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We argue that, while it is important to ultimately provide evidence for
informed decision and policy-making at the national level, there is also a need
to strategically engage actors from the national as well as the local levels of
governance. This involvement should be participatory and should strive to
adopt means that can enhance participation by local actors. In this way, the
research process can achieve multiple policy contributions at the national and
local levels while receiving feedback for improving the research process itself. In
addition, research evidence is translated more rapidly into development practice
when the relevant actors themselves apply the newly acquired knowledge. This
RPA process has rejected the 'business as usual' practice where policy-oriented
research is implemented by experts, with minimal participation of stakeholders,
and results are disseminated to potential users
ex post facto
, denying the main
stakeholders a chance to participate in making the research relevant to them by
learning from it, influencing and owning it.
Our main recommendation to researchers on adaptation to climate change
in particular, and development policy-oriented action research in general, is to
design their research activity by identifying and continuously involving relevant
actors at all levels, from the national to the local, in their differing categories
and roles, such as policy-makers, civil servants, private sector and civil society.
Technical research activity, coupled with a policy-process analysis involving
actors' roles, their interests and power relations, will help to clarify the dynamics
of interaction within the community and enable realistic and practical measures
to be crafted, for effective policy implementation through faster translation of
research results into development activities.
acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for
providing constructive comments which helped improve the chapter. We also
thank the CCAA project financed by the IDRC of Canada and coordinated
by IDS, at the University of Sussex (UK), for support for the research upon
which this chapter is based. We thank also Drs Oswald Mashindano and Natu
Mwamba, who participated in the Tanza Kesho Consult (TKC) project team
for the RPA research, and TKC staff members, for facilitating the research
process.
notes
1
Capacity to act, to exercise agency and to realize the potential of rights, citizenship
or voice (Gaventa 2006)
2
Currently, only the weather forecasts by the meteorology experts are used and
recognized as official weather information, although the traditional weather forecasts
are also presented and discussed at the DMF, until more work on documenting the
traditional knowledge on weather forecasting indicators is done. Interestingly, thus
far, the forecasts have been close to the meteorology experts' forecasts.
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