Kristjanson, P (author), Place, F (author), Franzel, F (author), Thornton, P.K. (author), and International Livestock Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya
International Centre for Research on Agroforestry, Nairobi, Kenya
Format:
Online journal article
Publication Date:
2002-02-23
Published:
Kenya: Science Direct
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 109 Document Number: D10958
20 pages, via online journal, In this paper we provide evidence to show that farmers' perspectives on poverty processes and outcomes are critical in the early stages of evaluating impact of agricultural research on poverty. We summarize lessons learned from farmer impact assessment workshops held in five African locations, covering three agro-ecological zones and five different agroforestry and livestock technologies arising from collaborative national–international agricultural research. Poverty alleviation is a process that needs to be understood before impact can be measured. Workshops such as those we describe can help researchers to identify farmers' different ways of managing and using a technology and likely effects, unanticipated impacts, major impacts to pursue in more quantitative studies, the primary links between agricultural technology and poverty, and key conditioning factors affecting adoption and impact that can be used to stratify samples in more formal analyses. Farmer workshops inform other qualitative and quantitative impact assessment methods. We discuss the linkage of farmer-derived information with GIS-based approaches that allow more complete specification of recommendation domains and broader-scale measurement of impact.
22 pages, via online journal, Past explanations of why rural people respond as they do to external development interventions have emphasized the role of key limiting factors or critical characteristics (wealth, education, land tenure, etc.) which are thought to influence peoples' behavior in predictable ways. Efforts to promote tree planting and soil conservation in eight neighboring villages in the Philippines revealed that variation in participation did not reflect clear patterns based on existing household or village characteristics. Instead, specific responses to interventions reflected a complex, but interpretable interaction between existing socio-economic factors and historic trends or events. Characteristics like the degree of local knowledge, security of land tenure and community cohesion affected peoples' participation, in general, but their specific influence was neither predictable nor consistent between, and even within, individual villages. An appreciation of the specific historic context was often sufficient to explain these variations. The following historic trends and events were found to have important consequences for peoples' participation: migration and settlement history; family and group lineages; history of socio-political organization and conflict; history of physical isolation; labor history; economic–ecological history; environmental history; and past exposure to development agents. The paper concludes with a preliminary checklist of questions intended to assist researchers and development agents to discover relevant and interesting historical information about rural villages.
13 pages, via online journal, In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in farming systems research (FSR) as a means of getting formal research and extension systems to work with and respond to the needs of resource-poor farmers. However, the results of many FSR programmes have been disappointing. This paper reviews a number of ‘successful’ FSR activities and argues that the development and use of research approaches and methods cannot be separated from the political, economic and institutional context in which they were developed and used. A closer examination of some of the new FSR methods shows that an understanding of the specific context in which these activities were developed and used is essential to understanding the potential relevance of the methods/approaches to other circumstances. A lack of an historical perspective concerning the source and advocacy of new FSR approaches and methods is one of the reasons why many FSR programmes in the past have given rise to disappointing results.
