This is a bit of an ethnographic blog post of my experience at the Water, Land and Eco-systems (WLE) write-shop in Nepal Katmandu. This write-shop was the final stage in preparing a grant we later received from WLE to implement a project testing financial models to help small farmers adopt solar powered irrigation pumps. However, this post is not about solar or pumps or farming, it’s about the challenges faced by donors and international organizations in bringing basic research together with development projects. It is a big and important challenge and one that many good people are trying to muddle through. This piece is a critique of my experience, but hopefully one with useful lessons and more importantly, I don't think the WLE program is behind the ball in this field at all, only that figuring out how to link knowledge with action or do results for development (R4D) research is not easy.
The goal of the write-shop was for 5 finalist proposals in the Ganga river basin to come together for 3 days to find synergies between their projects and develop their ideas including outcomes, outputs and research questions. The workshop organizers put a huge amount of emphasis on R4D and in many ways had taken some of the “linking knowledge with action” ideas to heart, pushing the participants who they assumed were "pure researchers" and had never thought of anything but a research question, to think first about the impacts they wanted to have and also about the outputs (e.g. policy briefs, movies, news articles) they would want to create as part of their grant proposal.
While these developments in the CGIAR’s grant making process seem positive, there are still many challenges. For one, the pendulum seems to have swung so far in the “D” direction of “R4D” that any concept of "use inspired basic research" is gone and it seems like the program might be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water, trying to act like development program or agency without the kind of budget that is required to scale development projects.
The organizers spoke at length about linking research with action by engaging with “next users” which they defined as people like government agencies, donors, private sector etc who might take projects to scale. There was some but much less emphasis on the importance of iterative learning with “end users”. Its not that they left it out, but it was certainly under-emphasized compared to the single minded focus on taking the specific project each of the five teams had in mind to scale. The idea of engaging with "next users” was treated like a novelty idea that no researcher had ever done before—seemingly the CGIAR has forgotten its own history and that the Green Revolution in India as well as the creation of the CGIAR itself was the result of active engagement on the part of scientists to influence policy and government institutions.
The problems that came out of the Green Revolution as well as many of the problems that have plagued agriculture development since both (both environmental degradation and the challenges of improving the lives of poor and marginal farmers) are not, I would argue, due to a lack of communication between science and policy (knowledge to action) as much as do to science pushing specific ideas and agendas without paying attention to tradeoffs that arise from the introduction of new technologies and the impacts on equity that their development programs create. These issues were almost left off the table entirely during the workshop except for the constant pleas of the gender specialist to collect “gender disaggregated data", but without insights into why this is important from a macro-perspective of the history of agriculture development projects or the CGIAR.
This is not to say that the workshop was not useful. It provided an excellent opportunity for Aditi and I to get on the same page with the project, clarify research priorities, train our field managers, and think about project synergies across WLE projects. But it also made me feel like the reforms of the CGIAR towards getting better at linking knowledge with action are still faltering. They have certainly taken on some lessons of linking knowledge with action, but issues raised by the literature in terms of iterative feedback from end-users, issues of power in development etc have not yet been well integrated.