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Farmers and researchers: The road to partnership

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Abstract

User participation is a critical ingredient for relevant technology development, whether in agriculture or industry. This has long been recognized in private sector R&D firms. In most public sector agricultural research organizations in developing countries, however, systematic involvement of farmers, especially poor farmers, in research has been weak. These farmers are rarely powerful or well organized enough to bring pressure to bear on government agencies to respond to their needs and priorities. Farmer-responsive research methods, such as on-farm research, farming systems research, and farmer participatory research, have been introduced into research organizations to compensate for the lack of mechanisms for bringing farmers' views into the formulation of research priorities and agendas. The impact of these approaches in achieving this objective, however, has been less than hoped for.

Insufficient attention to the political and institutional dimensions of developing client-responsive research is a major reason for this lack of impact. To bring about permanent change, farmer-responsive research methods need to be reinforced by changes in the balance of power between research and its clients and in the constellation of decisionmakers responsible for formulating research agendas. Participatory planning methods applied at the level of research programs provide new opportunities for involving farmers in decision-making about program priorities and for systematically incorporating information about client's needs. Recent experiments with strengthening farmers' associations and linking them with research organizations suggest new opportunities for increasing farmers' ability to express demand, act as an external pressure group, and serve as viable partners with research organizations.

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Authors
  1. Deborah Merrill-Sands
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  2. Marie-Hélène Collion
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Additional information

This paper is a significantly revised version of an invited paper, “Making the Farmers' Voice Count: Issues and Opportunities for Promoting Farmer Responsive Research” for the 12th Annual Farming Systems Research and Extension Symposium, Michigan State University, East Lansing Michigan, Sept. 13–18, 1992 and subsequently published in 1993 in theJournal of Farming Systems Research, vol. 4, no. 1. A shorter version, entitled “Making the Farmers' Voice Count in Agricultural Research”, has also been published by theQuarterly Journal of International Agriculture, July/September, 1993. Staff from Ford Foundation office in Dakar, William Duggan, Regional Representative, and John Sutter, consultant, as well as Lynn Ellsworth, Project Advisor, IDRC, stimulated much of our thinking about farmers' organizations working as partners with research organizations. Ford Foundation has been promoting and strengthening local rural organizations through a number of their activities. We also gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Thomas Eponou, leader of the ISNAR research project on research-technology transfer linkages, to an earlier draft paper on this subject. We have also developed our thinking considerably through the stimulating exchange of ideas with Jacqueline Ashby and Louise Sperling of CIAT who, quite independently, have been working on similar concerns of developing institutional and financial mechanisms for increasing farmers' influence over research. This revised paper has benefited significantly from discussions with Anthony Bebbington and John Farrington of the Overseas Development Institute and from comments provided by Christian Bonte-Friedhem, Howard Elliott, Niels Röling, Willem Stoop, and Robert Tripp on an earlier drafts. This paper synthesizes and builds on the results of research carried out at ISNAR on research-technology transfer linkages; organization and management of on-farm clientoriented research; and research program planning and priority-setting. While the ideas are based on work carried out at ISNAR, the views are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of ISNAR.

Deborah Merrill-Sands, an anthropologist, is a senior officer at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) in The Hague, Netherlands. She was leader of a major research project at ISNAR on the organization and management of on-farm research in national agricultural research systems. She is now based in the USA and works halftime for ISNAR and halftime as a free-lance consultant.

Marie-Helene Collion, formerly a senior officer for planning at ISNAR, is currently an agricultural economist in the Africa-Sahelian Department of the World Bank in Washington, DC, USA. Previously Dr. Collion worked with the International Research and Development Center in West Africa.

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Merrill-Sands, D., Collion, MH. Farmers and researchers: The road to partnership. Agric Hum Values 11, 26–37 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01530444

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