Your search found 3 records
1 Sugden, Fraser; Punch, S. 2014. The challenges and benefits of employing a mobile research fellow to facilitate team work on a large, interdisciplinary, multi-sited project. Research in Comparative and International Education, 9(4):441-453. [doi: https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2014.9.4.441]
Research projects ; Interdisciplinary research ; Research and development ; Research funding ; Research personnel ; Research support ; Research workers ; Researchers ; Teamwork ; Capacity building ; Communication
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H047883)
Over the last few years research funding has increasingly moved in favour of large, multipartner, interdisciplinary and multi-site research projects. This article explores the benefits and challenges of employing a full-time research fellow to work across multiple field sites, with all the local research teams, on an international, interdisciplinary project. The article shows how such a ‘floating’ research fellow can play a valuable role in facilitating communication between research teams and project leaders, as well as in building capacity and introducing disciplinary specific skills. It also highlights some key challenges, including problems of language and translation, and the complex power relations within which such a researcher is inevitably embedded. This article contributes to the development of strategies for collaborative projects to facilitate coordination between research teams. It is based on a five-site, cross-cultural project, involving nine partners with a mixture of natural and social science backgrounds, researching aquatic resource use, rural livelihoods, work and education in China, Vietnam and India.
2 Seckler, D. 2015. Flotsam: some adventures from my life. Lexington, KY, USA: Author. 340p.
Economists ; Autobiographies ; International organizations ; Research institutes ; Researchers ; Higher education ; Educational institutions ; Economic development ; Social aspects ; Families ; Ancestry / Europe / USA / England / Indonesia / India / Sri Lanka / Colorado / Sterling / Montana
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: 920 G000 SEC Record No: H047920)
(0.25 MB)
3 Berazneva, J.; McBride, L.; Sheahan, M.; Guerena, D. 2018. Empirical assessment of subjective and objective soil fertility metrics in East Africa: implications for researchers and policy makers. World Development, 105:367-382. [doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.12.009]
Soil fertility ; Agricultural productivity ; Soil analysis ; Soil pH ; Soil types ; Soil quality ; Cation exchange capacity ; Natural resources management ; Researchers ; Policy making ; Farmers attitudes ; Crop yield ; Maize / East Africa / Kenya / Tanzania
(Location: IWMI HQ Call no: e-copy only Record No: H048769)
(1.09 MB)
Bringing together emerging lessons from biophysical and social sciences as well as newly available data, we take stock of what can be learned about the relationship among subjective (reported) and objective (measured) soil fertility and farmer input use in east Africa. We identify the correlates of Kenyan and Tanzanian maize farmers’ reported perceptions of soil fertility and assess the extent to which these subjective assessments reflect measured soil chemistry. Our results offer evidence that farmers base their perceptions of soil quality and soil type on crop yields. We also find that, in Kenya, farmers’ reported soil type is a reasonable predictor of several objective soil fertility indicators while farmer-reported soil quality is not. In addition, in exploring the extent to which publicly available soil data are adequate to capture local soil chemistry realities, we find that the time-consuming exercise of collecting detailed objective measures of soil content is justified when biophysical analysis is warranted, because farmers’ perceptions are not sufficiently strong proxies of these measures to be a reliable substitute and because currently available high-resolution geo-spatial data do not sufficiently capture local variation. In the estimation of agricultural production or profit functions, where the focus is on averages and in areas with low variability in soil properties, the addition of soil information does not considerably change the estimation results. However, having objective (measured) plot-level soil information improves the overall fit of the model and the estimation of marginal physical products of inputs. Our findings are of interest to researchers who design, field, or use data from agricultural surveys, as well as policy makers who design and implement agricultural interventions and policies.
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