Presented by Paul Sillitoe at the Expert meeting on participatory agricultural research: Approaches, design and evaluation, Oxford, 9-13 December 2013

1. Participatory research:
A brief overview
Paul Sillitoe
University of Durham
Expert meeting on participatory agricultural research: Approaches, design
and evaluation, Oxford, 9-13 December 2013

2. Development as material progress
• Assumes technologically driven change
• Assumes capitalist market political
economy
• Development aims to reduce global poverty

3. • Material = only legitimate
measure of objective
progress
• Top-down interventions
planned and implemented by
agencies
• Theory of modernisation

4. Development and social change
• Technology not socially neutral
• Natural resources v. social dimensions enduring source of confusion about
development

5. Socio- cultural variation
• Socio-cultural acceptability a
central issue
• Generic solutions v culturally
tailored ones

6. Unsustainable development
• Sustainable development – today’s buzz
word
• Repeated failure of development
programmes

7. What is sustainability?
• Sustainability - change is gradual
• Development - change is rapid
• Difficult to square sustainability with
economic growth
• Environmental costs of capitalism potentially
unsupportable long-term

8. Participation
• Agencies realise human element important
• Precursor = Farming Systems Research
• But participatory approaches have not
enjoyed the success anticipated by
supporters. Why?

9. Local versus global science
What do you see?

10. • Duck-rabbit -- questions privileging of
global science
• Focus on the interface where knowledge
negotiation occurs

11. Hybridisation
Generic development
solutions versus socioculturally specific
ones

12. Soundness of local science
• Idea others’ knowledge can contribute -- even
challenge science – appears preposterous
• Increasingly realised local knowledge of
natural resources and practices integral
aspects of any environment

13. Local know-how and sustainability
• Much to learn from those we presume to
develop regarding sustainability
• Appreciation of local ideas & practices to
encourage more sustainable development in
both ecological & cultural senses
• Implies undoing much of the change
previously imposed on populations to
‘develop’ them?

14. Interdisciplinarity
• Focussing on identified researchable constraints
• Distorting to divorce knowledge from wider
socio-cultural context
• Problems of reductionism lead to calls for
interdisciplinarity
• Local knowledge interdisciplinary by definition

15. Tacit knowing
• Challenge documenting tacit knowledge
• How can we capture in words?
• We all engage daily in acts not focally aware of

16. Variation
• Variation in what people know
• Clustering of certain knowledge within
populations
• Links to political power

17. Local political issues
• Participation in hierarchical societies?
• Experts know all
• Challenge to devise inclusive approaches
• Problem of short time research frames

18. Knowing what’s at stake:
education?
• Education a development priority, to inform
people
• But how to avoid brainwashing?

19. International political issues
• Left wing = appropriate local determination
• Right wing = getting market to work
• Participation as parroting dominant view
• How realistic to expect dominant nations to
relinquish power?
• Complexities of democratic government

20. Manipulation of participation
• Participation a forlorn hope?
• Participatory development subject to
manipulation
• Political pressures for control and ‘results’
• Blueprint v process approaches

21. Misuse of knowledge
• Agencies may misuse knowledge
• Unfair exploitation as a commodity
• Concerns for intellectual property rights

22. • Substantial challenges
• Thanks!