Document(s) 4 of 15

Introduction

Researchers are approaching the process of innovation, as well as their own role in improving natural resource management (NRM) in a new way. ‘Research and development’ – also known as R&D – derives from the concept of researchers who are in control of a pipeline for producing technological innovations: an idea goes in at one end of the pipeline, research develops a prototype, and then a fully developed product comes out, ready to be released to eager users, at the other end of the pipeline. In contrast, ‘research for development’ emphasizes the iterative, adaptive nature of innovation in complex ecosystems, which is achieved through systematic enquiry combined with learning based in action. The purpose of this chapter is to set the scene for understanding the evolution of new approaches to innovation in agriculture and NRM and the kind of research and development process needed to realize their potential for NRM.

Research for development in NRM is just one part of an innovation process, which is shaped by multiple social and political actors as well as by environmental conditions. Adaptive management is an approach to coping with the complexity of resource management, based on establishing indicators, trying interventions, monitoring their effects and learning from feedback. It depends on the ability of resource managers to receive, understand and respond to positive or negative signals in the physical and social environment and to change management responses accordingly (Berkes and Folke, 1998). Several of the case studies in this book make use of the livelihoods approach (Scoones, 1998), which integrates NRM into a framework for analysing how people use natural resources to make a living. The livelihoods approach treats access to natural resources as one asset among several other kinds of capital – human, social,

financial and physical. A rural livelihood is considered sustainable when it is resilient enough to bounce back from stresses and shocks, maintaining its assets without degrading the natural resource base. From this perspective, natural resource use by individuals or groups is only one part of the livelihood strategy of those people. A reversal of environmental degradation requires new livelihood options that change people’s incentives, in particular the benefits and costs of resource use. When innovation in resource management is driven by perceived tradeoffs, participatory assessments of livelihood strategies are important for developing a common understanding of how these depend on natural resource assets (Carney, 1998). Both adaptive management and livelihood analysis approach NRM as a process of social change.

In an adaptive process, enquiry (or research) to generate new knowledge and learning to share existing knowledge are both important, although the emphasis on one or the other will vary from time to time. Researchers are only one among many stakeholder groups, each with different kinds of knowledge and often with competing ideas about the purpose of research, as well as of the use of the natural resources in question. As several cases in this book illustrate, in order to do research for development, researchers are beginning to relinquish classical, reductionist notions of control and objectivity. One of the major challenges is for researchers to recognize that their results and their impact on NRM depend on relationships with other stakeholders, who may have more power to visualize and to realize the desired outcomes of interventions than the researchers do. As a result, the participation of key stakeholders alongside scientists in a jointly managed process of investigation and learning based in action is a central feature of research for development. In such science, quality depends on the quality of the participation of all the relevant stakeholders in research and development, and in the overall innovation process.

The change in concepts and approaches that is represented by ‘research for development’ is a crucial part of a larger societal process of rethinking several important relationships: between post-industrial, globalizing economies and stocks of natural capital; between human health and the environment; between our food systems and the flora and fauna, soil, water and air on which we depend; and, ultimately, the relationship between human society and nature. This shift in thinking is occurring because the capacity of global ecosystems to support current levels of human consumption of food and environmental goods and services is threatened at local, regional and global scales and has finally become a major political issue and a topic for headline news. Research for development is also part of a movement to promote broad and inclusive participation in determining the goals and direction of societal development.

Global concern for the depletion of natural capital stocks is not only an expression of the conservation ethic, but is linked to concern with international poverty, famine and disaster. Ecological threats of global significance are paralleled by the vulnerability of over 800 million poor people to malnutrition, disease and high rates of infant mortality, together with rising inequality in the distribution of wealth. The capacity of poor households, communities and countries to recover from external shocks such as war, famine, epidemic disease,

hurricanes, global climate change and indebtedness partly depends on the status of their stocks of natural capital. The diversity of this natural capital gives it an important advantage over man-made capital in providing the poor with the resilience to survive periods of stress in their livelihood systems, given that diverse ecosystems are more able to recover from shocks and stress (Conway, 1985, 1987; Pearce et al, 1990). Poverty, growing inequity and the importance of natural capital to the poor mean that global and local competition between rich and poor over natural resources, such as water, is expected to be one of the most significant causes of conflict in the 21st century.

Several decades of NRM research have proved disappointing to efforts to halt the degradation of stressed environments and fragile ecosystems where poverty is increasing. Critics find that rural development policies, agencies and practitioners have repeatedly been proved wrong and have lost credibility; that the research establishment has shown itself incapable of addressing the decline of rural society, the needs of poor rural populations in fragile environments and deepening crises in the depletion and degradation of natural resources; and that resource management science is fundamentally on the wrong track (Ashby, 2001; Campbell, 1998; Chambers, 1997). Public sector research on NRM could build a stock of socially useful knowledge that would enable human societies to sustain both natural resources and human well-being over the long term. However, the prevalent approach to NRM which treats ecosystem components separately (for example, independent disciplines, programmes and policies for soil, biodiversity, forestry, etc) is unsuited to addressing problems in complex ecosystems. One of the main reasons for this is the high degree of variability and unpredictability of processes in complex ecosystems which tend to reach a critical threshold and then produce unanticipated effects, often the opposite of those the resource managers intended (Holling, 1986; Tenner 1996; McDougall and Braun, this volume).

The conventional approach to NRM is based on reducing and controlling variability in order to contain and avoid negative impacts. But experience shows that if variability is reduced and natural patterns of disturbances are disrupted, they accumulate and return at a later stage on a much broader scale. Diminishing variability tends to increase the potential for larger-scale, less predictable and less manageable disturbances, which can have devastating effects on ecosystems (Ludwig et al, 1997) and reduce their capacity to provide the environmental services on which material and energy stocks and flows depend. A well-known example given by Holling (1986) is forest fire suppression that leads to an accumulation of litter on the forest floor, which eventually provides fuel for a fierce, uncontrollable conflagration once a fire does take hold. In contrast, allowing variability to occur in the form of periodic, small-scale fires helps to maintain a viable forest ecosystem. For NRM to work with variability in whole ecosystems, a radical change is called for in the way research is carried out (McDougall and Braun, this volume). The emergent properties of new approaches can already be detected in new ways of doing science as well as in new kinds of research organizations (Ashby, 2001).

New approaches to adaptive NRM involve social and organizational, as well as technical, change. Recent research has highlighted the value of traditional as

well as new, modern local institutions to sustainable resource management –and this evidence has contributed to a forceful critique of the neglect and destruction of local resource management institutions by central government interventions, often leading to worsening resource degradation (Ostrom, 1990; Folke et al, 1998). As a result, decentralization and participation in resource management are widely seen as increasing effectiveness, although for these to be realized, locally accountable representation and power of decision – ie, a domain of independent local decision-making – must be present (Ribot, 1999). Devolution of resource management to local stakeholders is part of the wider movement to empower citizens to determine the directions and goals of development, of which research for development is one facet.

Most of the literature on common property regimes for resource management has not yet included a hard look at how institutional and technical innovations are catalysed, or the role of stakeholder-based, participatory approaches to research in the innovation process. However, recent work using field experiments with alternative common property management decision-making regimes conducted in rural communities suggests some insights that are valuable for participation in research for resource management. The findings illustrate the importance of collective participation by researchers and the ‘researched’. The construction of communication channels between scientists and the people whose behaviour they were investigating led to preconceived hypotheses being discarded while the participants’ explanations opened up new avenues for investigation (Cardenas, 2002). These findings from economics are analogous to those showing that an important result of farmer participation in a plant breeding process is to provide feedback that re-orients breeding objectives and the way plant breeding research is organized (Lilja and Erenstein, 2002).

Although decentralization, devolution and participation are widely promoted as desirable features of the organization of NRM, the need for comparable changes in the organization of research including stakeholder participation has received little attention. Research programmes that do not include organizational learning about relationships between researchers and the people whose NRM practices are being investigated run into serious difficulties. As Stroud’s case study in this volume illustrates, stakeholder participation in NRM research requires changes in research practice, attitudes, roles and responsibilities.

The research analysed in this book provides a foundation for addressing the issues of complexity, stakeholder diversity and institutional transformations needed to enable research for development and the cornerstones of ‘good practice’ for participatory research in NRM.

The challenge for research

When researchers analyse and make recommendations on the management of natural resources – soil, water or biodiversity, for example – they confront the different values that stakeholders assign to these services. Ecological services include: maintenance of the composition of the atmosphere; regulating climate

variability; water quantity and quality; flood control; waste assimilation; nutrient recycling; soil generation; crop pollination; pest regulation; biodiversity maintenance; and landscape maintenance – to name but a few (Daily, 1997; Conway, 1997). Alternative resource management regimes distribute ecological services, and their costs and benefits, differently among different groups in society, who have competing interests in how the resources in question are managed – for example, in managing forests for commercial logging, for tourism or for wildlife preservation. In order to move from theory to practice, and to put research findings to practical use, tradeoffs between different uses have to be taken into account. The tradeoffs between one resource management regime and another have to be negotiated among different interest groups, or open conflict may emerge. Even if conflict over competing objectives for a given resource is not explicit, the result of a lack of consensus about how to manage that resource can be mismanagement – to its long-run detriment. The need for negotiation or conflict resolution to facilitate agreement about the use of natural resources means that research to improve NRM must ‘democratize’ by involving a broad set of stakeholders. As noted before, this requires researchers to recognize that they are only one group of stakeholders among many with different values and objectives for the resources in question.

The principle of involving stakeholders in NRM research is at the heart of research for development for two important reasons. The first reason is that stakeholder involvement and ‘buy-in’, or ownership, is crucial for identifying acceptable tradeoffs, for negotiating distributions of costs and benefits and for reaching consensus about the research findings and recommendations. Successful common property regimes can restrict access to a resource and establish procedures for decision-making about joint use; and they typically include social mechanisms for regulating the levels of resource use allowed, by whom, when and where, as well as procedures for resolving conflict, enforcing compliance and sanctioning non-compliance (Ostrom, 1990). Stakeholder ‘buy-in’ to these self-imposed rules and regulations depends on the existence of a shared understanding about cause and effect in key resource management processes and operations: for example, how much logging can be done without permanently damaging a forest ecosystem. In traditional common property regimes the understanding of cause–effect needed to maintain ‘buy-in’ can be established by long-term empirical observation and testing of cause–effect relations and may be embodied in long-accepted ritual, religion and custom. In conditions of rapid change, the understanding needed for consensus and compliance requires new knowledge to be generatedby research in order to achieve stakeholder ‘buy-in’ and often needs to include expertise drawn from other stakeholder groups (Funtowicz and Ravtz, 1993; Irwin, 1995). This form of ownership often needs to be established across a range of institutions and levels of decision-making (Martin and Sutherland, this volume).

A second reason for involving stakeholders in research is that their involvement is key to coping with the unpredictability of change and to sustaining variability, diversity and resilience in ecosystems, which was discussed earlier as an important principle for managing complex ecosystems. To adapt resource management iteratively so that it works with natural variability and

disturbance patterns in ecosystems, stakeholders, including researchers, need to interact with each other in a process of discovery and learning about how each other’s behaviour affects an ecosystem, how this alters the status of the natural resources in which they have an interest, and how each stakeholder’s actions (or passivity) influences the distribution of costs and benefits. Social norms or behavioural rules, values and institutions that encourage shareholders to engage in shared experimentation, trial-and-error learning and ‘ecological literacy’ (see Box 1.1) help groups of people to respond to variability and to calculate the cross-scale effects (see Box 1.2) of their behaviour (Vernooy case study, this volume), which may otherwise remain hidden, but powerful, drivers of environmental change. Behavioural rules and institutions for experimenting with resource management can be seen as one aspect of resilience and adaptiveness in co-dependent social systems and ecosystems (Berkes and Folke, 1998). Participatory research for adaptive NRM can be understood as an important cluster of behavioural rules, values and ways of organizing that promote receptivity in a social system to feedback from the environment, and thus ecosystem resilience.

In summary, there are three main facets of the challenge facing participatory research for NRM. The first is to engage stakeholders in processes of systematic enquiry to uncover and understand the ‘knock-on’ effects of different management regimes and their cross-scale effects. The second is to link this enquiry to knowledge sharing, so that the information produced by research is relevant to common goals, is socialized and provides a basis for action. Given that the problems needing research involve cross-scale effects, the third facet is to find the appropriate scales at which stakeholders’ enquiry, learning and action need to mesh with each other in order to change (or maintain) resource management regimes.

In order to make the connection among enquiry, learning and action at appropriate scales, it can be useful to situate thinking about participatory research in the broader context of promoting innovation for NRM. Research to promote innovation through learning based in action is a key to successful, sustainable resource management in a rapidly changing environment. An analysis of 208 cases of sustainable agriculture from 52 countries, involving almost 9 million farmers on close to 30 million hectares, concludes that successes have been founded on a participatory approach involving farmer experimentation, and building a capacity to learn about biological and ecological complexity (Pretty and Hine, 2001). Many of the cases in this book are about the transition from doing research and development to doing research for development that builds on this principle. A sustained, collective capacity for innovation is critical for improving the management of natural resources. The capacity to innovate must be sustained because an iterative learning process is required to maintain or improve the complex natural systems that provide human society with food and environmental services. And the capacity to innovate must often be collective because, most of the time, managing natural resources involves multiple stakeholders with different and often competing uses for the same resources who must negotiate and act together to avoid destructive management practices. As many of the case studies illustrate, research in this setting has to become a collective enterprise in which different stakeholders’ values, knowledge and expertise are negotiated to produce results.

Definitions of participatory research

This book is a reflection on the conduct of research for participatory adaptive NRM when this research is part of a learning process shared by multiple stakeholders, including the state, non-governmental agencies, community-based groups and private individuals, as well as research organizations. The terms ‘participatory management’, ‘participatory research’ and ‘participatory learning’ are frequently used interchangeably and with little concern for overlap among them. In order to discuss different kinds of participatory research, it is useful first to clarify what we are talking about, and then to review some of the principles that are common to all.

Participatory natural resource management

Participatory natural resource management (PNRM) involves the management of resources by the relevant stakeholders (as opposed to their being excluded by other agencies). It requires the negotiation of goals and acceptable tradeoffs among multiple stakeholders, who may include researchers and other learning communities. It also involves participatory problem definition, visioning and building a shared agenda for action. Agreeing upon rules of resource management and how to enforce compliance is a typical element of participatory resource management. Examples of participatory management are given in the case studies included in this volume by Brinn, Borrini-Feyerabend and Garrity.

Sharing knowledge among stakeholders to build a common analysis of a problem and its solutions is a characteristic of participatory resource management. Some of this knowledge may need to be generated by research, but this is often not the case. In many cases the knowledge exists in one stakeholder group but it needs to be shared. An example of the role of knowledge sharing in PNRM is the community approach to the control of bacterial wilt (Pound case study, this volume).

Adaptive, participatory natural resource management

The inclusion of the term ‘adaptive’ means that integrating participatory knowledge sharing with knowledge generation is achieved in an NRM process. Iterative learning and research loops are a major feature of the adaptive approach to management and they involve changes in social institutions as well as in environmental conditions (Folke et al, 1998). This is not just a question of degree, as participatory management often stops short of operationalizing these feedback loops, and as a result is unable to self-correct or to scale up. As Vincent (this volume) and Stroud (this volume) emphasize, the importance of learning lessons in participatory research is to limit mistakes and create new ways of looking at resource management problems. Participatory management without the feedback loop afforded by integrating research and learning often stagnates after the first flush of participation. Successful adaptive PNRM usually involves a process in which one or more stakeholder groups combine their efforts to

understand environmental feedback, do participatory research and use the results to inform the learning process, intervene jointly in resource management, monitor the status of the ecosystem including its people, and learn from this experience in order to adapt the next management intervention. Adaptive PNRM includes re-vitalizing and institutionalizing many practices common in successful local resource management systems (see Box 1.1), for example building monitoring indicators (McDougall case study, this volume).

Participatory learning

Participatory learning is an approach aimed at sharing knowledge based on the principles of discovery learning. Adult education, in particular, uses discovery-based learning because adults often learn and retain information better when they uncover principles and facts themselves rather than when they are told about them. Farmer field schools are a good example of the use of participatory learning to share knowledge for NRM (Nelson case study, this volume). Participatory learning often evolves into participatory research because there are questions that none of the stakeholders can answer satisfactorily and that can best be addressed through participatory research methods (Braun et al, 2000). Vernooy and McDougall (this volume) argue that participatory learning that changes people’s fundamental understanding of resource management processes, including their own behaviour, is a means of empowering stakeholders, particularly the underprivileged, to take more control over resources important to their survival.

Research for participatory resource management

Research for participatory resource management requires, but is not limited to, the use of participatory methods. In other words, PNRM does not mean that only participatory research approaches and methods can be used. A wide range of research methods, both participatory and non-participatory are combined and need to be understood as a spectrum of methods and approaches (see McDougall and Braun, this volume, for a comparison of approaches) from which stakeholders – not just researchers – can choose. The cases analysed in this book illustrate how research for participatory management involves stakeholders in generating new information relevant to making decisions about the parameters and procedures for adaptive management. These parameters or procedures may include the boundaries of the ecosystem, the relevant actors, the physical and social spaces for intervention, the priority problems and opportunities, the alternative development paths, optional interventions (both technical and institutional) and the tradeoffs these entail for different stakeholders. The Schreier case study in this volume illustrates the combination of geographic information systems (GIS) research with participatory management; Vaughan’s case study in this volume shows how modelling is being integrated with participatory research methods; Martin and Sutherland in Chapter 2 explain how researchers’ own institutional studies were used to inform participants in community meetings convened to vision new forms of devolving resource

management. Snapp and Heong, in this volume point out that a major research challenge is to combine the various ‘information bits’ derived from different stakeholders, and distil these into decision rules that they can use.

A useful rule of thumb is: the more stakeholder ‘buy-in’ that is required –and the more diverse expertise needed to generate the information required to reach agreement – the more important it is to use participatory research approaches and methods for NRM.

However, whether participatory or non-participatory methods of enquiry are used, research carried out for PNRM has to incorporate stakeholders’ different research objectives and criteria for validity and credibility even if, for example, stakeholders are not involved in data collection and analysis. Then methods – both participatory and non-participatory – need to be agreed upon that meet these objectives.

Participatory research

It can be seen from the above discussion that participatory research is a collection of approaches that enable participants to develop their own understanding of and control over the processes and events being investigated. This is derived from the principle that greater understanding and power to use information results from being involved in its generation. Participatory methods for monitoring and evaluation help to make NRM more accountable to stakeholders, and to give participants greater confidence in the results. In the McDougall case study in this volume, easily understood criteria and indicators are developed by local communities, researchers and other stakeholders. These provide a framework for later monitoring, and for assessing key factors and their direction of change. This monitoring process creates the opportunity to feedback information and learning into the community forest management system. It thus serves to guide future action, helping to increase the sustainability of community forest resources. In a different approach, Vernooy and McDougall (Chapter 6) show how creating a set of environmental monitoring indicators with stakeholder participation, and presenting these to local government decision-makers, raised awareness and provided a basis for action. Participatory action research has the added objective of enabling participants to act more effectively based on their own improved understanding. Action research combines intervening in the process being studied with investigating the changes this action produces, and this approach is highly compatible with the concept of adaptive PNRM.

Different kinds of participation in research are possible and there are several typologies that distinguish along one or more dimensions (Arnstein, 1969; Biggs, 1989; Pretty, 1995). Empirical study of how different kinds of participation are being used in participatory research shows a huge diversity of practice in combining different types (Lilja et al, 2001). Analysis of 150 NRM projects using participatory research shows that there is a definite pattern of using more empowering types of participation in the dissemination of results – ie, at a stage when conventional researchers are most comfortable in ‘letting go’ and relaxing conventional controls (Lilja and Ashby, 1999).

One of the fundamental differences among approaches to stakeholder participation in research for NRM is the way in which power relations among different stakeholder groups are structured. Natural resource management and research about it are embedded in power relations (Vincent, this volume). These may encompass powerful international, national or regional interest groups and relatively powerless local people. And they may also include the relatively wealthy, high caste or male members of a community in contrast to the poor and those of low social status, such as women and minority ethnic groups. Information is one source of power in a changing NRM situation, and participatory research can purposively generate new information that changes the balance of power, and can strengthen the bargaining situation of less powerful stakeholders.

Processes to promote participation in the management of resources and in research that fail to examine how power relations affect, and are affected by, the participatory process are often superficial and transitory. For example, participatory rural appraisal (PRA) has been heavily criticized for failing to recognize the incentives for different interest groups to manipulate the appraisal process (Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

The way in which power relations among stakeholders are handled in a participatory research process is intimately related to the issue of research quality. For example, gender relations affect the distribution of power in a participatory research process and bias results. This issue is examined in depth in the chapter in this volume by McDougall and Braun.

One way to assess quality in participatory research is to ask: ‘How valid and reliable do the different stakeholders who are party to the research process judge the results to be?’ In a PNRM process researchers are stakeholders who set research standards, but they are not the only ones. Thus standards for reliability and validity have to be negotiated with stakeholders. Often researchers have to accept compromises. A variety of different standards will often have to be met for quality assurance. The way in which power relations shape results can make or break the credibility of both the research process and its conclusions. For example, Mosse (2001) describes a PRA sponsored by a State Forest Department in India in which an overwhelming preference for planting eucalyptus trees was identified among the villagers participating. It turned out that villagers had little knowledge or experience of eucalyptus, but prioritized what they perceived the agency was able to deliver. The results of the PRA reflected the balance of power between the villagers and the State Forest Department, but did not provide a valid assessment of villagers’ needs nor a conclusion that stands up to further analysis. Sutherland’s case study in this volume reports that villagers did not distribute vetevier grass planting material from experiments to other communities because they did not have permission from the project that had paid them for growing these, illustrating how power relations also affect ownership and how research results are used.

One of the major threats to the validity of research occurs when stakeholders have not explicitly negotiated how control or ownership of a participatory research process is going to be managed. Ravnborg et al (1996) show how the exclusion of a key stakeholder group from a problem diagnosis

led to a result that was fundamentally biased against them and towards an interpretation that ultimately damaged the agreed-upon collective reforestation programme. Only once a forum was created, in which the absent stakeholders were included, were new information and competing interpretations of the advantages and disadvantages of slash and burn practices aired. Only then was it possible to negotiate a viable plan for collective action, which was subsequently successfully implemented. The cases in this book illustrate the broad spectrum of approaches to managing power relations, control and ownership of participatory resource management and the research it involves. For example, the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) case did not negotiate power relations explicitly and this affected research quality as researchers began to drop out because of their loss of control (see the Stroud case study in this volume). The ‘Landcare’ process is quintessentially owned and driven by local groups, but managing the dynamics of power relations among different stakeholders within the Landcare groups or among groups, and how these affect research is not evident in the project strategy (see the Garrity case study in this volume). In the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) case study reported by McDougall (this volume) researchers were flexible from the start in providing a framework for monitoring that enabled multiple stakeholders to develop their own indicators, and eventually to take over and adapt the framework. This approach focused on generating feedback and adaptive learning, making it easier for researchers to see the advantages of ‘letting go’, but the negotiation of power relationships among other stakeholders in the research process was less explicit. In all these cases, the motivation for the participatory research is researcher-driven, at least at inception.

A different approach is illustrated by the explicit negotiation of control in a PNRM process, which is secondary to and embedded in solving a compelling wetland management problem (see the Borinni-Feyerabend case study in this volume). This case initiated its process with a meeting in which a vision for the future of the wetland involved various ‘stakeholders’ presenting their individual views and negotiating a basic agreement on rules to be respected and activities to be carried out. Within this framework of agreed rules, stakeholders decided what research they needed and how to collect it in order to throw light on different resource management options.

In summary, research for NRM cannot be carried out as if it were independent of power relations among researchers, or between researchers and other stakeholders. For this reason, a capacity for organizational learning in research organizations is an important determinant of the outcomes and impacts of research, because organizational learning is essential for transforming power relations that otherwise become an obstacle to innovation in NRM, as the case study by Stroud in this volume illustrates. The models or theories of participation and resource management that drive innovation in a research organization engaged in NRM are critical determinants of research practice. Many of the problems encountered in conducting participatory research are rooted in organizational behaviour rather than in the choice of methods or types of participation (see Box 1.3).

Models of participation in a research organization provide a means to structure and organize the research process, methods for decision-making, and the rules and behaviours of researchers. Models that are incompatible with adaptive PNRM make it difficult for the necessary learning to occur. When models of participation incompatible with adaptive PNRM prevail in a research organization, for example when research and development is the dominant model in contrast to research for development, most of the innovative research is done by an informal, or ‘shadow’, organization that develops as a way of circumventing the outmoded rules of the formal organization (Sherman and Schultz, 1998). Rocheleau, in this volume, analyses the world of isolated and undocumented participatory research outside formal research organizations and the institutional divides within formal research that are an obstacle to organizational learning. In contrast, in a learning organization new models of how to conduct research for development are rapidly incorporated and innovations are readily undertaken. The idea of a learning organization arose in the private sector out of the need to be adaptive in the face of rapid change driven by intense competition, and the learning organization concept has several features in common with participatory methodology, as the chapter by Stroud in this volume explores in detail. The models of participation that drive organizational behaviour and research practice are based on underlying principles (defined as the ideas that are used to formulate models). Principles are more important than rules or methodology: ‘rule-generated behaviour doesn’t work’ (Sherman and Schultz, 1998). For this reason, an important focus of this book is the illustration of the underlying principles of participation that are more important than the specificities of one or another participatory methodology. One way of illustrating how principles are more important than methods is to examine how participation in research adds value to adaptive NRM.

Adding value to resource management with participatory research

Participatory research adds value to NRM in several ways:

• By introducing new information and feedback into participatory learning and adaptive management.
• By increasing the capacity to cope with complexity and diversity.
• By the inclusion of lay knowledge in the identification of problems and monitoring of change.
• By enabling diverse stakeholders to challenge accepted wisdom, whether lay or expert.
• By potentially levelling the playing field and breaking down the monopoly of ‘one version of the truth’, which is often that of the dominant elites, and which can short-circuit collective action.
• By helping to establish agreement about what information stakeholders need and can use to make collective decisions.
• By building social capital which ‘spills over’ into collective action.
• By increasing the capacity for innovation.

Participatory learning is an essential part of research for development and adaptive management of complex ecosystems. Participatory research has a vital role to play in making sure that the learning process which drives adaptive management can draw on different kinds of knowledge and is not biased by just one explanation of key cause–effect relationships. When power relationships in the participatory research process are negotiated in an open forum, where different perceptions of cause–effect (and of credit and blame) can be aired, then research adds value to participatory management by bringing to the table new information that all stakeholders can use to forge an agreement. Pretty and Hine (2001) observe that innovation in sustainable resource management for agriculture is fostered by ‘farmer participation, rapid exchange and transfer of information when trust is good, better understanding of key agro-ecological relationships in fields, and farmers experimenting in groups’. Several case studies from this volume provide examples of participatory research adding value to resource management by fuelling the process of learning, successful innovation and adaptive management. Adding a farmer research component to evaluate and select promising potato clones with increased late blight resistance complemented learning about potato late blight through farmer field schools in Peru (see Nelson’s case study in this volume). Seed management innovations developed in Nepal through a process of interactive learning between indigenous and formal knowledge systems, and the success of community action, depended fundamentally on their ability to control processes of knowledge production through different kinds of research (see Pound’s case study in this volume). Their improved understanding of gene flow stimulated the interest of community members in learning plant breeding skills to proactively manage genetic resources.

Participatory research adds value to NRM by building on natural diversity because it is highly decentralized, adapted to location-specific conditions and stakeholder-driven. Classical research is identified with resource management practices based on reducing variability, and this slowly changes the functioning and resilience of an ecosystem, undermining ecosystem capacity to withstand or recover from shocks and stress. If natural variability is reduced or disturbances prevented, they accumulate and return at a later stage on a much broader scale. Diminishing variability tends to increase the potential for larger-scale, less predictable and less manageable disturbances that can have devastating effects on ecosystems (Ludwig et al, 1997), and to reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide environmental services in the future.

Participatory research adds value to NRM in a different way when it promotes the involvement of extended peer communities in science. Adaptive management of complex ecosystems needs to include the stakeholders in an environmental problem when there is a high level of uncertainty about cause and effect, disagreement about research measurement and debate on ethical aspects (Funtowicz and Ravtz, 1993; Irwin, 1995). Participatory research approaches are especially needed in situations where there is disagreement and conflict over appropriate management: debate heightens the need to include lay expertise in the research process and to bring an end to the practice of research being conducted exclusively by technical specialists. Inclusion of lay expertise promotes an exchange of different forms of knowledge and cross-fertilization across diverse knowledge forms. Research for development requires: a willingness to engage in non-scientifically generated knowledge; an acceptance of a plurality of knowledge forms, not a unitary consensus; and a preparedness to engage with stakeholders’ concerns.

Common principles of participatory research

Participatory research can add value to NRM oriented at the development of sustainable livelihoods when some basic principles apply (see Box 1.4) that are common to all the diverse approaches illustrated in this book. First, the research agenda and problem definition is formulated by and with stakeholders and is driven by an organized expression of different stakeholder demands. This usually requires the use of diversity analysis to understand different roles, rights and responsibilities. Examples are given by the case studies of Conroy and Snapp, in this volume, of changes in research priorities after participatory problem analysis and experimentation.

A second principle is that data collection, processing, analysis and interpretation has to involve relevant stakeholders, improve their analytic capacity, advance their understanding of the resource management situation and provide them with a basis for action. Participation in research builds the capacity for ongoing innovation which is essential for sustainable livelihoods and resource management. It is not enough for researchers to collect and interpret data on their own.

Third, different types of knowledge and evidence are usually required and combined – both expert scientific knowledge and lay empirical knowledge –and this involves participatory learning and an exchange of knowledge among different stakeholders to ‘level the playing field’, and permit shared understanding to evolve. Blending knowledge also involves hybridization of methods, as when free experimentation combines with controlled experimentation, survey research with local observations, or GIS analysis, remote sensing and history with participatory scenario building.

Fourth, establishing the usefulness and relevance of results as a basis for action involves negotiation among all the stakeholders affected by the problem or the proposed action(s). The need for conflict resolution and facilitation skills is widely appreciated in PNRM. It is less well understood that these skills are equally important in the research process when needs for information are diverse, variant standards for what constitutes scientific proof are held, and definitions of participation diverge. Researchers approach participation in different ways, and their notions of participation may not be congruent with those held by local stakeholders, leading to implicit or explicit struggles for control over the research process.

A fifth principle is that mechanisms and procedures for monitoring, feedback and learning are integrated into the research process (as well as into the resource management process). This includes scrutiny of and learning about the quality of the participation and of the research, where questions of professional standards for participation may arise. Organizational learning and change in research entities to stimulate changes in research practice and evolution towards a model of participation in research for development may be crucial.

Finally, locally accountable representation and power of decision over research priorities and practice must be present. Adaptive PNRM is unavoidably embedded in action, real-life decisions and tradeoffs because the natural and social processes being investigated are almost impossible to subject to controlled experimentation. All the stakeholders in a participatory research process intended to promote innovation in resource management that improves livelihoods must have a decision-making domain and power to make choices that either approximate their actual situation or resemble the changes that are being anticipated in their power to choose among alternative resource management regimes. Otherwise unreal decisions and false choices will corrupt the process and confound the results, leading to conclusions that cannot be replicated or scaled up, issues that are explored by Rocheleau in this volume. Often this implies that researchers and development professionals give up some of their customary control and other stakeholders gain more power over the research process.

From the perspective of research and development, the idea of uniting science and participation seems at worst a messy, and even risky, interference by lay people in the domain of experts, complicating controlled experimentation and throwing scientific standards into question; and at best a poor substitute for market research. From the perspective of research for development – itself one facet of a broader goal of establishing the rights of citizens to participate in

defining the directions of an inclusive and empowering development process –participation is an important procedure for relevant science. This book provides an insight into many innovative efforts to unite participation with scientific rigour that show the promise of this endeavour.

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