilities of financial and human resources allowed a second and
more participatory sub-project of research on the trade-offs between production of grain
and production of fodder from the maize crop.
Research projects, as discussed above, can take their place along a
continuum of degrees of participation, a place determined by the problem they identify to
solve, but also in part by their funding and institutional context. Their place in the continuum in turn has
implications for overall research design and for particular methodologies. Given all this, we feel it is very important for
research projects to be clear and consistent about their objectives, and about what they
are not intending to do. The objectives of
research will influence the internal design of the project, its mix of on-station/on-farm
activities and of quantitative/qualitative methodologies (see also Franzel
et al 1998), its relations with extension (see below) and possibly with policy makers, and the most appropriate forms of dissemination. A clear statement of objectives also has
implications for how a research project’s success should be monitored and evaluated (Note 4). Emphasising this clarity of objectives does not exclude the
possibility of changing project objectives, provided this is done in as transparent and
participatory way as possible and the methodological implications thought through.
Many discussions of PRA by its best-known proponents consider it as
an approach to, or a worldview of, development work. Such
a view stresses long-term engagement, and participation of
farmers in planning development activities as well as in information gathering. In practice, in both research and development, PRA
is mostly used as a collection of tools, mainly concerned with visualisation,
and used instrumentally (Note 5) to gain information
for a particular purpose over a fixed and relatively short time-scale. Rather than take sides in such a debate, or
spend time policing the boundaries of RRA and PRA, we note that the contrast corresponds
quite closely to the different ends of the research continuum, with PRA as a worldview
being associated with collegial research, and PRA as a set of field methods with
contractual and consultative research. Researchers
seeking to move their research from a consultative to a collaborative style would do well
to consider the broader purpose of PRA as a critique of existing approaches, but this does
not preclude a careful consideration of the methods that have become known as "PRA
tools".
The different field methods used within PRA are well-described in a
number of places, and methods for use in livestock research and development are described
in Kirsopp-Reed (1994), Waters-Bayer and Bayer (1994), Roeleveld and van den Broek (1996), and
from the Tanzania research project under consideration (Ashley 1997). A brief discussion will be adequate here:
Semi-structured interview
must be the backbone of any PRA activity, including that for livestock research. “Semi-structured” is the key:
checklists should be used flexibly to aid the interviewers and to ensure that nothing
relevant is missed out, rather than as questionnaires.
Participatory mapping is a
technique that proves very useful with livestock producers.
This is perhaps more the case with semi-extensive and extensive systems than with
intensive dairy systems, but maps can also be used to explore fodder resources, marketing,
input supply and service provision linkages.
Ranking and scoring techniques
can be used to evaluate constraints to livestock production, the comparative value of
different feeds, and the different objectives/outputs of a livestock species. In the first case care needs to be taken in
interpreting results: constraints operate in combination and the one that is most
obviously limiting is not necessarily the most fundamentally important. “Lack of information” if cited as a
constraint does not necessarily imply that available or potentially available information
would solve the current problems.
Ranking of feeds is also problematic, and needs considerable care in
communicating with interviewees. Are they
being asked to compare feeds in the quantities available to them, or per unit weight or
volume? Can there be meaningful
comparison between cut and carried fodders, purchased feeds and grazing? Are feeds being evaluated on only one axis or on
more than one axis representing different purposes such as energy and milk production [see
also Thorne and Herrero (1998) and references cited therein]? Matrix ranking of feeds against several criteria is
one partial solution here, but these questions need to be faced. What is being asked of producers must be
communicated with precision and if possible in a standardised
way across individual interviews. Franzel (1993) discusses the use of the traditional bao game for evaluating
tree species against different criteria (one of which is used as fodder) and gives some
practical guidelines for using the game in a standardised way.
Ranking of production
objectives/outputs of different livestock species (for instance using cards with drawings
of a bucket of milk, a plough, a currency note) can be a very useful tool, though perhaps
less so in dairy systems where production objectives are relatively clear. Again, care has to be taken in specifying whether
objectives are being compared for each species or vice versa. For a more quantified version of this approach see Bennison et al (1997). Even
more than the other tools mentioned here, ranking should be carried out wherever possible
separately for male and female farmers, and for farms of different sizes.
Calendars are a crucial
tool in participatory livestock research. Calendars
can be used to obtain information on seasonal labour demands
and on seasonal feed availability and use. For
this purpose they can be combined with ranking and scoring techniques. If this is done, the remarks on ranking and scoring
of feeds above need to be taken into account, and it also needs to be made clear whether
feeds available within a particular month are being compared against each other, or
whether the use or value of feed is being compared across months (in which case, it must
be clear if the comparison is of quality or of quantity and of availability or use) (see
Morton and Romney 2001).
Pile sorting
"proportional piling" can be used in various ways, some of them similar to the
uses of ranking or scoring, bearing in mind the difficulties of quantification,
particularly of unlike things. Pile sorting
might have particular uses in prioritisation of research
topics.
Going beyond the discussion of particular tools, the Arusha workshop and others contacted during this study were
concerned with issues of ‘good practice’ in PRA (not specific to livestock
research), such as:
·
the appropriate size for a PRA team, and
the importance of team-building around agreed objectives.
The dangers of too many specialists pursuing their own agendas, leading to overlong
and unfocussed sessions were recognised. At the same time, the pressures to have all the
sponsoring organisations represented were seen as sometimes
unavoidable, but manageable through splitting the team.
·
language:
PRA reports seldom make much reference to the language in which they were
conducted, and which of the participants (researchers or farmers) were fluent in that
language.
·
“beneficiary fatigue”: the
possibility of tiring informants through overlong and/or repeated sessions was mentioned
repeatedly. In truly participatory research
this danger can be minimised by building trust between
researchers and farmers over time, but even then must continue to be borne in mind.
·
the longer-term issues of trust and
communication: the presentation at Arusha of the Lake Zone FSR project showed the lengthy time scale
necessary to build up the trust needed for participatory research, which inevitably raised
once more the issues of constrained timescales for research projects. The importance of learning communication skills for
bridging the researcher-farmer divide (which often exists even with researchers themselves
one generation from the land) was also stressed, and there were calls for donors to fund
short courses in these skills for African researchers. This issue needs to be considered
in a much broader context than that of PRA training (see also Okali
et al 1994).
·
the need in many circumstances to have
separate sessions for different categories of farmers: male/female, small/large, rich/poor
farmers, of different ethnic groups.
Participatory on-farm trials are usually regarded as central to
participatory research. As discussed above,
the particular difficulties of carrying out participatory on-farm trials with livestock
can be seen as a key reason why participatory research in general has not developed in the
livestock sector.
One issue that is generic to both livestock and crop research is the
trade-off (real or supposed) between participation and scientific rigour
in on-farm trials. Put simply, the greater the
degree of control that farmers have over trials, the less the experiments are likely to
produce data that conforms to normal scientific standards.
Farmers' control of experiments is likely to lead to: distribution of farms or
animals between treatments being unbalanced; parameters other than those focused on not
being held constant; farmers modifying treatments during the trial; "control"
farmers adopting one of the treatments half-way through the trial and many similar
occurrences that make the production of easily analyzable datasets difficult.
The most important point to make about this trade-off is that it is
closely linked to the objective of the research. If
the objective is to develop technology that will be adopted by farmers in the project
area, it will not be necessary to produce scientifically valid data. If the objective is purely the production of
scientific knowledge, then farmer participation will be seen as wholly negative. In between these two poles lie the majority of
on-farm trials, where the development of adoptable technology is the overall aim, but
combined with factors such as:
·
the sorts of institutional and professional concerns discussed
elsewhere in this paper,
·
a desire to increase understanding of the scientific factors
involved, which in turn is likely to be linked to
·
a concern for the adoption of the
technology to be replicable over larger areas and varying conditions.
It is in these cases where the trade-offs between participatory and
scientific objectives will be most felt, and modifying research methods to increase
scientific rigour is likely to impact negatively on
participation. In each case the extent to which methodologies are "scientific"
or "participatory" will depend on the exact combination and hierarchy of
objectives. This is not to say that nothing
can be done to mitigate these trade-offs. At
least three distinct mitigating strategies can be identified:
Training: There are real possibilities for developing with
farmers a shared understanding of the basic scientific concepts involved and why they are
useful in producing new knowledge. This
applies especially to the concept of control treatment.
There are well known anecdotal examples of livestock keepers spontaneously adopting
controls in order to assure themselves that positive results they saw in their livestock
were definitely the result of specific treatments (see for example, Swift cited in
Chambers 1983). With training, and equally
importantly, time, such understanding can be
widely shared. However, as discussed elsewhere
in this paper, time is likely to be at a premium in projects funded on research budgets.
A group approach: if the
basic concepts that underlie the research design can be understood in this way, the
adherence of farmers to trial design can be increased by encouraging them to view it as a
collective responsibility. In this way,
treatments and controls can be divided up between farmers.
Assuming that farmers accept the overall importance of the trial, they may be more
likely to accept that it is necessary to adhere to the application of a specific treatment
(or control) if such adherence is seen as a service to the group as a whole. Under certain circumstances (if other factors are
constant across farms or can be accounted for in analysis) group approaches also help to
overcome the problem of very small sample sizes, or one-cow herds. Again however, forming, training and managing
groups to accept such collective responsibility is a time consuming task.
Innovative statistical
methodologies: Many of the problems associated with the analysis of participatory
on-farm trial data are statistical and increasingly have statistical solutions. The major problems specific to livestock
research are associated with the presence of only one or two animals per farm, leading to
large variations within the sample, particularly as regards management practices. A generic set of problems with participatory
research is that of unbalanced datasets. The
first set of problems are discussed in the booklet by the
A
separate major issue with participatory on-farm trials, that does present itself more
acutely with livestock trials, is that of risk. While
the sorts of feeding interventions our projects were most concerned with – uses of
forage already available on farm – were not highly risky, any experiment carries some
degree of risk, if only that of loss of condition. It
has been pointed out that some research on tree fodders may pose risks of toxicity
(Paterson et al 1996), and this should be an
example where on-station trials should be carried out in the first instance to ensure that
new forages farmers are offered are not toxic.
If an intervention begins to prove successful, not adopting it, in
other words adhering to a control regime, also begins to become a risk. Where the risk is to a large household capital
asset such as a dairy cow (rather than just the annual yield from a small trial plot), it
becomes an important practical and ethical issue.
Again, there are strategies for mitigating this element of risk, or
making risk more acceptable to farmers. The
first, obviously, is observing principles of information sharing and voluntarism. Farmers need to be told what the risks of
interventions are, and what the limits of researchers’ knowledge about those risks
are. When such information is shared,
farmers must be free to choose whether to participate in trials, and ultimately whether to
withdraw from trials in progress. In order to
limit the ethical and practical problems associated with enforcing a control regime on
some farmers, ICRAF have tended to run trials comparing different treatments, rather than
comparing a treatment and a control (Franzel, pers.comm).
There are also possibilities of researchers sharing farmers' risks
through financial means; cost-sharing, financial guarantees against loss of animal value. One interesting example is the research on
concentrate feeding (Romney et al 2000), where increased credit was provided through the
co-operative (where the participating farmers delivered milk) to allow farmers to feed
high levels of concentrate in early lactation. In
this case there was a very close fit between the intervention being tested and the need
for a financial mechanism. Cost-sharing and
similar approaches may raise problems of appearing to give handouts, and making the
research less participatory because farmers have financial incentives, but should be
explored. One speculative possibility for
mitigating risk that was mentioned during the research was that of using commercial
insurance (D M Njuru pers comm.),
although it is unlikely that insurers would insure particularly risky interventions.
Researchers in the Arusha workshop, and
others contacted during the project, tended to support vigorously the continuing necessity
of on-station trials in the sort of research under discussion. The workshop participants also tended to disagree
with what they understood as the current position of one major donor to the dairy sector
in
On-station work can be seen as particularly relevant to the subject
of both the projects considered: very small-scale commercial dairying in areas of high
population density. This system is relatively
new to the farmers, so the store of indigenous knowledge can be assumed not to be great,
and the sorts of strategies that are or could be available to the poorest producers are
not well understood by researchers. The
Tanzanian project in particular justified on-station work by reference to ‘missing
links’ in both farmer and researcher knowledge.
If on-station trials can therefore be seen as part of an overall
participatory process, it highlights both general problems of identifying research
priorities (see above) and specific problems of obtaining farmer feedback on on-station
trials. Ideally perhaps, the process should be
iterative and incremental, with each refinement of on-station trials taken back for farmer
comment, but the timescale of livestock feeding trials and the time constraints imposed by
donors militate against this.
The dissemination of research was seen as an important issue
throughout the project. One aspect of this was
publication and professional reward systems, discussed below; another was described under
the rubric of “research-extension linkages”.
In many ways, discussion of these issues has been overtaken by the new discussions
on dissemination, at least within DFID-funded research.
What was clear, however, was that participatory research, which by its nature is localised, is not exempt from the obligation to think through ways
of achieving wider-scale uptake. In Arusha the assumption was that wider uptake would typically involve
national extension services, and the talk was of the different institutional and financial
contexts in which such services exist, the necessity of their early involvement of such
services in research, and the need for an understanding of their preferred form of
message. A few years on, with further evidence
of the collapse of national extension services (with the partial exception of
During the course of the study, and especially at the Arusha workshop, it became clear that some of the greatest concerns
that livestock researchers had about participatory research related to its institutional
context. To a great extent these concerns are
generic to all participatory research, but they are perhaps felt more strongly in the
livestock sector because they combine with livestock-specific issues such as long research
timescales and problems of small samples. Two
sets of issues in particular arose: funding procedures and timescales, and reward systems
for researchers.
There was a strong feeling at the Arusha
workshop that the timescale and funding of the projects represented were major constraints
on the degree of farmer participation that could be achieved. This was exacerbated by the greater timescales
needed for livestock research. A leisurely
timescale greatly facilitates the proper communication and the building-up of trust
between researcher and farmer that is necessary for participatory research. Accepting that on-station research has a role in
the overall research process, the process of obtaining feedback from farmers' plans for
on-station work is problematic. There is no consensus on how to do this, and it was felt
that the ideal approach would be iterative and incremental: going back to farmers
frequently to discuss relatively small packages of research findings or research plans. A
short timescale limits the number of iterations that are possible between on-farm and
on-station work. There was also a feeling that
the flexibility necessary for truly
participatory work, for example the flexibility to make radical switches in research
topics, is difficult for donor-funded projects.
More specifically, however, the constraints on timescale, funding and
responsiveness were seen as relating to the two projects’ place in a research programme,
funded centrally by a donor, and targeted at a number of countries. There was a strong contrast here with a project
funded under
Participants also saw problems relating to the projects’ status
as centred on three-year PhD projects. While there are strong arguments for donor-funded
scientific research to be based on PhD projects (arguments principally relating to
incentives for developing country researchers), the three-year PhD project is a very short
timescale for participatory research. The
requirements of a PhD also steer researchers towards safer, more scientific, on-station
activities and limit their ability to switch topics and approaches in mid-project. They give little incentive for researchers to work
on design of extension materials and liaison with extension services. There is a need for co-ordinated
thinking by donors, NARS and universities to address these problems.
There was some interest at the workshop in the funding of separate
project identification exercises, or longer projects subject to review points, to allow
the understanding of systems and the participatory choice of research topics before the
formal beginning of a PhD programme, as happened in the Kenyan
project. The workshop also recognised the risk of such an exercise creating farmer
expectations, which would be disappointed if the longer project was not funded or was
subject to delays. We nevertheless feel that
participatory research projects that are also PhD projects should be funded over four
years.
A further, more speculative suggestion is that universities should be
more imaginative in their choice of external examiners (or co-examiners) for PhDs, using
non-academic professionals such as senior extensionists,
representatives of formal farmer organisations or co-operative
officers.
In addition, it was a very important concern of the workshop, and of
livestock researchers visited subsequently in both countries, that on-farm data is not
considered suitable for publication in the peer-reviewed academic journals on which
professional reward systems for researchers are based.
It is certainly the case that reward systems in NARS give very heavy weight to
peer-reviewed publications, to the possible detriment of other forms of output, and that
many journal editors are suspicious of the “scientific” value of on-farm, and
particularly participatory, data (Note 7). However, there are dissenting voices. International researchers associated with
Netherlands funding (Rijk De Jong pers.comm., J B Schiere pers.comm and updated) tended to downplay this concern, by pointing
out that there are ‘softer’ but no less esteemed journals that will publish
participatory research, and that many researchers in NARS will not achieve a high
publication rate in either participatory or conventional research. There are also signs of change in the reward
systems themselves, particularly in
This paper has been exploratory, rather than aiming to reach firm
conclusions or guidelines for participatory livestock research, but some concluding
remarks are in order.
Firstly, clarity of objectives was a constant theme. In the real world, objectives are set by many
stakeholders with varying degrees of influence, for reasons developmentally good or bad. We can seek to increase the influence of
farmers on research objectives, but we have also to recognise
that participatorily-defined objectives do not always imply
participatory research. Not all research can,
or should be, highly participatory: what is important is to match methodologies to
objectives. For much research, particularly
funded by research budgets, this is likely to mean nudging research slightly from a
consultative towards a collaborative mode.
Secondly, there are important reasons why participatory methodologies
are less developed for livestock research, and these must be understood.
Thirdly, however, many of the most important constraints to
participatory research are institutional, are shared with participatory research in any
sub-sector, but also vary greatly between the institutional hosts of research and the
funding sources.
Fourthly, our project was not able to say a great deal about
participatory livestock trials. There
therefore remains important work to be done in reflecting further on analytical techniques
that can be used with participatory data, and most importantly in documenting
participatory methodologies for on-farm livestock trials from around the world.
This publication is an output from a research project funded by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) for the benefit of developing countries. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of DFID.
The projects concerned were: “Husbandry strategies for improving the sustainable utilisation of forages to increase profitable milk production from cows and goats on smallholder farms in Tanzania” ,carried out by Reading University, in collaboration with Sokoine University of Agriculture, Livestock in Development and NRI (see Ashley et al. 2000): and “Evaluation and improvement of feeding strategies for optimising feed intake in crop/livestock systems”, carried out by NRI, ILRI and the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (see Morton and Romney 2001, Lukuyu et al 2001).
The acronym can be used more broadly for National Agricultural Research Systems, including Universities and some parts or aspects of extension systems. It will be used in the narrower sense here.
For example, the Netherlands-funded Tanga Dairy Development Project hosted and provided key long-term data to the LPP-funded research project on "The development of feeding strategies to improve reproductive performance and milk yields of cows in high potential, mixed farming systems". ISLP played host to researchers from German Universities
These issues, and the relations between logical frameworks and participatory research, are explored in detail by Farrington and Nelson (1997).
Using PRA or more traditional data-collection methods in this way is sometimes labelled extractive as contrasted with participatory. We prefer to avoid this terminology; creating knowledge by surveys, even if that knowledge is not returned directly to the community, is a valid activity and hardly needs to be compared with strip-mining.
More accurately, the position of Dutch Development Aid is one that sees
on-station trials as a last resort (Rijk De Jong, pers.comm). It should also be
noted that the Netherlands-funded Tanga Dairy Development
Project in
A brief paper by one of the
authors (Morton 1997) sets out the views of some major livestock journals on on-farm and
participatory research. Editors were generaly welcoming of on-farm research, but cautious about research
that did not meet “normal” canons of experimental design and statistical rigour. However, few indicated a total refusal to accept
papers based on the latter form of research. As some Tanzanian researchers pointed out,
international and regional journals of farming systems, or agricultural social science,
which are peer-reviewed, may be a possible outlet for papers on participatory livestock
production research.
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Received 4 May 2002