Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
(4) develop suites of indicators of health and sustainability, and (5) monitor progress,
assess health and sustainability, and evaluate the status of the agroecosystem. This
chapter describes how PAR was used to develop a suite of health and sustainability
indicators and to implement some actions to address agroecosystem health and sus-
tainability concerns in the tropical highland agroecosystem.
3.2 PRocess and metHods
The process involved three groups of actors: (1) communities in six study sites dis-
tributed across Kiambu district, (2) resource persons (extension and technical staff
from divisional administrative offices), and (3) researchers. The researchers were a
multidisciplinary team of agronomists, economists, engineers, medical personnel,
sociologists, and veterinarians. Additional personnel, including district staff, and
experts from governmental and nongovernmental organizations were included when
need arose.
All the people living within the study sites were invited to participate in most
of the village PAR workshops. Communities decided to elect a contact group (com-
mittee) to serve as the focal point for communication between the community and
other actors in the project. Election to the committee was stratified based on gender,
age, and other study-site-specific criteria such as clan and wealth ranking. There was
a resource persons' team in each division of the district, serving as the main link
between the research team and the study sites in their divisions. From these teams,
groups of six to eight people were selected to serve as facilitators in PAR workshops
in their division.
Based on the scheme developed by Elden and Levin (1991), the resource persons
and the research team comprised the outsiders, while communities in the study sites
were the insiders. Similarly, the objective of the process was described as developing
grounded, local theory on assessment and improvement of agroecosystem health and
sustainability. The process through which the study sites were selected is described
in Chapter 2.
3.2.1 C
o m m u n i it y
i
D e n t i t i e s
The approach used in this study assumed that there would be identifiable communi-
ties in each of the study sites. A
community
was defined as a group of local peo-
ple sharing similar interests (Ison, 1993; Webber and Ison, 1995) and capable of
undertaking some degree of collective action. As described by Burkey (1993), it was
expected that conflicts of interest, contradictions, and differences in perspectives
would exist among different groups within a community. Further, it was expected
that a cooperative context within which people have sufficient security to speak and
act publicly (Chataway, 1997) might not exist.
The existence, identity, and characteristics of communities in the study sites were
determined through initial participatory workshops held in each of the study sites.
The geophysical boundaries of the study sites were then altered to be as confluent
as possible with those of the communities. To elucidate the interests, composition,
and structure of the various groups in the community, root definitions (Checkland
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