CGIAR Systemwide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis. 2003. The Quality of Science in Participatory Plant Breeding. Proceedings of a workshop co-hosted by the CGIAR System-wide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (PRGA) and the CGIAR System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP). Rome, Italy, September 30 - October 4, 2002

Pound, B., S. Snapp, C. McDougall and A. Braun (Eds). 2003. Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods: Uniting Science and Participation. Earthscan/IDRC.Management of local resources has a greater chance of a sustainable outcome when there is partnership between local people and external agencies, and agendas relevant to their aspirations and circumstances. Managing Natural Resources for Sustainable Livelihoods analyses and extends this premise to show unequivocally that the process of research for improving natural resource management must incorporate participatory and user-focused approaches, leading to development based on the needs and knowledge of local resource users.Drawing on extensive and highly relevant case studies, this book presents innovative approaches for establishing and sustaining participation and collective decision-making, good practice for research, and challenges for future developments. It covers a wide range of natural resources – including forests and soils, and water and management units such as watersheds and common property areas and provides practical lessons from analysis and meta-analysis of cases from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It offers insights on how to make research participatory while maintaining rigour and high-quality biological science, different forms of participation, and ways to scale up and extend participatory approaches and successful initiatives.This book will be invaluable for those professionally involved in natural resource management for sustainable development, and an essential resource for teachers and students of both the biophysical and social science aspects of natural resource management.

CIAT (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical) JIRCAS (Japanese Internacional Research Center for Agricultural Science); PRGA Program. 2002. Proc. Workshop on “How participatory research can complement conventional research approaches”, held in Tsukuba, Japan, 4-8 march 2002. (CD-Rom).

Braun, A. 2004. Ethics and Professional standards. Paideia Resources.Over the last decade many practitioners have realized that Participatory Research and Development can be done well or not. The quality of participatory research and development can affect the well-being of people and the environment and poor quality initiatives can have serious social, economic and ecological consequences. Furthermore, a high quality participatory process is not sufficient to guarantee success. The wrong approach or design –however well implemented – is unlikely to lead to the desired outcomes. The question of ethics, professional standards and accountability is one of several key elements crucial to improving the design and quality of participatory research and development.Ethical frameworks and professional standards and accountability mechanisms for these are well developed in the medical field and in academia among researchers who study human subjects, however has been relatively little discourse about these in the arena of participatory research and development. Nevertheless, some organizations have explored these issues and examples of key elements from a variety of frameworks are summarized.

Douthwaite, B., N.C. de Haan, V. Manyong and D. Keatinge 2002. Blending “Hard” and “Soft” Science: the “Follow-the-Technology” Approach to Catalyzing and Evaluating Technology Change. Special Feature on Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM). Conservation Ecology. Vol 5(2). Other articles in this special issueThe types of technology change catalyzed by research interventions in integrated natural resource management (INRM) are likely to require much more social negotiation and adaptation than are changes related to plant breeding, the dominant discipline within the system of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Conceptual models for developing and delivering high-yielding varieties have proven inadequate for delivering natural resource management (NRM) technologies that are adopted in farmers' fields. Successful INRM requires tools and approaches that can blend the technical with the social, so that people from different disciplines and social backgrounds can effectively work and communicate with each other. This paper develops the "follow-the-technology" (FTT) approach to catalyzing, managing, and evaluating rural technology change as a framework that both "hard" and "soft" scientists can work with. To deal with complexity, INRM needs ways of working that are adaptive and flexible. The FTT approach uses technology as the entry point into a complex situation to determine what is important. In this way, it narrows the research arena to achievable boundaries. The methodology can also be used to catalyze technology change, both within and outside agriculture. The FTT approach can make it possible to channel the innovative potential of local people that is necessary in INRM to "scale up" from the pilot site to the landscape. The FTT approach is built on an analogy between technology change and Darwinian evolution, specifically between "learning selection" and natural selection. In learning selection, stakeholders experiment with a new technology and carry out the evolutionary roles of novelty generation, selection, and promulgation. The motivation to participate is a "plausible promise" made by the R&D team to solve a real farming problem. Case studies are presented from a spectrum of technologies to show that repeated learning selection cycles can result in an improvement in the performance of the plausible promise through adaptation and a sense of ownership by the stakeholders.

Vernooy, R. and C. McDougall. 2003. Principles for Good Practice in Participatory Research: Reflecting on Lessons from the Field. IN: B. Pound, S. Snapp, C. McDougall and A. Braun (Eds.O Managing natural resources for sustainable livelihoods: Uniting Science and Participation. Earthscan/IDRC.In previous chapters our colleagues have described their experiences in exploring new conceptual and methodological grounds in participatory research (PR) in natural resource management (NRM), often as a complement to existing (‘traditional’) research from both the natural and social sciences. These explorations are producing new and exciting insights into promising alternatives for the management of natural resource systems, including crops, soils, water, trees and animals. These experiences are also resulting in the innovative adaptation of participatory research approaches. Venturing into this still relatively new research terrain of working for rural transformations, however, raises difficult questions about the research process. Researchers are faced with the challenge of critically assessing the kind(s) of participation and processes appropriate to the different stages of the research cycle. This expansion of the research domain and the new knowledge generated require that researchers must be able to identify what is ‘good practice’ in PR in NRM. While this challenge is starting to be met in some individual research projects, the emergent learning has been somewhat insular. Perhaps because the experience of doing participatory research in one context is not easily compared to another, shared learning between research institutions about ‘what is good practice in PR in NRM’ has been slow. We consider that comparisons and the integration of ideas are necessary elements of identifying good practice. The PRGA (Participatory Research and Gender Analysis) Program and the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) NRM workshop in Chatham, England, created an ideal opportunity to begin such a process of shared learning. In this chapter we draw on the case studies from the Chatham workshop and other literature to generate a number of principles of good practice in PR in NRM and, potentially, beyond this field.1 The intention is that these principles may be useful in the planning and assessment of the rigour of participatory research methodologies. As such, we aim to contribute to the growing interest in the development of appropriate methodologies for monitoring and evaluating participatory research. We argue that this on-going assessment of rigour, and the subsequent refinement of methodologies are integral parts of participatory research.