Resources

Considers the changes that are afoot with regard to learning, research and extension within agriculture in developing countries. Decentralization, participatory approaches and such methods are gradually becoming less marginalized, with the professional rewards of their adoption rising compared with the risks. For change to be rapid and sustainable requires the mutual reinforcement of participatory methods, new learning environments, and institutional support. The paper contains sections on the following: changing phases in agricultural research, extension and development; a vision for the future; the role of governments and state institutions; non governmental organizations; international agricultural research and the CGIAR; local institutions; education and learning organizations; and institutional and policy implications for the new professionalism. It is concluded that a sound strategy is steady lateral spread through alliances, mutual support, networking, training and sharing, stressing not only methods and learning environments, but also personal behaviour and attitudes. This paper begins with the perspective that "the dominant positivist and modernist frameworks have singularly failed to help poor people and reduce inequity." It proceeds to consider the options and alternatives to the dominant paradigm considering common uniting themes. Some of these themes are: the affirmation of individuals and their perspectives, the importance of context and therefore limitations on the whole notion of transferability and replicability and the importance of participation.

It concerns a variation in wealth ranking exercise that was used in the context of a mid-term field survey. It involved socioeconomic analysis and differentiation of the target population of a rural development project in Zaire and was funded by GTZ. The paper lays out the procedure, and briefly reports on its findings; giving a justification for the use of its methodology.

This paper describes a five day RRA exercise carried out in a village in Gujarat, in order to classify the economic status of a community. The classifications were obtained through interviews carried out with key people in the village. Each household was classified using criteria developed by the villagers themselves. The paper reports the results under the following headings: health of family members; education of children; assets ownership; credit worthiness; land ownership; part-time employment; and house size.

AKRSP supports village institutions in undertaking soil and water conservation on the private land holdings of farmers as a part of the watershed management programme, identified by the villagers as one of their priorities for natural resource management. This paper examines this process with regard to the village of Madargadh. The programme has at its centre the Extension Volunteer, who prepare watershed treatment plans and maps for their village. They are trained in conducting impact studies in order that the impact of soil and water conservation programmes be assessed after the rains. The paper reports on: the sequence of participatory impact monitoring; the process of impact monitoring; recommendations of farmers, made in the light of analysis of impact data; and the application of participatory impact monitoring for natural resource management projects on the general level.

This note is based on the adaptation of matrix scoring in order to investigate local perceptions of agroecosystem properties, namely: productivity, stability, sustainability and equity. It concerns a recently concluded PRA workshop in Paiyur for scientists from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. The paper concludes that sequencing of activities and a relaxed approach to collaborative exploration is a prerequisite for understanding the behaviour of the farm family. Scoring of any kind involves implicit weighting, and inter-year, inter-plot and enterprise combinations confound the issues. Generally, in this area, matrix scoring was concluded to have worked well, sheding much light on the functioning of agroecosystems.

This represents an attempt to compare the results of an RRA assessment with those generated by a less rapid approach. It crosschecks the results of RRA, assesses the extent to which RRA was fulfilled, and as a result considers the implications for RRA methodology. The activities of the study are centred around the Barakin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State, Nigeria. Ten issues are discussed in which RRA did not fully illustrate the extent of problems, among these are soil fertility, organizational structures, agricultural development and income. In concluding, the paper emphasizes the need for greater representation of the views of women; the requirement of good relationships so as to access critical information, especially in RRA; and the specific attention that needs to be given to cultural differences present both in terms of the researchers and the appraised.

The first RRA was carried out in Australia in 1988 with the aim of "forging closer links between researchers and farmers, utilising farmers' expertise and determining possibilities for future agronomic research in the area". It was also hoped to evaluate RRA as a "problem identification method in a developed country context". The RRA was carried out in two phases (exploratory and topical) with two teams of researchers from agricultural and social science backgrounds. The six most frequent problems, identified by producers and research team separately, are listed and a summary of the "action strategies" that were decided upon. Advantages of RRA over conventional survey methodologies included raising the profile of the School of Crop Sciences (who initiated the RRA exercise) in the Shire. The findings also supported the original assumption that "many of the problems that have been evident in developing countries are also evident in developed countries".