ABSTRACT

Top-down approaches to innovation development are still frequent or even dominant in many circles. However, such approaches have long ceased to be the only paradigm for designing and delivering the inventions needed to help farmers adapt to a rapidly evolving environment. Agriculturalists moving away from top-down approaches were following the steps of social scientists such as Lewin (1946), who embarked on research conducted in close interaction with local actors. During the 1970s, farming systems approaches were developed both in the English- and French-speaking spheres (see, for example, Norman et al, 1982; Jouve and Mercoiret, 1987) and were soon followed by the emergence of participatory approaches: from participatory rural appraisal (PRA) (Chambers et al, 1989) via participatory technology development (PTD) (Ashby and Sperling, 1995; Veldhuizen et al, 1997) to participatory learning and action research (PLAR) (Scoones et al, 1994). This gradual evolution reflected a growing awareness by researchers that it was crucial to better involve the farmers in the research process and to empower them in the process of doing so. Today, many researchers are engaged in refining such approaches and methodologies in order to further improve the way in which research works with an array of stakeholders of the rural sector in the hope that this will speed up the innovation process, increasingly seen from an innovation systems perspective (World Bank, 2006).