Participatory Research for Smallholder Livestock Systems: Applying Common Sense to Complex Problems

Key Points: 1. Participatory approaches to research (PAR) bring researchers closer to farmers, the intended users of research outputs. 2. Active, functional participation of farmers in the evaluation and development of new technologies requires researchers to make an important commitment: respecting the knowledge, skills and opinions of farmers while maintaining confidence in their own scientific knowledge. 3. Farmer experimentation is not usually suitable to provide quantitative biophysical data (this can be achieved more effectively in researcher controlled experiments), but to provide qualitative information and improve understanding. This type of information can be collected systematically to enable rigorous analysis. 4. While participatory approaches are likely to lose some of their current ‘favoured status’, the principles of farmer participation will remain an essential component of agricultural research