Salient Events in the Development of PPB and PVS

According to a comprehensive PCI review carried out by Walker (2008), the terms PVS and PPB were not really introduced until the mid-90s. Prior to the emergence of PVS and PPB as methodological entities in their own right, the ground was being prepared through work carried out in the fields of participatory research and farming systems research from the 1970s onwards. He cited projects such as the national program of Guatemala (ICTA) that tried to institutionalise a mode of research which included on-farm trials and farmer-managed tests designed to elicit information directly from farmers that would be of use in technology design (Hildebrand, 1979). Another project that operated along similar lines was carried out at the prestigious Pantnagar Agricultural University in India. On-farm research was a key part of their maize breeding programme and a mechanism was devised to better link information from farmers to plant breeders so that it stood a better chance of influencing new plant breeding research priorities (Agrawal, 1979, Biggs, 1983)⁴.

These early experiments in PVS-type methods co-existed with, and on the periphery of, conventional ToT crop improvement research. Walker (2008) suggests that there was undoubtedly far more FPR experimentation going on than was recorded in the literature, and that in some cases the FPR activity was not well characterised - cf. Morris et al. (1999b:8). The first published in-depth account of PVS activities concerned the activities of a CIAT bean breeding programme in Rwanda (Sperling et al., 1993a). Over the course of the project, farmers were invited to a research station to assess cultivars and select those that they wanted to take home (Ibid.). The paper documented the process and provided insights into the

rationale behind farmers’ selection criteria, as well as how and why they differed from those of the professional breeders. Two major points emphasised in the paper were that farmers have the capacity to outperform plant breeders in the selection of germplasm for use on their own land; and, that the involvement of farmers in the research process can reduce overall research costs (Ibid.).

An early account of progenitor PPB-type activities was recorded in an article written by Maurya and colleagues in 1988 (Maurya et al., 1988). Their work concerned improving rice breeding for rain-fed areas in eastern India through identifying the traits which farmers thought desirable in their traditional landraces, comparing these traits with advanced

4 For a more in-depth account of these PCI progenitor projects please see Walker (2008).

breeders’ material, and then providing farmers a selection of the material which best met their criteria for them to test on-farm (Ibid.). Although this was not strictly PPB by a contemporary definition, Dr. Maurya’s work involved farmers earlier on in the breeding process than PVS did, and like PVS, farmers were directly involved with testing the new material on their farms under their own management conditions⁵.

While there were different groups experimenting on farmer participation in crop improvement processes, there was not a definitive definition or classification of PPB, PVS, or PCI until an IDRC workshop in 1995 where all three acronyms were used (Walker, 2008). The following year the first of a series of four papers were published by Prof. John Witcombe, his colleagues at the Centre for Arid Zone Studies – Natural Resources (CAZS-NR), Bangor, and their research partners in India and Nepal (Witcombe et al., 1996, Joshi and Witcombe, 1996, Sthapit et al., 1996, Witcombe et al., 1999). In the first paper a key distinction was made between PVS and PPB in that the former involves farmer evaluation of near-finished or finished lines, whereas the latter involves the selection of genotypes by farmers from segregating generations, which is to say, earlier in the breeding process when the plant population being selected from has maximal genetic diversity (Witcombe et al., 1996). The earlier involvement of farmers in the breeding process allows for them to have more of an impact on the phenotypic qualities of the finished variety, which is particularly important if there are no current varieties available which suit farmers’ needs.

The year 1996 also saw another milestone in the global development of PCI. After almost a year of planning by various parties, an international seminar was held at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (Biermayr-Jenzano et al., 2011). The purpose of the meeting was to consider important issues arising from the fields of participatory research and gender analysis⁶, and consider how ‘end-user’ perspectives could be prioritised and

mainstreamed by a highly-visible international research programme (Ibid.). The key outcome of the seminar was an agreement that resources and knowledge should be put in place in order to fund a programme to develop methodological tools, capacities and institutional strategies for participatory research. CIAT was to convene the programme and it was to be co-sponsored by three of its CGIAR sister organisations: the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT), the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry

5 Further details of this and successor projects are listed as a case study in Weltzien et al. (2003:138)

6 The role of gender in agriculture and its acknowledgement and inclusion in agricultural research agenda coincided with a rising global interest in FPR.

Areas (ICARDA) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), as they would likely be users of the programme’s outputs. An advisory board was convened consisting of elected representatives based on different interest groups considered as stakeholders, including:

donors, NARS, IARCs, NGOs, indigenous knowledge systems, universities. Three decentralised working groups were established, each with a representative on the board.

 Plant breeding group (PBG)

 Participatory natural-resources management (PNRM)

 Gender Working Group (GWG)

Each working group developed a 5-year plan although gender issues were represented as a core issue within both the PBG and PNRM.

In December 1996 – the then Technical Advisory Committee of the CGIAR approved the establishment of the Systemwide Programme on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis (PRGA) which was subsequently created in 1997. The PRGA’s prime mandate was, “to improve the ability of the CGIAR system and other collaborating institutions to develop technology which alleviates poverty, improves food security and protects the environment with greater equity. (Biermayr-Jenzano et al., 2011:14).” Each working group started with a five year plan to be enacted between 1997 and 2002, consisting of the following themes: methodological development, capacity building, fostering partnerships and networks, and, institutionalisation of methods across the CGIAR – later referred to as ‘mainstreaming’ (Ibid.).

According to Biermayr-Jenzano et al. (2011: 14), over the course of phase I, the PRGA and its partners argued that participatory research and gender analysis:

 “Employed and was grounded in robust scientific methodology, ensuring the validity of its work.

 Generated broad impacts by producing technologies and refining methods which met the demands and needs of end-users, increasing their uptake and mitigating their rejection by farmers.

 Was cost-efficient, primarily on account of its increased impact and shortened time for technology development and deployment.

 Are especially beneficial to women, the poorest and marginalized groups, all of whom were frequently overlooked by conventional research;

 Was being used by a large and growing number of CGIAR scientists, and there was growing (and unmet) demand for training in these methods”.

One key activity carried out by both the PBG and PNRM working groups during phase I was the collation, development and analysis of two large project inventories of case-studies (Cf.

Weltzien et al. (2003) and McGuire et al. (2003)). The PBG project inventory was, and remains, a valuable resource for helping to identify the achievements of PCI projects, analyse their similarities and differences, and to draw out lessons and examples of best-practice with which to formulate a typology or framework of PCI. The PPB inventory was an account of the global state of PPB at the time and consisted of 80 registered projects. There were many other projects that tried to register but were not accepted on account of their using participatory methods in an extension rather than research capacity. The inventories contained a wide array of projects differing in crop type, agro-ecological conditions and institutional contexts, although most projects were situated in marginal-subsistence oriented areas. The inventories helped in ‘demystifying’ the process of PCI, and as a reviewer of phase I put it,

“... [the analysis of the inventory was] not to prescribe any particular type or mode as the correct one, but rather understand the effects of different modes of participation on the outcomes of research.” (Saad, 2003:15)

There were three major published outputs of the PBG project inventory. Two large monographs were published after the end of phase I, one focusing on PPB from the perspective of formal plant breeding, and the other from the perspective of farmer plant breeding (Weltzien et al., 2003, McGuire et al., 2003). Both these documents were originally published in 1999 as PRGA working documents and the material within contributed to the third major published peer-reviewed output – a framework for analysing PPB approaches and results that was previously discussed under Section 2.3.1(Sperling et al., 2001).

Other than the project inventory work, the PRGA supported cutting-edge research through a competitive small grants scheme. In the first phase 26 grants were awarded across the three working groups (Biermayr-Jenzano et al., 2011). This gave the programme ‘reach’ across many different geographical areas, agricultural production systems, and helped to extend its

research network and interaction with stakeholders (Biermayr-Jenzano et al., 2011). Each CGIAR director general also appointed a PRGA centre liaison who would disseminate

information, research results and grant opportunities from the PRGA to their respective centre and its partners (Ibid.). The PRGA also provided learning and capacity building activities in participatory methods to both CGIAR staff and recipients of their small grant funding. During phase I the PRGA also regularly conducted international meetings, workshops and symposia,

and also maintained a Listserv mailing list. Saad (2003) mentioned the importance of the mailing list in helping to generate a code of ethics and best practices for PPB that would not put stakeholders at a disadvantage, and in the creation of a PPB and IPR guidelines document.

One major hypothesis that directed research during the first phase was that the publishing of empirical evidence of the benefits of FPR, including PPB, would stimulate researchers to experiment or adopt these methods and approaches. The programme therefore developed a range of methodologies with which to evaluate the impacts and costs of FPR (Biermayr-Jenzano et al., 2011). The outcome of this was a book that considered PPB and NRM in particular (Lilja et al., 2002). The thought behind the book was that the development and collation of carefully constructed impact studies would produce reliable scientific evidence that could support the cited benefits of farmer participation in crop improvement and

stimulate its future wider use by research professions (Lilja and Ashby, 2002). In order to meet this aim, the book tried to address questions previously raised in another paper by Ashby (1996):

1. What degree of user participation is appropriate at a given stage in the innovation process?

2. What approaches to farmer participatory research and gender analysis (PRGA) are most effective for different types of technologies: e.g., knowledge or management intensive?

3. Are farmer PRGA approaches broadly applicable?

4. How do we measure benefits and monitor performance in relation to different goals (of various stakeholders)?

5. What are the costs?

In trying to provide impact assessment strategies, the authors were confronted by the

multiplicity of aims and objectives for using participatory methods which lead to a diversity of potentially measurable impacts, e.g. process, technology, economic, efficiency, sustainability, empowerment criteria, etc. Another salient issue in participatory impact assessment arose in trying to differentiate between overall project outcome(s) and the specific contribution that

‘participation’ has made to it/them – there are often very few case studies that involve a counterfactual case to act as a baseline in which no participatory methods have been used.

Lilja and Ashby (2002) also mentioned the dearth of cases that identified causal relationships between participatory activities and their purported impacts. In the book the authors present

case-studies and an impact assessment framework which tries to address these difficult issues (Ibid.).

The combination of different initiatives carried out by the PRGA over the course of its first phase was wide and far reaching. The information contained within the project inventories, the research network supported by its mailing list, the timely analyses derived from data acquired from these and other sources, and its position as a system-wide programme of the CGIAR, all contributed to its position as a leading global authority on FPR and PCI during this period.

The PRGA was not alone in its publication of PCI material. Of the major international agricultural research journals which publish articles on plant breeding, Euphytica and Experimental Agriculture have published by far the most papers on PPB and PVS⁷. In December 2001, the 122^nd volume of Euphytica was devoted entirely to PCI. In the

introduction to the PCI volume, the contributors state that it “...is believed that participatory crop improvement (PCI) possesses some essential advantages over formal crop improvement, such as a better definition of selection criteria that are important to the local community, and better targeting of environmental conditions (Elings et al., 2001).” Moreover they cite the project inventory work of the PRGA and a PPB workshop that took place in 1999 at

Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands as catalysts for bringing together a PCI dedicated issue (Weltzien et al., 1999). The main purpose of this PCI edition was to address the issue of how collaboration between farmers and breeders can best be organised, and the most appropriate breeding methods for realising this (Elings et al., 2001). The contributors included members of the PRGA as well as two other research groups who had devoted much of their activities to developing and implementing PCI (Ceccarelli et al., 2001, Witcombe et al., 2001). One of these groups, CAZS-NR and its research partners, had already been mentioned.

The other consists of a decentralised participatory barley breeding programme operating across Syria, Tunisia and Morocco operating as a series of projects within ICARDA, a CGIAR centre. These two research groups represented the leading plant breeder practitioners of PPB and between them accounted for over half of the peer-reviewed articles on PPB (Walker, 2008).

7 Other major plant breeding journals include Field Crops Research, Crop Science, and Plant Breeding.

I have so far presented an account of the emergence and establishment of PCI as a set of related crop improvement methodologies on the international stage. The next section considers the limited global mainstreaming of PCI methods and its status today.