The other day a colleague asked me to give a talk on “communication planning” for the benefit of his colleagues in a tree nursery project. I wasn’t too familiar with their project so I asked some key questions about it, such as:
- What are the goals of the project?
- What is the role of communication in the project?
- How will communication be used to help achieve project goals?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- What prior work has been done to understand the stakeholders?
To facilitate wide-scale adoption and achieve impact, an R&D project needs to address the following points before a communication strategy can be designed:
- Brief description of the technology or recommended practices
- Impact or change desired: (e.g., improve the quality of X of all _______ by 35%; change farmers’ beliefs in ________management by 30%)
- Target audience: (e.g., 500 tree operators in ____ municipalities in _______ province adopting recommended practices ; 10,000 growers in _______ municipalities in ______ provinces can identify the characteristics of quality seedlings, demand quality seedlings, and grow such seedlings)
- Variables to be monitored: (e.g., tree operators’ cultural management practices, etc. )
- Methods to be used for each variable: (e.g., surveys of nursery operators and tree growers; focus group discussions; participant observation; assessments of attitudes)
- Consequences of change: (e.g., nursery operators grow quality seedlings, tree growers can recognize quality seedlings, reduced or zero tree mortality rates, reduced expenditure for planting materials, higher income, policy support to facilitate wider adoption – policy makers pass an ordinance that will require nursery operators to follow quality assurance checks as a requirement for a business license, etc)
- Change motivations: (e.g., save $$$; time; labor)
Stakeholder participation
The tree nursery project will have to take a few steps backward to do the following:
- better understand stakeholders or intended project beneficiaries — what are their practices, reasons for doing them, resistance points. For this, the field staff will need to spend more time to “hang out” with the operators and growers. The agricultural anthropologist, Jeffery Bentley, has a practical to-do list for “hanging out” which I will share with you in another post.
- create opportunities for nursery operators and tree growers to participate in defining the problem and finding the pathways to solve it.
ICRAF has carried out a farmer-led development and scaling up of tree-based options in Africa and it would be useful to learn from their experience.
Will appreciate your comments.
2 comments
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May 29, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Efren B. Saz
I guess my first reaction to the proposal is how much do we know by now of the many variables of interest to be able to say that we (the researchers) are confident already that we have enough basis to make our subsequent actions the most logical and that our partners are ready for scaling up. I am, therefore, refering to the amount of knowledge about tree farmers’ behavior and what motivates them to act in a particular way (adoption of a recommended set of actions such as investing their money, time and other resources, redoing certain things that they were used to doing, etc. What else outside of our sphere of influence might affect this behavior? In short, are we really ready for scaling up or might we do more probing yet to see if our initial findings are adequate. Did we miss something. Were we able to spot the variables that really matter?
May 29, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Monina Escalada
Thanks Efren. I agree with all the points you raised. Apart from the technical forestry practices, the project staff will need to have a better understanding of the nursery operators and tree growers’ perceptions and behavior – their reasons for doing certain practices, resistance points, etc. There will be need to conduct focus group discussions (FGDs), key informant interviews and eventually a baseline survey.
Often, there is a temptation for outsiders like us to gauge the behavior of intended project beneficiaries as below our scientific yardsticks. Yet, if we hang out more with them, we will learn that they have a reason for doing certain practices because of the circumstances they are in.