Abstract only

Persistent poverty and environmental degradation demand a constant effort to improve the effectiveness and impact of agricultural and natural resource management research. Participatory research methods have been developed to enable researchers to better target their work towards the needs and constraints of specific stakeholder groups. Beyond improving the efficiency of the research process, participatory research may also strengthen the capacity of participants to initiate a continuous process of innovation suited to their particular needs and conditions. The capacity of users to locally evaluate and adapt technologies may be particularly important in natural research management. This paper assesses the impact of using participatory methods in three natural resource management research projects. The analysis assesses the technological, economic, human, social, and cost implications of incorporating users into the research process. Data for the analysis was gather using both participatory and conventional survey methods. The results suggest that user input early in the project can be critical for identifying relevant technologies. User input was also linked to higher levels of adoptability and/ or economic impact. While human capital impacts were found to be very high when farmers worked intensely with researchers, no significant social capita1 impacts were found. This could possibly be related to the plot-level nature of the technologies being developed. Finally, participatory methods do appear to imply increased short-run costs. However, these costs are not as high as might be expected and are often one-time costs associated with building capacity to do participatory research.

English

0310|R01CIMPU|AGRIS 0301|AL-Economics Program

Juan Carlos Mendieta

CIMMYT Publications Collection