106 – Reflections on the FRN Convening

Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a Social Impact Scientist and an anthropologist and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

[00:00:17] Lucie: Hi David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi Lucie. We’ve just come back from an exciting trip. I assume we’re going to talk about that.

[00:00:24] Lucie: Yeah, exactly. So the McKnight Foundation was organising a FRN convening, a convening discussing Farmer Research Networks, bringing together representatives from the three areas of practice, let’s say, in the world where they work, so the Andes, West Africa and Eastern Southern Africa, plus a whole number of invited guests working on related issues from, I think, politicians to other funders or other donors.

[00:00:56] David: UN agencies, international research organisations, CGIAR, or 1CG, I think it’s now called, yeah, a whole range of other people.

[00:01:07] Lucie: And so we were there as research method support from our grant for research method support, where we work a lot with Farmer Research Networks, supporting them in a range of different ways. Although actually it’s a bit more complicated, do you want to talk about the other meetings that sandwiched it as well?

[00:01:22] David: I think let’s focus on the convening itself because the convening is really, what’s really important, and I’ve been involved with this programme for 10 years now and this is a big deal, this is the first time we’ve had such a convening and FRNs, Farmer Research Networks, have been happening for much of that 10 years. And this time, with the external guests, this wasn’t really about the FRNs, the existing ones that exist within CRFS, the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, which is McKnight’s program, but this was very much about this approach and looking externally.

And one of the things which really excited me about the approach was that, well, about the convening, was that the approach was now conceived as something which could be relevant beyond the work that’s been happening within CRFS for the last 10 years.

[00:02:21] Lucie: We should say, perhaps COVID stopped the previous convening from happening in person, but there was an online one, if I understand correctly.

[00:02:29] David: There have been two. There was a face to face one, but that was internal. And then the online one was also internal. And so there have been such meetings before, but really inward looking, trying to learn. And this is one of the things I love about working in this program, that it is very reflective. It’s really smart people thinking hard about problems.

And one of the things that I really appreciated was that in this convening, this idea of bringing in the external guests, or external thought leaders, we were challenged then, is this really different from what’s happening elsewhere? Is it not different? And I found many differences and many similarities with what’s happening elsewhere, which I was sort of already aware of. But I found it so useful to actually engage with a number of people who are thought leaders in their own right, but not deeply exposed to CRFS thinking.

And it was very interesting to me how there’s huge amounts of money going in to more conventional ways of doing things. And people who are leading that work are thinking very hard and very deeply about what they’re doing, but they haven’t had some of the insights that we’ve had which we now take for granted.

One of the discussion points that came up in very interesting ways was just this simple thing of paying farmers to be part of a research. And it was very interesting that when the farmers brought up some of the issues that they had, one of the big issues was that, well, the researchers come in and then, what’s the data for? What’s it used for? They don’t really see the use.

And the thing is, these two things go together, that actually, a lot of the international research funding is just these relatively short term studies where you don’t work for a long time with a single group. And so therefore, it is appropriate to give them recompense. But it’s also, you’re not really doing it for them.

[00:04:30] Lucie: No.

[00:04:31] David: You’re doing it for learning. Whereas very central to the FRN approach is the fact that the farmer networks, whatever shape they take, and they take different shapes in different contexts, but they are central to this.

[00:04:46] Lucie: And interestingly, also in our list of participants, I think we both forgot to say farmers, because we’re so used to farmers being present at these research meetings.

[00:04:56] David: Absolutely, you’re absolutely right, this fact that there were local farmers, there were farmers from within the region, there were farmers from across other regions, who were there, who are present. Many of them representatives, many of them able to use their voice powerfully to communicate with others, so they’re not necessarily a random farmer. They are farmers who have leadership positions and have grown into those leadership positions because they have the ability to interact at multiple levels, but farmer representatives all the same.

And their voice is extremely strong within our communities of practice within CRFS approaches, within these FRN approaches. But it’s very interesting how different that is and how different this felt in other approaches. And the other point which I found was very interesting was on the researcher side. We’ve got something which came out, it was actually on the posters from the Agroecology Hub that our team helped sort of bring out, this idea of this generalist researcher.

And it was very interesting that this is a concept which resonated extremely strongly with a number of people at the meeting, who are embedded in FRNs, who have actually played that role in some sense and are recognising that they don’t know, there aren’t that many examples to follow, there aren’t that many role models. But it’s something which within the FRN approach, in certain cases, is emerging as something which is really important.

[00:06:34] Lucie: Can I just explain here, a generalist researcher, the idea of this is, not that an academic stays very much limited by their discipline, but uses their skills that they have learned as a researcher to actually research and find out ideas and knowledge from research about other issues which the farmers are experiencing to try and find knowledge together.

[00:06:59] David: I would frame it slightly differently. It’s this element that the researcher is not there because of their specialist knowledge. They are there because they have built relationships with the community they are serving. And that’s the thing, that human connection, that human element. They have the skills of a researcher, they’re not embedded community workers in that sense. They are researchers, but they are playing the role because of their human connection.

[00:07:31] Lucie: That’s such an interesting distinction.

[00:07:33] David: And there was one of the, you know, one of the participants from CGIAR centres, which is this sort of big collaboration of research centres, who said they’d thought about this before, and they had the concept of a community embedded researcher, which I really like. There was a question of how such a researcher would be funded and who would fund them, but I really like that idea that you actually have jobs which are to be a researcher within a community, to build those relationships within the community, to understand what research needs that community has, and to then be the bridge into the research world. What a fantastic job that would be.

[00:08:09] Lucie: I was exactly going to ask what would that mean for research. At the moment we’re talking about very small pockets of very basically individuals who are doing that bridge. But what would it mean for research more widely? So you’re suggesting that you need a whole different kind of job?

[00:08:24] David: Well, yes, I think that, you know, the idea of actually having researchers embedded in community is a really interesting one. And I think it would change the nature of research. But I think it would change it in a very positive way if we could actually build the structures around it. Because I think it would enable transdisciplinary research in a very different way. I mean, one of the components of that is that you don’t need everybody to be transdisciplinary, to have transdisciplinary research happening, but this generalist researcher would, by their very definition, be transdisciplinary because they wouldn’t be limited to their discipline.

They ideally, in my mind, would have a strong disciplinary background in some discipline, but that would just give them the perspective to understand the need to consult with specialists in other disciplines and to bring them on board. Well, and this is the thing, it’s not a pure transdisciplinary approach because we’re not asking everybody involved to be transdisciplinary. But we’re having a transdisciplinary approach where there are people leading it from within the community who are inherently transdisciplinary.

It’s a really, really interesting and exciting idea. And it’s not clear to me that it would be feasible at this point in time for all sorts of interesting reasons, not least because it’s not clear to me that if we had such an approach that such community enabled researchers would have career progression, that they would have the opportunity to progress themselves, to get recognition for their work. Because, in some sense, the way they’re doing research is very much at odds with the traditional disciplinary focus of academia.

So there would need to be interesting changes or shifts in our academic structures. And it’s not clear to me as well at this point that, for researchers, that there is a good long term job. I can absolutely see the value of early career researchers embedding themselves in community and playing this role.

But in some sense, you don’t want that to be an individual. You want it to be somehow institutionalised. And so I don’t know what this would look like. If it depends on individuals, it sort of is inherently not quite right, but we need that skill set to be recognised and valued and we need those positions to be something where that trust is built. But on what level is it built? Is it built with individuals? Of course, that’s important with any community, it’s an individual relationship, it’s human contact, which matters. But we don’t want it to just be one on one, we want it to be scalable, and that means elements of institutionalisation, which are challenging. I don’t have the answers here, but there are wonderful questions which have come out.

[00:11:34] Lucie: So that’s one aspect, yeah. What other questions are you thinking of?

[00:11:38] David: There are so many different inspirational pieces through the week. One of the other things which I was really, inspired by was that FAO was there. You know, FAO is a UN agency, Food and Agriculture Organisation, and there is interest within FAO in agroecology, which is a good point of alignment. And they also have an approach which they’ve been doing for many years called Farmer Field Schools, which relates very well with the FRN approach. In fact, some of the people who first created the idea of the FRN approach, and I’m thinking particularly of Rebecca Nelson in this, was deeply, deeply schooled, you could say, within the Farmer Field School approach.

And her critique of the Farmer Field School approach was simply that well, there’s so many great Farmer Field Schools, but we’re not learning across them. You know, there isn’t that global learning coming out of the Farmer Field Schools, whereas there’s a lot of good local learning happening. So how do we actually create these enhanced, she used to talk about infinity loops, where you have the local learning and the global learning, coming out through data, coming out in different forms and informing others?

A lot of the FRN initial conceptualisation came almost as an extension of thinking about the work which is so good, which is happening within Farmer Field Schools and actually saying how do we get that global learning beyond just the good work, which is happening through Farmer Field Schools. And I think this is something where to have FAO there and to be part of this and to be part of thinking about this, oh, it’s so interesting.

And what was so interesting, of course, is that FAO also has now real efforts to get data at scale using indicators and so on like TAPE and others. They’ve got distinct, if you want, innovations happening related to agroecology, including these indicators such as TAPE and related to the Farmer Field Schools which have been so well established all over the place.

And yet, the idea of bringing these together and actually trying to think how to have this learning, how to do it differently. This is what we have been grappling with for 10 years. So that opportunity now to think at a different scale, you know, 10 years ago when we started thinking about FRNs, we didn’t know enough.

But now there’s so much which has been learned over the last 10 years about this sort of approach of trying to do this. And we don’t feel we’ve got to a simple process which can just be applied at scale yet. But we’re getting there. No, when I say we’re getting there, that sort of implies a sense of coherence that doesn’t exist.

[00:14:34] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:14:37] David: Coherence is not always a good thing, the stimulation that comes from different people bringing different perspectives. What I meant by the fact that we’re getting there, I feel, is that there are some learnings which are coming out where there are opportunities to think about how could this be done at scale, what might this look like if it was different, and so on.

And I think this is not uniform across the three regions, but there are learnings which is so interesting, and which the likes of FAO now are able to see and possibly build from. And maybe they could build out from their Farmer Field School approach to a sort of FRN of Farmer Field Schools, which would then have this sort of learning coming up and coming out, tying in with their Farmer Field Schools approach, but bringing up further learnings in different ways. Wow, that would be exciting.

And I think that if you’re thinking about how to take and use the Farmer Field Schools approach to build agroecological evidence and really serve the agroecology within FAO, there’s a real opportunity here. So yeah, these discussions at least I’ve been hearing happening. This isn’t coming from me, but it’s really exciting.

[00:15:49] Lucie: Yeah, it does sound exciting. I think I was interacting at a different level to you, I think, during the week. It’s interesting to hear that all of those things are going on. I very much made the most of it to get to know the different ways the Farmer Research Networks work in the three regions. I even learned, you know, because most of our work is in West Africa, so I learned more about how the farmer federations actually developed, about 20, 30 years ago, which I hadn’t been aware of. I thought that they had been a bit older than that.

And in Eastern Africa, it’s very much reliant on NGOs, I guess, and then the Andes is completely different. And they sort of do their own thing, which is really great. It was amazing to have the three cultural regions interacting and exchanging. I think absolutely everybody loved that and appreciated it.

[00:16:38] David: Yeah. And you mentioned the Andes there, one of the innovations that I’d heard about from the Andes, which I finally got to dig into much more, was this sort of network of farmers that were collecting climate data to feed back into improved local forecasting. And then that in turn was then leading to improved action based on predicted events. Oh, it was wonderful to understand the details of this and to actually see how… I’d understood it before and I thought this is really nice, but it’s not relevant to the areas where we work as well for different reasons and to understand how I was both right and wrong.

The reason it wasn’t relevant is because this improved forecast, when you’re in a mountainous region with lots of local microclimates, this is essential, you need this, and the global models aren’t able to give you local forecasts and you can quite easily get improvements to those local forecasts by feeding the data in, which is more locally relevant and so on. So that’s what I had understood previously. And I thought, well, you know, in the context that we work, this is much less relevant because we don’t have so many micro forecasts and we don’t have these sorts of things.

And even then, if you take that to the next step of how they’re using it for their extreme events, where a lot of their extreme events are frost, they’re temperature related in ways that in the West African and East African regions where we work, are not as relevant.

[00:18:15] Lucie: Yep.

[00:18:16] David: And so that’s where I’d felt, you know, this is great, I love what’s happening, this is what I’d known before, but it’s not necessarily so relevant for our regions.

However, what I think I’d failed to understand before, which I really grasped here, is that in some sense, yes, those were the needs that were emerging because that’s the region they were in, but there was underlying this a process of working with farmers on understanding the events they’re interested in and the needs, which could be appropriate in other regions.

And so even if the improved forecast was less important, and the nature of the data they’re collecting could be different, the approach that they’re doing, which I’ve never really been exposed to before, that is something which could be relevant. And that’s really exciting, that there’s details of what they’re doing and how they’re approaching it and how they’ve been building this out with the farmers, where even though the end result could look quite different, there’s a lot we could learn from that approach.

And I think there’s a real opportunity to take some of these ideas and to rebuild around it, maybe in a way which is more accessible and more shareable. Not because what the group in the Andes have done isn’t good or isn’t available. It’s just they haven’t built it with reusability in mind and they built it to serve the farmers that they’re trying to serve, which is exactly correct.

But if we look at this same approach and say, well, can we make it easier for others to do the approach they’ve done? Then what comes out of it might be quite different, but if we could make that easier, that would be really exciting. We know from the PICSA work that we’re doing, the importance of climate data in different ways, and in the context we work, the historical data is what people have valued, and this is why PICSA has been so successful, but the PICSA approach kind of has that as a starting point.

Whereas the approach in the Andes, they sort of take a step back from that , where you actually go through a process which is able to identify locally what the needs are in terms of historical data forecasts and so on. So I have a feeling that there’s something really exciting and interesting that we could learn.

Of course, PICSA, which we’ve been involved in for many years, and this group in the Andes who are looking at these sort of short term forecasts, which are really useful in their context, bringing ideas from both of these together into something which could be, well, I think genuinely, not necessarily new, but useful. Bringing together in some ways, maybe, oh, I was really excited by that and really inspired by the work that’s been happening out there.

[00:21:24] Lucie: That’s really interesting.

[00:21:26] David: Were there other specific pieces of inspiration you found?

[00:21:31] Lucie: I just always find the West African groups really inspiring, so unfortunately, Madame Ba wasn’t able to talk, but she was bringing in more of the nutritional side, which wasn’t discussed as much and how to integrate that within the agroecology approach. I’ve just always got a thirst to know more about how Farmer Research Networks, their role within a context where there’s insecurity. I’m not sure if… you know, inspired to know more in those sorts of situations.

[00:22:01] David: As you know, I’ve known the West African team for a long time and I have so much respect for their work. And I was so delighted with how well they represented themselves and the people who were really interested in a number of the things that were said there, the ambition and the institutionalisation. I mean, what’s happened in terms of institutionalising these approaches within federations and so on.

There’s so much to be inspired by there. But I knew about all that. So in some sense, my other point of inspiration came from East Africa and this group called FIPS. I won’t say what FIPS stand for because as they pointed out that this is where they started, whereas now it’s just a name and it could be made to mean anything. And so we actually had fun at breakfast one day thinking about other ways to use the acronym FIPS, which are now more aligned with the work they do.

[00:23:02] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:23:04] David: But the thing which was really inspirational about the way they’ve taken ideas from FRN and tried to sort of fit them into structures which can scale, and trying to get these out at scale in certain ways as part of other structures that they’ve built, and how well they fit in, and how they capture part of the FRN process. But I would argue not all of it.

[00:23:30] Lucie: I mean, it’s hard for these NGOs, a lot of them already have their own way of working, and then there’s this opportunity to work as part of the FRN approach, so they’re trying to work out how to adapt the FRN to suit their existing structures, well, they’re trying to work out how to do both, I guess.

[00:23:49] David: This is what’s so powerful. And with FIPS in particular, their existing structures meant that they could get things out at scale. So they have these FRN type groups, you know, lots and lots of little ones of them, I think they said 96 in sort of Western Kenya. And they don’t have the same structure that I would recognise in other Kenyan FRNs. They don’t have the same researcher interaction at this point in time. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the opportunity for that.

And this is part of what we were discussing in very interesting ways that, from where they’ve got to, you know, they’ve prioritised in some sense, building the farmer network. And the research took a little bit of the back seat. And so one of the things we were discussing is, well, how could we strengthen the research component? And this is really exciting because I think in many other cases, the farmer research has been prioritised maybe over the network and actually building those structures to be enabled to network together.

There’s so many different cases where different things have been prioritised. What really inspired me about the FIPS approach was that they had really prioritised the farmer network element in certain ways. And we were able to now discuss, well, okay, how do we strengthen the research and what is it that needs research? And actually ask the question, you know, is research even needed?

And I think the answer to that was definitely yes, but not maybe in the way that it’s coming out elsewhere. This is something which there are plenty of research questions which are emerging. And so trying to think how those bubble up and how you actually now get the right sort of elements of research coming in to strengthen this in ways which really help. Really fascinating.

That was another point of real excitement for me to just think and be challenged by a group taking a very different approach, but doing so in a way which enables us to think about the approach where you could be getting the elements of it out at scale and then bringing the research in more strongly afterwards.

Oh, that was exciting. I suppose it’s exciting in the same way that the Farmer Field School approach enables us to think about that as well. But they have a very different approach, well, it’s not a very different approach, it is a slightly different approach on the ground. So to have FIPS having taken the FRN approach but weakening the research to be able to scale it and now discussing with them what it might look like to put the research back in more strongly. Oh, I really enjoyed that discussion.

[00:26:33] Lucie: That sounds great. And as you’re saying that I’m sort of thinking of that’s a bit what happened also with the creation of the farmer federations in West Africa then. They started by creating networks basically, or organisations, and then the research side came later.

[00:26:49] David: Yes, absolutely. And the farmer federations in West Africa, as you said, the current structures and some of the most you were learning about, they date back to 20, 30 years. But the ideas of these and the structures behind these do date back longer, and there are others which have a longer history.

But what’s really interesting is that if you think about, how they have been built up around these networks of farmers with mutual support and actually gaining benefit from that. That’s the obvious way to start.

[00:27:28] Lucie: Exactly.

[00:27:29] David: If we’re really wanting to build strong Farmer Research Networks, well we need to start with strong farmer networks. What’s really interesting is there was a case in the Andes, which actually was the opposite.

[00:27:43] Lucie: Oh.

[00:27:44] David: It started very much, as I understand it, about farmer research and supporting farmer research and trying to help groups of farmers involved in research. And eventually it really gained momentum as an approach, but it was really about advocacy and promoting farmer’s rights. It’s a wonderful story. It’s now a really big and powerful organisation whose origins were in farmer research, but then really grew into advocacy because that’s where the need was.

And I think this is the key thing, when I think of agroecology, it’s practice. It’s actually helping farmers farm better and get more out of their farm and maintain their environment and all the rest of it, have cohesive society. It’s research, which is about actually getting the evidence and learning from this and actually being rigorous in what we’re doing and being able to make sure that this is what is transferable to elsewhere, can be learnt and can be shared, this has sort of global implications and so on.

And then it’s also, of course, the advocacy, promoting the farmers’ rights, and being able to support the farmers at a political level, to be built in positive ways around these communities. And the fact that maybe the balance shifts from one to the other over time, oh, that’s a nice sign to me.

Now, my expectation is that things will get stuck. And so there’s no perfect system or perfect solution. But I do like the idea, I like starting with the practice and then the research coming in as something which actually adds value to that. And if it doesn’t add value, it doesn’t stick. But we have wonderful cases in the West African context in particular, where that research has added value to the extent that it has stuck within the institution, it’s been institutionalised.

And then, of course, that this research should enable the voice of that community to be stronger and to be heard, that’s another level. And the fact that there are instances of that emerging as a strong voice really encourage me that this is an approach that can serve the three functions.

Anyway, it’s exciting times. It was an inspiring meeting.

[00:30:22] Lucie: It was, it was really interesting presentations and people present.

[00:30:26] David: Well, it’s interesting that for me, I can’t single out the presentation part .

[00:30:32] Lucie: I know all of your comments are coming from the separate conversations you have had outside of the…

[00:30:40] David: Well, the people who were there together and the way they were brought together, you know, the field trip was memorable. But it was the people more than the presentations. And of course, I’ve been in this community long enough that the presentations weren’t as new to me as I think the fact that others were engaging in this was great.

Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of people who come from their own area where there’s so much entrenched thinking at scale about standard ways of doing research or ways of interactions, which I guess have come from a particular type of funding. And it’s very interesting to me to see how, when you’re stuck within those funding cycles, it’s very difficult to see beyond them. And we’re just so lucky to have been involved and engaged in, McKnight’s CRFS work where they do have a very different way of funding which builds this sort of communities and which is sort of reflective and thoughtful and deep. It’s interesting to observe just how much funding cycles are influencing this.

[00:32:04] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:32:05] David: And how common it was for people involved in maybe sort of bigger bits of research to be talking about things in such a different way which really I can see how this relates to their funders but it also demonstrates how far removed they are from actually doing anything useful on the ground.

You know, that difference between people who actually have time to embed, to be deeply embedded over time within communities, with communities, and the people who aren’t, is just so visible.

[00:32:41] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:32:42] David: It’s really interesting to observe that. I have been exposed to that over the years many times, but I guess the reason it was so different on this occasion is that the majority were related to this sort of long term approach. Whereas a minority were sort of now in the traditional funding approach, whereas normally it’s the other way around. And the people who had come in from the sort of more traditional or more standard funding approaches, although they were in the minority, they were, by and large, exceptional.

So they were really, really good people. So, I really had a lot of respect for what they’re saying and where they’re coming from. But the impact of their funding worlds on them was so visible in this context, in a way where normally it wouldn’t be because there’d be in their element. And so this was really interesting to me as well.

Anyway, so I do think that thinking about how much funding cycles have influenced the relationships between researcher communities and so on, these are really, really interesting observations again. I had a great time last week.

[00:33:58] Lucie: I think that has come through quite clearly. And it’s great. I had a great time from a different perspective. Yeah, but really good.

[00:34:07] David: Yeah. Full credit to CRFS and McKnight for organising it. It was a really important meeting, I think, in a number of different ways.

[00:34:15] Lucie: And timely.

[00:34:16] David: Timely, exactly. There’s real possibilities for these ideas actually spreading further. That desire to have a further influence is wonderful, because there’s a lot of internal learning which hasn’t been shared out beyond so much. And putting it out there, engaging other people in it, really interesting.

 Great time. Thank you.

[00:34:37] Lucie: Okay, thanks, David.