Learning About Stakeholder / Gender Differentiation in Agricultural Research and Extension in Zimbabwe: Is He the Farmer Or the Farmer’S Husband?
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Public Disclosure Authorized Assessing the impact of Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Public Disclosure Authorized Edited by: Nina Lilja, Jacqueline A Ashby, and Louise Sperling with the collaboration of Annie L Jones Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized CONTENTS Page Overview: Assessing the impact of using participatory research and 1 gender/stakeholder analysis Nina Lilja, Jacqueline A Ashby PART 1: TYPES OF PARTICIPATION AND THEIR IMPACT Chapter 1 Success Factors in Natural Resource Management Research: Dissection of a Complex Discourse 25 Kirsten Probst 2 Farmer Participation and Formal-Led Participatory Plant Breeding Programs: Types of Impact to Date 55 Eva Weltzien R, Louise Sperling, Margaret E Smith, Laura S Meitzner 3 Considering the Impact of Farmer-Led Participatory Plant Breeding: Lessons from Case Studies to Date 77 Shawn McGuire PART 2: TYPES OF GENDER/USER DIFFERENTIATION AND THEIR IMPACT Chapter 4 Learning about Stakeholder/Gender Differentiation in Agricultural Research and Extension in Zimbabwe: Is he the Farmer or the Farmer’s Husband? 91 Jürgen Hagmann, Edward Chuma, Oliver Gundani 5 Incorporating Gender Concerns in Participatory Rice Breeding and Varietal Selection: Preliminary Results from Eastern India 109 Thelma R Paris, Abha Singh, Joyce Luis, Mahabub Hossain, Hari Nath Singh, Sanjay Singh, Omkar Nath Singh 6 Participatory Testing and Evaluation of Manual Rice Transplanters by Nepalese Women Farmers 122 Vinay Kumar Gami, Scott E Justice Page PART 3: METHODS AND TOOLS FOR MONITORING AND EVALUATION OF NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PROJECTS Chapter 7 Monitoring and Evaluating Participatory Research in Community-Based Natural Resource Management Projects 133 Karen McAllister 8 Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation of a Local Development Program: The Case of AS-PTA/Paraíba 162 Manoel Roberval da Silva, Pablo Sidersky, Irene Guijt, Luciano Marçal 9 Self-Evaluation as an Approach to Assessing Participatory Research: an Asian Experience 172 Dindo Campilan, Gordon Prain PART 4: MEASURING THE IMPACT OF PARTICIPATORY PLANT BREEDING Chapter 10 Farmer Management of Maize Diversity in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico: Methods Proposed for Impact Assessment 185 Mauricio R Bellon, Melinda Smale, Alfonso Aguirre, Flavio Aragón, Suketoshi Taba, Julien Berthaud, Jaime Díaz, Humberto Castro 11 Participatory Breeding: Does it make a Difference? Lessons from Namibian Pearl Millet Farmers 198 Emmanuel S Monyo, Sheehamanje A Ipinge, Geoffrey M Heinrich, Effie Chinhema 12 Breeding Better Rainfed Rice Varieties through Farmer Participation: Some Early Lessons from Eastern India 208 Brigitte Courtois, Rama Kant Singh, Sushil Pandey, Colin Piggin, Thelma Paris, Suraphong Sarkarung, Virendra Pal Singh, Graham McLaren, Suraj Singh Baghel, Ram Kumar Sahu,Vishwa Nath Sahu, Sharad Kumar Sharma, Sanjay Singh, Hari Nath Singh, Abha Singh, Omar Nath Singh, Bhupinder Veer Singh Sisodia, Chandra Hari Misra, Jafran Keshari Roy, Devendra Chaudhary, Kameshwari Prasad, Rama Kant Singh, Pramod Kumar Sinha, Nimai Prasas Mandal Page PART 5: MEASURING THE IMPACT OF PARTICIPATORY NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Chapter 13 Developing Integrated Pest Management with Kenyan Farmers: Evaluation of a Pilot Project 227 Michael Loevinsohn, Gerdien Meijerink, Beatrice Salasya 14 Towards Participatory Management of Natural Resources: Experiences from the Calico River Watershed in Nicaragua 242 Ronnie Vernooy, María E Baltodano, Jorge A Beltrán, Nohemi Espinoza, Dominga Tijerino 15 Impacts of Using Participatory Research and Gender Analysis in Integrated Pest Management Research 257 Sarah Hamilton, George W Norton APPENDICES I List of Participants 269 II List of Acronyms and Abbreviations Used in Text 277 INDEX 282 Overview OVERVIEW: ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF USING PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH AND GENDER/STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS Nina Lilja*, Jacqueline A Ashby** Introduction Public-sector and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly using participatory methods to widen the adoption and impact of a range of technology innovations in agriculture and natural resource management (NRM). Examples of these technology innovations are: new crop varieties, improved crop husbandry, or changes in the management of soil, water, or forest resources. The growing scarcity of resources for research outside the private sector places increasing demands on researchers to provide evidence that the costs of participatory methods are justified by the results. Carefully conducted impact studies are needed to provide convincing evidence that client participation has been a good investment in the past and will continue to be so in the future. Although researchers using participatory methods have observed the success of the approach in a variety of fields, and documented results in a number of case studies, the impacts of using participatory research in contrast to other approaches are rarely systematically analyzed and recorded. This absence of well-documented analysis gives rise to important yet unanswered questions that are critical not only for the long-run credibility of participatory methods, but also for the survival of the principle of user or client participation in research and innovation. Ashby (1996) outlines these questions as: 1. What degree of user participation is appropriate at a given stage in the innovation process? 2. What approaches to farmer participatory research and gender analysis (PRGA) are most effective for different types of technologies: e.g., knowledge or management intensive? 3. Are farmer PRGA approaches broadly applicable? 4. How do we measure benefits and monitor performance in relation to different goals (of various stakeholders)? 5. What are the costs? An objective of using gender/stakeholder analysis is to assess how best to involve all stakeholders in the innovation process. This requires that we consider what patterns affect development among the stakeholders, analyze what activities the different types of stakeholders carry out, and assess with what resources different stakeholders work. Gender and stakeholder analysis does not always directly provide answers to agricultural production or NRM problems. But, it does provide means of raising questions about links between and among different stakeholders and agricultural production or NRM. Moreover, carefully conducted and documented gender/stakeholder analysis builds a solid basis for developing strategies to incorporate gender issues that are key to the success of development efforts (for gender analysis frameworks see for example: Wilde and Vainio-Mattila 1995, Lingen 1997). Similarly, a sound assessment of the impacts of gender/stakeholder analysis provides convincing evidence on how effectively it meets the overall goals of the development efforts. 1 Assessing the Impact of PRGA This introductory essay analyzes the main features of work being done to assess the impact of applying participatory research approaches and gender analysis to processes of innovation in agriculture and NRM, as a basis for recommending new directions for understanding and achieving greater impact in the future. We begin with a brief review of the status of impact assessment on PRGA. We discuss the main gaps in current work in the light of these key concepts of impact assessment. Next, we propose a general framework for assessing the impacts of using participatory research approaches and gender analysis. In this context of the framework, we also refer to the empirical cases of impact assessment, which are presented in the following chapters of this book. State-of-the-Art Impact Assessment of Participatory Approaches and Gender/Stakeholder Analysis A most important feature of the enormous body of work in progress using participatory approaches for rural development, agricultural innovation, and NRM is that the adage “a rose is a rose is arose” in no way applies. A high diversity of objectives and expected impacts are attributed to participation, making it a complex task to define the most important impacts for assessment in relation to different stakeholders’ interests. These impacts range along a continuum from efficiency or functional types of impact to capacity building and empowerment. For example, participation is used to improve the design and adoption of an agricultural technology – an efficiency outcome. A somewhat different outcome attributed to participation is that of local people’s improved capacity to manage soil and water resources sustainably, and to maintain local control over this management. Another feature of the diversity of expected impacts attributed to the use of participation is the lack of discrimination between process outcomes and final or “technology” outcomes. For example, a participatory approach to technology development can have an effect on the way experiments are carried out (process outcome) and thus on the number and type of people adopting the final technology hence capturing the economic benefits from adoption. The way the research is carried out, in other words, whether it is participatory or non-participatory, will also have a direct impact on the costs of doing research. Similarly, the impact of using a participatory approach is often confounded with the impact of the innovation (technology) introduced using it. Why is this important? First, confounding these two impacts may overestimate that of participation by attributing to it results that could be accomplished by introducing the same innovation without a participatory approach. Typically,