During the 1980s and ‘90s, most ACIAR partner countries had newly emerging research capability and very limited funding. On the project in China, ACIAR needed to provide every dollar for running the research. It is truly amazing to consider how our relationships with partner countries have changed since then. Many have much stronger research capabilities, and they look to Australia not for drivers of research but true collaboration, often with substantial co-investment.
Through these changing relationships, the role ACIAR played in enabling international research collaboration remained strong. I spent much of my 22 years in South-East Asia working with researchers from across the region developing and applying participatory research approaches in smallholder livestock systems. Those approaches remain as important and valid now as they were then. It isn’t just “the right thing” to involve farmers in research; it’s usually essential. They are the experts in their livelihood systems and no matter how much we study those systems we can never match that expertise. We learned that while smallholder farmers are typically outstanding observers, they do not always tell interpreters their observations. Tapping into this farmer knowledge through genuine partnerships between researchers and farmers is therefore critical to ensure a shared knowledge base upon which to undertake research and development activities together.
We also learned how important it was to be up-front with farmers that we didn’t have cash incentives for participation, nor did we have ready-made answers. But we did have ideas, interesting technologies and knowledge as well as the commitment to work with them over the long haul to seek answers to problems and develop new farming options with them.
This approach usually led to insightful relationships that, for much of the time, threw up surprising outcomes in the field. We were successful in some situations but not in others. This taught us how often the outcomes of participatory research are unanticipated. Even where we were not successful, there were important lessons so long as the engagement with farmers was committed and genuinely participatory. One of those lessons was that assumptions which I thought held true, often did not. Assuming that the ways farmers optimise their livelihood strategies is similar to ours, for example. It usually is not. In short, through many cycles of testing and reflection, we learned to evaluate our most strongly held assumptions about smallholder livelihood systems… and then test them again.
