Participatory forest management is credited for supporting social learning processes and fostering capacity of forest users for collaboration and collective actions. Despite more than a decade of practice, the empirical evidence substantiating the contribution of participatory management for the capacity development of forest users is scarce. This study assesses a participatory forest management program in Madhupur Sal forest, Bangladesh, by comparing the capacity of de-facto groups of participants and nonparticipants and identifies factors that influence the capacity development.
Public institutions involved in research that aims to strengthen the productivity, profitability and adaptiveness of industries face a multiplicity of challenges when managing for the emergence of cost effective solutions to problems. We reflect upon the learnings of a Government sponsored Visiting Fellow’s programme that we describe as a knowledge management (KM) intervention within Australia’s primary industries Research, Development and Extension (R, D and E) system.
Change in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is not easily understood in terms of Western innovation discourses. In fact, innovations in the sense of modern and growth-oriented technologies are common sources for the erosion of TEK. This article brings together current literatures on TEK and innovation studies in addressing questions about the governance of socio-ecological change
Private sector actors bring expertise, resources, and new perspectives to agricultural development, but the tendency to short-term approaches and market-based orientation has been unable to drive a systemic change in the development agenda. We explore how multi-stakeholder dialogues can capitalize on and trickle systemic change through private sector involvement. Analysis from the farmer-led irrigation development multi-stakeholder dialogue space (FLI-MDS) in Ghana shows the need for a physical and institutional space to cater for and merge different stakeholder interests.
Since development agencies often implement interventions through collective-action groups such as farmer cooperatives and self-help groups, there is a need to understand how participation is affected by group-level and leader attributes. This study collected gender-disaggregated, quantitative and qualitative data on sixty-eight self-help groups in Zambia to understand the participation of men and women farmers in different crop-production activities. Results show that participation rates of men and women are the same across all maize production activities except harvesting.
During May 2010 the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) hosted two events related to knowledge management (KM): The Knowledge Share Fair for Latin America and the Caribbean, funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and a regional meeting of the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community. The Fair was attended by 200 professionals from more than 70 organizations and 18 countries and showcased more than 40 experiences related to KM in agriculture, development and food security.
This paper presents a case study of the work carried out by CIAT to facilitate the creation of a community of practice, using Dgroups and taking advantage of this virtual space to apply a qualitative monitoring technique called Most Significant Change. The experience reported here mixed key ingredients to create and facilitate a community of practice to facilitate knowledge sharing and communication flow among 14 learning and knowledge sharing centres in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This Breakout Session at the GCARD Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (Punta Del Este, Uruguay, 29 October – 1 November 2012)) sought to identify effective strategies for implementing innovation partnerships that improve the livelihoods of the poor on a large scale, including the gaining of evidence and understanding needed for that implementation.
The central question posed for this Breakout Sub-Session at the GCARD Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (Punta Del Este, Uruguay, 29 October – 1 November 2012) is "What role smallholder farmers now play and could play in meeting the future needs in food and nutrition security, poverty alleviation and sustainable management of natural resources?".
The problem being addressed during this session of the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2), which was held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 2012, is how we can bring together the needed diversity – of stakeholders and approaches – and understand better a number of multidimensional and complex questions such as: How can we inform stakeholders on alternative future scenarios and debate the desirability, consequences, winners and losers of diverse scenarios? How to better combine quantitative analyses with qualitative arguments?