Lightfoot, Clive

This paper describes experiences from East Africa and elsewhere where coalitions of different agriculture-related organisations at different levels have been using a learning process for collective planning and innovation. The learning process follows five phases:
À Defining future agroecosystems
À Matching farmer demands with the services needed to create those agrosystems
À Negotiating new partnerships
À Taking action and assessing the actions taken
À Assessing the performance of the new partnerships

This paper aims to devise a farmer participatory method that not only improves farmer management of natural resources, but also monitors the impact of improvements. This assessment is made in terms of: economic efficiency, biological material recycling, species biodiversity and material input-output balance. Results suggest that high performance in all indicators can occur simultaneously and that economic loss from crop failure does not jeopardise performance in biodiversity and recycling.