Towards transdisciplinarity: integration in R4D on social inclusion and agricultural intensification

Agricultural intensification is often seen as a pathway to alleviating poverty within communities, and achieving the development and agricultural production goals of governments or agricultural aide donors. Tempering the achievements that have been made over recent decades is the growing recognition that many people often struggle to engage beneficially, if at all, in intensification. In this context, the SIAGI research project (https://siagi.org/), set out to identify how Research for Development (R4D) investments could be designed to facilitate socially inclusive agricultural intensification. Social inclusion was both a core value of the SIAGI project and an outcome against which the impact of the project would be measured. The integrated assessment (IA) program of research in SIAGI was designed to provide a space for the SIAGI team to (a) capture, integrate and reflect on knowledge generated from the partners’ disciplinary research and engagement with community and other stakeholders, and (b) test ideas and assumptions around opportunities for often-marginalised members of community to engage in agricultural intensification, and the risks they may face. In this paper, we reflect on how our integration research helped the team bridge conceptual differences, synthesise and structure our knowledge as well as better incorporate informal knowledge held by collaborating farmers in our work. We developed three inter-related frameworks considering local water management, inclusive value chain assessment, and the process of empowering change in individuals and community. We contend that the frameworks have an audience beyond the SIAGI project team, namely donors, researchers or other stakeholders who are proposing interventions in community, as a tool for project design and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and to think through design of interventions (outcomes, risks, and supporting mechanisms).