From: LEISA in Perspective – 15 ILEIA
Coen Reijntjes, Marilyn Minderhoud-Jones and Peter Laban
Farmers
everywhere experiment. They adapt, innovate and observe the results of their
work. Creating knowledge in this way is an integral part of sustaining
agricultural production. It is only recently that 'farmer-led' processes of
agricultural development have been superseded by formal scientist-directed
agricultural research. Increasing numbers of researchers and development
workers are acting as facilitators and equal partners in farmer-led
agricultural development. They recognised that farmers must be able to adapt to
continuously changing conditions and the needs of sustainability. Thus, it
becomes critical to strengthening farmers' ability to analyse, monitor, adapt
and innovate.
The following
factors are important in this process.
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What works in
one place, time and circumstance will not necessarily work elsewhere.
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What suits the
farmer prepared to take risks, or the one committed to full-time farming, may
not suit another with different ideas and constraints.
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The complexity
of farmers' land use and livelihood systems, and their diversity, can radically
affect the overall benefits of common sense interventions. For example,
destroying crop stubble to disrupt the life cycle of a particular pest may also
destroy the ratoon crop over which women or the landless have customary rights.
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The
message-based approach is one of the least effective of teaching methods.
Due to rapid
changes and the loss of indigenous knowledge and social cohesion, farmers and
their communities have often lost the self-confidence and capacity to adapt and
innovate. If they are to take development back into their own hands, they will
need encouragement and support to strengthen their innovative capacity.
Today's
farmers are more integrated into the national and global economy than those of
earlier generations, and agricultural development itself is more heavily
influenced by external processes and interests. Indigenous knowledge is often
insufficient to support the sustained development of effective livelihood and
farming strategies. Securing sustainable agriculture, therefore, requires not
only participatory development but also concerted action on the part of
farmers, development workers, researchers and policy makers. In the interests
of sustainability, individual farmers and communities have to co-operate with
other interest groups including land users, government officials, and consumer
groups. All have a stake in agriculture and all are jointly responsible for
keeping agriculture sustainable. Strengthening and facilitating farmer-led
development and concerted action are crucial for development towards LEISA.
Development
workers, researchers and policy makers play an important role in strengthening
farmer-led development and in the facilitation of concerted action. Development
workers stimulate and facilitate the local development process and strengthen
farmers' capacity to learn, adapt and innovate. Researchers support the local
development process by taking part in studies to assess the local situation and
they provide advice in setting up experiments. They can also assist in
monitoring and evaluation, and carrying out scientific research into the
problems identified by farmers. Policy makers, together with farmers, analyse
policies to see how far they create favourable conditions for the development
of LEISA. In this way a participatory process is established that strongly
improves the effectiveness of development.
As knowledge
relating to the development of sustainable agriculture is still limited, these
participatory development processes are interactive 'learning' processes. This
not only involves learning about the practical aspects of sustainable
agriculture but also about the implications of knowledge management, technology
development, marketing and fair trade.
A
participatory learning and development process requires profound changes in the
attitudes of those involved. Such processes build on farmers' knowledge, skills
and experiences and strengthen local decision-making. Researchers, policy
makers, development workers and farmers can all be considered experts. Farmers
know about their own reality and their land use systems. They can be skilled
innovators who have developed ways of experimenting through trial-and-error. In
order to co-operate with farmers, trust must be built up by respecting local
values, understanding and speaking the farmers' language and by working
together in a spirit of equality. In this process, outsiders often have to
reorient their thinking on agro-ecology, 'agri-culture', the indigenous economy
and knowledge, gender roles and relations, and methodologies for participatory
learning and development.
The potential
to facilitate and support participatory processes may differ widely from one
situation to the next depending on the skills and resources available. In one
situation it may only be possible to stimulate reflection on past and present
experiences and relate these to future plans, in another experimentation at
community level can be improved or a broad process of participatory development
and concerted action facilitated. There is already considerable choice of
methodologies for participatory land-use development including Participatory
Learning and Action (PLA), Rapid Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Systems
(RAAKS), Participatory Planning (for example, Gestion des Terroir),
Farmer-to-Farmer (FtF) extension, Participatory Assessment, Farmer Field
Schools (FFS) and Participatory Technology Development (PTD). Each of these
approaches deals with one or more aspects of participatory agricultural
development: analysis, planning, technology development, institutional
development, monitoring, evaluation or the sharing of information. Below, we
will examine some methodologies for participatory assessment, planning,
learning, experimentation and extension.
Assessment
involves an analysis of the evolution of farming and seeks to explain movements
away from or towards sustainability. It also seeks to identify the options for
bridging the gap between present trends and future needs. Assessment consists
of monitoring changes in conditions of production, objectives and needs, and
evaluates the impact of experiments and adaptations. Sustainable agriculture
includes not only the production system, but also involves processing, input,
trade, transport, communication, consumers, and research and extension.
Therefore, it may be necessary to include in the analysis the processing and
recycling of organic waste, the production of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides
as well as the social and environmental factors related to these activities.
Ideally, the
development of sustainable agriculture requires a comprehensive, historical and
dynamic analysis both at micro and macro levels. However, experience with
comprehensive analysis in Farming Systems Research shows that lack of time and
resources often means it is impossible to examine all aspects of agriculture.
Depending on the objectives of the assessment, the availability of money, and
the situation and skills of the actors, decisions have to be made about what
should be included in a participatory assessment. In order to avoid assessments
taking up too much of the farmers' time and resources, participatory methods
are needed that focus on key issues. Participatory assessment should support
farmers own analysis of factors that directly affect them and which they can
influence. Assessment of the wider development context, and especially of those
aspects farmers cannot change easily, can be left, in the first instance, to
researchers and policy makers.
Conventional
assessment in agriculture is generally restricted to economic analysis. As
environmental and social costs are externalised, this type of assessment tends
to encourage a lack of sustainability in agricultural development. A holistic
reference base covering the economic as well as the ecological and social
objectives of agriculture is needed. Criteria of sustainability' should be
fixed by norms which can be monitored using a set of measurable indicators. A
relatively homogeneous group of farmers may be able to formulate common
objectives, criteria, norms and indicators for sustainable agriculture.
However, as different categories of stakeholders often have conflicts of
interest, expectation, experience and vision, it may not always be easy to come
to an agreement on criteria and indicators.
The relative
importance given to each criterion may vary from stakeholder to stakeholder and
can change over time as awareness and insights into sustainable agriculture
evolve. Policy makers, for example, may require scientific quantitative
indicators before they are convinced, while farmers may prefer indicators
related to natural phenomena with which they are more familiar. Thus, to make
the planning and implementation of concerted action possible, participatory
assessment is needed in which differences in visions become visible and
negotiable. The challenge in assessment is to find ways to balance the
different criteria of sustainability and the diverse interests of different
categories of farmers with those of other land users and the state.
There are many
conventional and participatory assessment and planning methodologies, and new
methodologies continue to be developed. Here we examine some examples.
Participatory
Rural Appraisal (PRA) recently
renamed Participatory Learning for Action (PLA), is a methodological approach
that is used to enable farmers to analyse their own situation and to develop a
common perspective on natural resource management and agriculture at village
level. PRA is an assessment and learning process that empowers farmers to
create the information base they need for participatory planning and action.
Outsiders contribute facilitation skills and external information and opinions.
Many different tools have been developed for use in PRA. There are four main
classes: tools used in group and team dynamics; tools for sampling; methods for
interviews and dialogue; and methods for visualisation and preparing diagrams.
Most countries have had some experience with PRA and local publications are
available. IIED regularly reports on new developments in its PLA notes.
Gender
Analysis in Agriculture Gender Analysis seeks to analyse and monitor the roles
of men and women and their needs in land use and agricultural development. It
aims at empowering women to improve their position relative to men in ways that
will benefit and transform society as a whole. The analytical tools involved
focus on social relations and the division of resources within social units.
They make it possible to distinguish between the different activities,
aspirations, needs and interests of social groups and particularly between
those of men and women. Gender analysis has been extended to generation
analysis.
Bio-resource
analysis This approach is being developed by the International Centre for
Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM) and the International Institute
for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR). Flow diagrams are drawn to map 'bio-resource
flows'. These are used to identify options for improving the farming system including
increasing species diversity, recycling, bio-mass production and improving
economic efficiency, all indicators reflecting economic and ecological
sustainability. Using an indicator diagram it is possible to see whether or not
a system is becoming more sustainable. This is a particularly useful learning
approach when brainstorming together about the types and directions of
bio-resource flows. It is less useful when precise analysis is required.
Assessment of
progress towards sustainability In its concern for environmental conservation,
IUCN uses a participatory approach to 'assess progress toward sustainability'.
IUCN has developed methods for system, self- and project assessment. Its
approach fosters 'questions for survival' such as:
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What is the
condition of the people and the ecosystem?
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What is the
nature of the interactions between people and ecosystem?
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What motivates
people to do what they do?
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What action
should people take to improve their own situation and that of their ecosystem?
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How should
these actions be taken?
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How do people
know whether things are getting better or worse?
Programmes of
action can be developed from the answers to these questions. IUCN has developed
several tools for this including 'Participatory and Reflective Analytical Mapping'
(PRAM), 'Assessing and Planning Rural Sustainability' and the 'Barometer for
Sustainability'. To develop consensus on the priorities and actions among local
communities and other key stakeholders, IUCN has developed a method known as
'Strategic negotiation for community action'.
Several
networks that include FAO and the World Bank, are developing environmental
monitoring systems. These approaches use indicators and employ a
'pressure-state-response' framework. This framework makes it possible to link pressures
exerted on land quality by human activities and chart their effects on the
state of the land. Changes over time, the response by society to these
pressures, and the activities of land users and policy makers ca n also be
linked together. Generally, these indicators monitor the more direct
relationship between human action and the environment, such as the impact of
forest clearance, the cultivation of steep slopes and over-stocking. The use of
such techniques, however, may obscure the more complex interactions between
economics, politics and culture, and land use and the environment. In these
approaches, scientific as well as grassroot indicators are used.
Experience
with these methodologies is still limited, although more work has been done
with PRA and Gender Analysis. If the methodologies available could be presented
in one overall framework, it would make it easier to select those most
appropriate for the task in hand.
This category
of methodologies centre on approaches concerned with strengthening the
capacities of farmers to learn, experiment, adapt and innovate.
Farmer-to-Farmer extension, the Farmer Field School approach, and Participatory
Technology Development are among the most well-known approaches in this
category. These approaches also include assessment and planning based on the
methodologies referred to earlier.
Farmer-to-farmer
extension
Since the
early eighties, farmer-to-farmer extension has taken on the form of a movement
in Central and Latin America. Small farmers began to analyse their situation
and questioned the anti-ecological and anti-smallholder technologies of the
Green Revolution model being promoted. Farmers started to value farmers' own
knowledge and the process of learning from other farmers. In farmer-to-farmer
extension, farmers are seen as active subjects in their own development. Their
response to the factors that limit production is to use local resources in an
ecological way and to try and change the traditional vertical relationship
between extension workers and farmers. The objective of farmer to farmer
extension is to strengthen farmers' innovative spirit and their ability to
communicate knowledge with other farmers. In this process farmer promoters play
an important role.
Farmer
Field School approach
The Farmer
Field School approach developed from the Integrated Pest Management programmes
supported by FAO in Southeast Asia in the nineties. At present Farmer Field
Schools are also being organised in INM, bio-diversity and soil and water
conservation. Farmers discover and learn for themselves the relationship
between crops, pests, predators and soil and water. The Field Schools are
characterised by strong farmer-led and farmer-to-farmer extension. The aim is to
empower farmers so they are able to select and adapt the technologies most
appropriate to local agro-ecological and economic conditions. Emphasis is
placed on the fact that farmers should then go on with the process of
technology selection and adaptation themselves. Researchers and development
workers need to become experts in facilitating participatory learning,
selection and adaptation.
Farmer Field Schools encourage direct interaction between people and ecology. In field school IPM training, basic principles are discovered in the fields and linked to farmers' previous conceptions and experiences. In this way, farmers regain control over knowledge generation and dissemination, and technology development.