ABSTRACT
Despite notable productivity-related successes, traditional, scientist-led, technical research in natural resource management (NRM) has come under criticism from farmers, donors, and even scientists themselves (GFAR, 1999, 2000) for concerns about weak relevance and adoption. In response to this critique, participatory research approaches – with more user-oriented, flexible methods and a different set of assumptions about research – have emerged. Yet as these participatory approaches have gained momentum, criticisms of their application have also emerged, especially around ‘scientific rigour’, generalizability and naiveté about power relations (Cooke and Kothari, 2001). Furthermore, the relationship between traditional and participatory research is often confusing, the lines between them blurred. Despite increasing interdisciplinarity in enquiry and innovation processes, a multitude of tensions and even scepticism surrounds the two approaches. These tensions have created the risk of NRM researchers aligning themselves either with participatory or with traditional research, and missing opportunities to gain from the strengths of the other. In this chapter, we seek to address this risk by exploring some key dimensions (see below, ‘Traditional and participatory research: key dimensions of difference’) and the strengths and weaknesses (‘Putting it together: reflections on navigating the research spectrum’) of both approaches, as well as the related concept of diversity analysis (‘Diversity analysis in NRM research’). Through this exploration, we underscore the complexity and dynamism (‘The challenge: complexity, diversity and dynamism in human and natural landscapes’) inherent in the human and natural systems that NRM research addresses. We argue that the desired improvements in NRM demand that research institutions assess, more explicitly and thoughtfully than ever before, the multiple facets of traditional and participatory research approaches, and consciously craft appropriate and innovative combinations of approaches for each research initiative.
