Practical tools to assess the adoption and impact of agroecology remain limited. Many assessment approaches are too time-consuming, costly or disconnected from real-world conditions. A team of researchers tested an alternative approach based on focus group discussions (FGDs) with village committees and district extension agents. This approach allowed to get a good overview of the level of agroecological advancement in a village, while significantly cutting down the time required to gather this information. Thus, the approach could be useful to scale-out the assessment of agroecology to larger areas. This blog post shows results of a test that was conducted in 16 villages in Xieng Khuang Province in the Lao PDR.
Main message of the chart
Agroecological scores were rated by village committees in 16 villages and by technicians of District Agriculture and Forestry Offices (DAFO) in four districts (totalling 45 villages). The chart compares the ratings of village committees (blue bars) and DAFO technicians (red bars) along 19 agroecological aspects.
- In average, both the DAFO technicians and the village committees gave medium to high scores, even though the scores of the DAFO technicians tend to be higher (an average 0.34 points higher than those of village committees). Both groups share a broad sense of what’s strong or weak, but differ on magnitudes.
- The biggest gaps (with higher scores from DAFO technicians) concern aspects related to land governance and farm management, such as the use of animal manure (1.1 points difference), collection of non-timber forest products (1.o points difference), as well as the diversity of tree and crop species, water management, and income diversity (each with 0.8 points difference).
- Communities rate themselves higher than DAFO technicians in soil tillage (0.7 points difference), social relationships (0.3 points difference), participation in negotiations (0.2 points difference), and diet awareness (0.1 points difference). Thus, they rate social aspects and agency higher than DAFO technicians.
- Both groups agree that chemical inputs, soil tillage, diet awareness, the use of crop residues, and problems with traders are the main weaknesses in the assessed villages.
Implications of the findings
The results show that communities emphasize social capital and negotiation, while technicians emphasize biophysical/biodiversity and farm-management practices. This gap may reflect different day-to-day vantage points. Both groups seem to agree that technical soil practices, responsible input use, and market issues remain widespread pain points. These results are useful for policy makers, extension services, and development partners to identify entry points at village level to improve their agroecological performance in a targeted manner.
The approach based on focus group discussions helps to capture the status of agroecology at the village level within a short time and has potential for out-scaling assessments at regional level. The focus group discussions with district officers are significantly faster than those with village committees while yielding comparable results, albeit with fewer insights and details. Hence, to achieve a quick agroecological assessment in a larger area, such as a province, the focus group discussions with district officers might be more suitable.
Further reading
Data