RESEARCH PROCESS

The selection of case studies was deliberatively purposive as is advised in qualitative research (Yin, 2003). The selection was also strategic in keeping with critical realist intensive research designs by considering cases that are widely practised in some countries of southern Africa; but that have different emphases and are being practised under different social and agro- ecological conditions (Danermark et al., 2002, p. 170). Section 4.2.2.4 discussed the broad criteria for selecting study sites and this section discussed the details of the qualities and factors that I considered in choosing who to research with and where. This process was the first part of getting ready to do field work.

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The following is a list of criteria that were used in selecting the case studies:

Sustainable agriculture practices that had a relatively long history in southern African countries (at least 10 years) and that have demonstrated potential to grow in any country of the SADC region;

Sustainable agriculture practices that were extensively practised;

At least one of the agricultural practices had to be indigenous to southern Africa; A study site in which sustainability was being incorporated in farming;

Farmers and trainers who have been practising sustainable agriculture for a number of years who have yielded at least some of the social and ecological benefits;

Farmers and trainers who have been engaged in the learning, practice and development of the practice for a number of years;

Farmers working on relatively small holdings as such farmers form the majority of farmers in the SADC region, must be involved; and

Diversity between the case studies in terms of socio-political and agro-ecological conditions.

There three selected sustainable agriculture practices and study sites were: Permaculture practice in Hwedza District, agro-ecological zone;

Machobane Farming System practice in the districts of Mafeteng and Mohale‟s Hoek in Lesotho; and

Organic farming practice in Durban District, South Africa (see Section 1.3).

4.3.2 Negotiating access

Bloor and Wood (2006) underlined the importance of negotiating access in doing social research and defined it as a process by which researchers get access to research settings. They pointed out that in conducting overt research, social scientists have to seek permission to work with potential research participants and that such negotiations are ongoing: from research planning to report writing. It is both a social and physical access, called „getting in‟ and „getting on‟ respectively. Getting on was achieved through trust building by respecting local customs, listening carefully and keeping promises. I negotiated initial access in each case study through making calls and writing e-mails to people of influence who worked and lived in the research setting that I had selected. At the end of field work, I „left the field‟, a social process of withdrawal from field work (Bloor & Wood, 2006) in keeping with good practice. The process of managing and concluding field relationships started with access negotiation and in all three cases had four aspects:

Giving research participants feedback on what was emerging from the research and getting their comments;

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Obtaining research participants‟ feedback regarding the progress that they had made in examining and implementing the solutions modelled at the previous workshop; Thanking research participants for having taken part in the research process; and Bidding research participants farewell.

Details of the process of negotiating access for each case study are discussed below. 4.3.2.1 Case Study 1: Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE)

In the case of the Zimbabwe Case Study, I went through the Coordinator of the Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme who gave his consent for me to work with one of the schools in their programme – St Margaret Primary School in rural Hwedza district. The negotiations began in May 2008. This consent was put in the form of a letter that he wrote to the headmaster of the school advising him about my research interest and of the need to allow me to work with them. The headmaster in turn welcomed me and invited the Permaculture teachers in his school to participate. They verbally expressed interest in the study. Two of the teachers then accompanied me to speak to farmers who were practising Permaculture, introduced me and urged the farmers to take part in the research. It was after this visit, that we set dates for interviews. In this sense, my access to some of the research participants was mediated by others and especially by the gatekeeper or the key informant. However, participation in all cases was voluntary. I had direct negotiations with other Permaculture facilitators who were involved in SCOPE but not directly and they gave verbal consent, which was adequate. In each of the two subsequent visits, I reported to the SCOPE coordinator first before visiting the school. Each time I visited the school, I reported to the headmaster first. We would always negotiate the dates and times at least two weeks ahead. These processes of getting in and getting on were therefore not one-off but recurrent. Leaving the field, in Case Study 1, took place in September 2009 after 16 months of engagement. 4.3.2.2 Case Study 2: Isidore community of organic producers and marketers

Negotiating access in the South African case study, which was located in the urban and peri- urban areas of Durban, was less bureaucratic. It began in June 2008 a few weeks after an encounter with an organic farmer and facilitator who presented some of his work at a PELUM workshop. . After securing the interest of this Isidore farm owner, who also networked with local organic farmers and trained new, emerging and established farmers, agreed to help me to identify who I should talk with based on the suggestions that I had made. His consent was also verbal. He hosted me at his place during all three visits to his area. There was potential for ethical and validity issues to arise when a planned feedback workshop failed to happen as planned and I had to negotiate with him as to whom to see in order to obtain the required feedback. One of the criteria for choosing whom to interview was that one of the persons had to be someone with whom he had little or no communication with

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after the workshop. The trust that we had built between us appeared to have helped because he not only agreed that we do this but accompanied me and was honest in his answers about having „excluded‟ some of the CL workshop participants in the post workshop deliberations (see Case Record Section 3.8.1). I left the field in this case study in October 2009 after 16 months of engagement.

4.2.3.3 Machobane Farming System as promoted by RSDA and MADF

Negotiating access in Lesotho involved talking with a former Board member of PELUM where I used to work and whose organisation, Rural Self Development Association (RSDA) was supporting the MFS, through both phone calls and e-mail communication. After agreeing to the study, she persuaded me to also engage with another NGO – Machobane Agricultural Development Foundation (MADF), whose primary focus was the development of the MFS practice. I then negotiated with the director for access and he also agreed. The study area comprised the two districts of Mafeteng and Mohale‟s Hoek. The main gatekeeper, however, remained the director of RSDA. When going to the field, my access was primarily negotiated with this director and the negotiations of timing were generally conducted well ahead of the visits. During the second visit to Lesotho, which similar to the other two case studies focused on holding Change Laboratory workshops, there was a specific request to reduce the planned workshop to two days rather than the proposed four days so that the farmers would not be away from their fields for too long. Some farmers came from very remote areas. The adjustment was made without compromising the planned number of hours for the workshop. Meetings with farmer groups in Lesotho always began and ended with a prayer. The local leader was responsible for welcoming participants.

4.3.3 Phases of the study: exploratory and expansive

4.3.3.1 Phase 1: Exploratory phase

Getting on with the study involved making: preparations before the study; adjustments during the study; and records of interviews, workshops and observations. It also included reflecting on the process and providing feedback to the community of practice which ranged from the research participants, to critical friends (see Section 4.4.3) such as fellow students and researchers, SAQA and international researchers met at conferences. Preparations included designing questions and then pilot testing them, which I did in Case Study 1. During interviews in Case Study 1, I took notes of interviews but realised that I needed to record future interviews so that I could capture the details. I then transcribed each of the interviews held in each workshop and send these out to research participants for corrections. Fieldwork also involved observing the physical and material environment in both phases of the study. This was the exploratory phase. After this exploratory phase, a report was compiled for each case study (see Case Record Sections 2.5; 3.5 and 4.5) and sent out for comments. There was

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a limitation in terms of the accessibility of the English report among farmers in Lesotho. The gist of the each report was captured in mirror data which was presented to research participants for feedback. This helped to overcome the challenge of language and assisted in obtaining the necessary feedback.

4.3.3.2 Phase 2: Expansive learning

The expansive learning phase of the study began with the holding of CL workshops. The time between the holding of the interviews and the CL workshops varied from five months in Case Study 3, to six months in Case Study 1, to ten months in Case Study 2. Each CL workshop shared the history of the sustainable agriculture practice locally; discussed the contradictions being encountered, chose which ones to work with and modelled at least one solution to at least one contradiction. Workshops lasted between 10 and 12 hours and each were run over two to four days. At the end of each workshop, research participants developed an action plan showing what they would do in connection with solutions that they had modelled.

During each CL workshop the researcher worked with an assistant who video-recorded proceedings and with whom he reflected on the proceedings of each day in order to plan for the following day. Within a week of completing a CL workshop, reports were sent for comment and often there none was received. During CL workshops, participants in Case Study 3 discussed in their local language and presentations were translated. This required considerable time and meant that we covered less ground than might have been possible. The use of local language however enabled farmers to engage with contradictions and model solutions in more enabling ways than would have been possible if they had worked in English. The limitation this created was that the researcher and his assistant could not engage much in the group discussions.

The second part of the expansive learning phase comprised of feedback engagements between the researcher and participants in each case study. In Case Studies 1 and 3, feedback workshops were conducted. In Case Study 3 a feedback meeting with the directors of RSDA and MADF were also held because they were unable to attend the workshop. In these two case studies, the feedback workshops were held about seven months after the CL workshops. In Case Study 2, the feedback sessions were conducted nearly 3 months after their CL workshop and this had implications on the progress made towards implementing the solution. The feedback in Case Study 2 involved three interviews. Throughout the research process, the methodological and theoretical reflections and insights generated in one case study informed the processes in subsequent case studies as all were concerned with change oriented workplace learning in sustainability practices. The table below (Table 4.1) summarises the phases.

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Table 4.1: Two-phased case study design implemented in the study

Case Studies Permaculture:

Zimbabwe Organic Farming: South Africa Machobane Farming System: Lesotho Phase 1

Exploring

Case Study 1

Document analysis Semi-structured

individual and group interviews

Observation of farmer fields and gardens

Case Study 2

Document analysis Semi-structured

individual interviews Observation of farmer

fields and gardens

Case Study 3

Document analysis Semi-structured

individual and group interviews

Observation of farmer fields and gardens

Data generated from the first phase fed into the second phase as „mirror data‟. Phase 2 Expansive Change Laboratory workshop One-day feedback workshop Process observation Practise observation Change Laboratory workshop Three feedback interviews Process observation Practise observation Change Laboratory workshop

One hour feedback meeting

Process observation Practise observation

Data generated from the second phase included some field level analysis with research participants as well as the modelling of solutions.