Document(s) 15 de 15

Jacqueline Ashby is a development sociologist by training and her work is focused on action research to promote organizational change and innovation in natural resource management and food systems, both global and local. She recently took on new responsibilities as Director of the Rural Innovation Institute at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) having been, since 1996, Director of Research, Natural Resource Management, and Coordinator for the CGIAR System-wide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis.

Ann Braun is an ecologist by training and has worked in basic and applied agricultural and environmental research and also as a developer of participatory research methods. After two decades with the CGIAR in Asia and Latin America, she now lives in New Zealand’s South Island and works as an independent consultant. Her current focus is on creation and support of learning communities to promote social, environmental and economic sustainability. Her interests include mentoring in participatory and user-sensitive approaches to research, education and development, systematization of learning processes, distillation of lessons learned, and promotion of ecological literacy.

K L Heong is a senior scientist at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines. He is an insect ecologist by training, having graduated from the Imperial College at Silwood Park, from which he recently received his DSc. Before joining IRRI, KL worked in the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute as the rice entomologist. At IRRI his work has focused on community ecology and he has established that insecticides in rice ecosystems do more harm than good, because they disrupt food web linkages and natural biological control mechanisms, favouring the development of secondary pests, such as the brown plant hopper. In his effort to reduce farmers’ unnecessary use of insecticides, he applied social psychology frameworks and developed ‘heuristics’ to motivate farmers to experiment with them. Working with communication scientists and extension workers in Vietnam, he initiated the use of media to scale up farmer motivation, reaching about a million farmers in the Mekong Delta. Farmers’ insecticide use was reduced by 50 per cent with no yield loss and he was awarded the Medal for Agricultural Development by the Vietnamese government and won the St Andrews Prize for Environment for this achievement. His interests include using decision sciences for research on resource management decision-making, developing multi-stakeholder participatory processes and the use of Entertainment Education to motivate change.

Cynthia McDougall pursues positive change in the areas of social justice and environmental sustainability through a combination of social science and popular education approaches. Originally trained in political science, comparative development and geography, she has been a part of the Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management and the Adaptive and Collaborative Management Research Project teams at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Indonesia for the last five years. Her work there has been primarily focused on strategies for enhancing social learning and equity in community forest user groups in Nepal, as well as contributing to comparative work in other communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. She has also been involved in participatory research and participatory action research methodology development, with an emphasis on gender and diversity.

Adrienne Martin is a specialist in social and institutional development with over 25 years of experience of development work with a focus on the interaction between people and natural resources. She has worked with a range of organizations, including national, international, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Since 1990 she has been based at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich, Chatham, UK, and currently leads the Livelihoods and Institutions Group. She has long-term overseas experience in Sudan where she worked on rural development issues in western Sudan, and in Syria with the farming systems programme at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA). She has extensive professional experience in Africa having undertaken research, consultancy, training and publication on the themes of participatory research, local knowledge (in Uganda and Tanzania) and livelihoods analysis (in Ghana, Uganda and India). Her current interests are in agricultural policy and the institutionalization of client-oriented approaches within national agricultural research and extension systems, rural and urban livelihoods and the role of social capital.

Barry Pound started his career as an agronomist, but has steadily broadened his scope to include farming systems and sustainable livelihoods. He has worked long term on agricultural research and development projects in Tanzania, Nigeria, Dominican Republic, Yemen and Nepal. For the last ten years he has been with the Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich, Chatham, UK, from where he has led, or contributed to, a wide range of research, development and training initiatives in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe for multilateral, bilateral and non-governmental organizations. Particular interests of his are the application of participatory approaches, and most recently research into the implementation of farmer-led extension approaches.

Dianne Rocheleau has conducted field research on the social and ecological dimensions of land use change, watersheds, agroforestry and biodiversity for over 25 years, in Kenya, Dominican Republic and the US, as well as short-term studies elsewhere. She worked as a Rockefeller Foundation Social Science Fellow and Senior Scientist with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry

(ICRAF) from 1983 to 1986 and as a Program Officer with the Ford Foundation from 1986 to 1989. She is currently an Associate Professor of Geography at Clark University. She has co-authored and co-edited five books including Agroforestry in Dryland Africa; Gender, Environment and Development in Kenya; Power, Process and Participation – Tools for Change; and Feminist Political Ecology. She has worked extensively on methodologies for community-based and participatory research as well as on the integration of social and ecological research methods and designs. She has also served on the Boards of CIFOR, the Land Tenure Center and committees of the National Science Foundation and National Research Council in the US. In all of her work she seeks to document, promote and protect socially just and viable human ecologies.

Sieglinde Snapp is an Assistant Professor of vegetable integrated crop management at Michigan State University, with a focus on applied, systems research and outreach to develop farmer knowledge and problem-solving capacity. In the long term she works to promote adoption of more biologically smart and sustainable systems in high-risk, high-input vegetable systems. The underlying premise is that nutrient efficiency is enhanced by greater use of carbon sources to build soils and greater reliance on deep-rooting legumes. She collaborates with farmers and extension staff to investigate mechanisms and develop technologies that integrate nutrient sources and use manure and cover crops to diversify systems and promote vigorous roots and healthy crops. She has over seven years of experience working in southern Africa in collaboration with national scientists to research maize and bean systems and the use of integrated soil management practices, and continues to research and teach on African cropping systems. She is deeply committed to developing new outreach methods and improving communication among researchers, farmers, crop advisors and extension workers. She developed a novel farmer participatory research method, the ‘mother–baby trial’. This on-farm trial design facilitates the relatively rapid but rigorous integration of farmer and researcher assessment of technologies and varieties. It is now used widely by scientists from eight different countries.

Ann Stroud is completing her 20th year in Africa, having resided in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, and is now in Uganda. She has worked in extension, research and development modes. Currently, she is the Regional Coordinator for the African Highlands Initiative (AHI). AHI is a unique programme that aims to improve the integration and coordination of contributions from a number of national, international and non-governmental research organizations to arrest land degradation and improve livelihoods in the highlands of eastern Africa. Her professional career has evolved from her graduation as a weed scientist from Cornell University, US, through work as a farming systems agronomist, to her current broader interests in sociology and institutional dimensions. These interests have been generated by her fieldwork with African farmers and her advisory work with many stakeholders involved in cracking the challenges of rural development in Africa.

Alistair Sutherland has worked in participatory agricultural research projects and programmes in various parts of southern and eastern Africa since 1983. He is currently based at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, Chatham, UK, and works within the Livelihoods and Institutions Group on a range of research, training and consultancy activities overseas and in the UK. His current interests include capacity building and training in managing organizational change and performance assessment, the monitoring and evaluation of client perspectives in agricultural research and the development of cost-effective methodologies for participatory research and social analysis.

Ronnie Vernooy is a senior programme specialist at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Ottawa, Canada. He received his PhD in the sociology of rural development from the Agricultural University of Wageningen in the Netherlands in 1992 and joined IDRC in the same year. His research interests include rural development, natural resource management, agricultural biodiversity and participatory (action) research methods including monitoring and evaluation. His current work focuses on southeast Asia (China and Vietnam), Central America and Cuba; he has a special interest in Nicaragua where he carried out field research in both hillside and coastal environments during 1985–1986, 1988–1991 and 1997–1998. Recent publications include, as editor and co-author, Taking Care of What We Have: Participatory Natural Resource Management on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (2000), Para una mina de oro se necesita una mina de plata: historiando sobre la Costa Caribe de Nicaragua 1910–1979 (2000) and, as co-editor and co-author, Voices for Change: Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation in China (2002).

Linden Vincent is Professor of irrigation and water engineering at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Previously she worked with the Irrigation Management Network at the Overseas Development Institute, London, and the University of East Anglia in the UK. She has particular interests in the relationships between agroecology, technology and water management, and collective action for water management in mountain areas, semi-arid environments and water-scarce locations. She has also written on the links between irrigation and water management, livelihood security and poverty alleviation. The Irrigation and Water Engineering Group at Wageningen, which she heads, is committed to interdisciplinary research. Staff and students have worked to develop ‘socio-technical’ theoretical frameworks and research approaches that integrate the environment, technology and society, to understand the relationships between irrigation and rural transformation. Linden Vincent has worked as an academic researcher, field engineer and consultant in development projects in India, Yemen and several countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and continues to facilitate postgraduate research in south Asia, southern Africa and South America. She has worked with various methodological approaches to knowledge generation, including survey and statistical methods of analysis, actor-oriented approaches, rapid rural appraisal and participatory technology development. She believes that it is possible for these different methodological approaches to inform each other.

Document(s) 15 de 15