Order from chaos? making local data relevant for policy audiences

Participatory methods are frequently extremely good at gathering huge amounts of information, but are often less helpful with the question of how to deal with the information. This article relates some methods that were used to deal with this issue in India, by SPEECH (Society for People's Education and Economic Change), a small field-based NGO, in examining sustainable agriculture. It describes a simplified example of the process, which includes narrowing down the information, interpreting the information, as well as making it relevant for a policy audience. Also crucial are explicit plans for an iterative process of discussion and feedback/ review of the emerging results, in order to validate the research results.