During the planning phase the FTI teams underwent series of planning discussions through meetings, exchange of drafts, as well as informal unstructured one-to-one discussions whereby the team members shared disciplinary insights, data, approaches, methods, and theories to come up with their respective team plans to implement innovation testing and refinement experiments (Table 5.8).
These planning discussions included presentation of the respective innovation by the team leader to the team, sharing knowledge about potential stakeholders and experimental sites, discussing advantages and disadvantages of engaging with various stakeholders and finally selecting an appropriate stakeholder or group of stakeholders to engage with. The teams also devised their respective stakeholder engagement strategies, and identified perceived implementation activities, time and financial resource requirements. While WUA and AL teams explicitly discussed the role and responsibilities of team members in their pursuit, the CA and SA teams tended in the beginning to vest their respective team leaders with every activity apart from field data collection or process documentation that was assigned to the research assistants and students available to the team leaders. All the four teams prepared their respective financial and time plans.
The SA, AL and CA teams spelled out the details of their data gathering exercises (soil and yield samples, input use, perception surveys, surveys to monitor soil salinity, etc), whereas the WUA team focused more on training the staff of WUA and leaving data collection to the WUA. Data analysis was foreseen as the responsibility of the FTI teams, who were then to discuss the results with the stakeholders.
These details formed what the teams called their road maps or work plans. The details were more precise for the first year and a bit vague for the following years. The teams intended to refine all of these based on their first year experiences.
A striking deficiency in the plans of all the teams was an absence of an agreed analytical framework. None of the teams addressed the question of how the teams would declare by the end of year one, whether or not the innovation in question was verified or not or what further elements of the innovation would need to be studied in detail. One could assume that the team leaders as the key scientists for their respective innovations would know from their previous work experience how to evaluate the effectiveness of their innovation. There were some details of what data will be collected, from whom, who will collect it, but they were not explicit in their plans about the methodology of analysis of
the data, neither these methodologies were explicitly discussed within their teams. One possible explanation could be the assumption by the team leaders that everyone else in the team knew how to assess the innovation in question regarding its social, environmental, agronomic, and economic impacts. Another possible explanation could be that since the monitoring and evaluation frameworks were yet not presented to the trainees by the time they had to write their plans, they did not think that it was important. They could have also assumed that it was the job of the FTI facilitator to assess whether or not the innovation was validated through those experiments.
Whatever the reason this absence of an analytical framework could be attributed to, the lesson one could draw is that in any capacity-building program, like that used by FTI, the monitoring and evaluation needs to be discussed early enough in the exercise.
Overall, preparation of team plans was not always a pleasant experience for the team members, and especially the team leaders. As stated above, the team member’s feedback, especially from those not located at Urgench, was not always appreciated, and sometimes triggered negative feelings in some teams about those comments and suggestions provided from Bonn. One simple explanation for comments by Bonn-based team members triggering negative feelings amongst team members based at Urgench could be the style of commenting. Urgench based researchers were largely Uzbek nationals, where saying something negative about someone else, even though true, is viewed as extremely rude. When extremely essential, suggestions for improvement and negative remarks can only be conveyed in symbolic language, using stories, gestures, and jokes. In contrast, most of the researchers based at Bonn were European or western nationals or those who spent long years working in European countries, and tended to be direct, when it is related to business, as they do not see direct criticism as humiliating or aimed at putting someone down.
Table 5.8 Activities during planning phase of FTI
Activities Participating Disciplines Time Span Exchange FTI Team Planning
Meetings Water Management, Hydrology Economics, Sociology, Geography
Agronomy, Soil Science, Economics, Agricultural Extension, Geography
Forestry, Economics, Soil Science, Agricultural Extension
Soil Science, Hydrology, Water Management June - November 2008 June 2008- April 2009 June 2008- February 2009 June 2008- April 2009
Insights, local knowledge about the stakeholders and chosen sites, experience from previous job, synthesis of literature rationalizing activities
Insights, local knowledge about chosen sites and stakeholders, legislative issues, experience from previous trails, sharing knowledge from literature Results of previous survey,
Insights, experience, legislative challenges
Insights, knowledge about mandate of proposed stakeholders, literature WUA CA AL SA Documentation of discussions into draft and revised plans
Team Leaders of respective
FTI teams June 2008– April 2009 Incorporation of comments and suggestions All four FTI teams Source: Authors’ compilation based on Field notes from June 2008 through April 2009
The teams which included E-members, some of the members located in Bonn and contributing to discussions through emails, especially faced challenges during communications:
Team Leader of an FTI team: “For [names one activity of the innovation that belonged to commentator’s field of specialization] he [names a Bonn-based member who provided comments] is responsible for making the plan, and has lots
of ideas, but for [names the other activity that was not specialization of the commentator] only agrees to everything I write– no suggestion on how to proceed further…” (Field Note October 2008).
Team Leader of an FTI team: “…the comments we got on our draft team plan
from Bonn are very demotivating […] we [those based in Urgench] work and they
[those based in Bonn] criticize our work […]. The realities in the field are very
different […]. If they think they can do better than us in the field, why don’t they come here and do it themselves” (Field Note August 2008).
What these statements indicate is not only the level of dissatisfaction with the contributions made by Bonn-based team mates by Urgench-based team members and vice versa. The first statement also points to existence of what Barbra Gray calls
Challenger disaster (Gray, 2008: S125). Challenger disaster refers to a team phenomenon whereby the team members having different views do not share their differential views due to power distortions within the team (Gray 2008:S125). These statements also reflect
contestations between epistemologies, localities, and hierarchy. The Bonn-based team members, when they commented on the draft plans, they tried to display their superiority in knowledge and expertise in their respective field of specialization, which was valid and universal under all conditions, including Urgench, as they usually read much more of the relevant literature, and participate in seminars and other forums where scientific knowledge is discussed compared to those based in Urgench, who did not have much access to literature. The seminars and presentations that took place in Urgench were usually related to the project work by researchers associated with the project. On the contrary, the comments from Urgench-based team leaders showed that the disciplinary Western knowledge had no clue what the reality in the field was, or did not understand the “real” side of things. The Bonn-based members triggered negative feelings amongst field based members especially when they tried to venture into the disciplinary or experience territory of their Urgench-based counterparts.
The fact that departmental coordinators, as well as leaders of most work packages, apart from the project’s field coordinator, were all based at Bonn, the Bonn-based staff were generally perceived by Urgench-based staff as coming from “the Headquarters” in the sense of having higher levels of authority in decision-making and influence within the project, but having less practical knowledge of how to make things happen in the field. When such exchanges happened through electronic communications (emails, commented electronic drafts) these posed special challenges and appeared to be not a good way of providing critical feedback in this case on several accounts. Firstly, when researchers from different disciplines communicated, they did not completely understand the terms, concepts, or the choice of phrases used by the sender (Field Note August 2008). If the
communication was face to face, they could directly ask the meaning of a specific term that was not understood. In an electronic communication, such clarifications were only possible through several rounds of exchanges, which could potentially clarify one term and create confusions about the terms chosen to explain. Secondly, in face to face communication, the specific tone of the speaker can change the meaning and the speaker has the possibility of using an appropriate tone. In electronic exchanges, it is up to the recipient of the electronic communication to assume and interpret the tone. For example if a scientist reading comments from another scientist is already irritated by some of the earlier comments, or simply has bad mood due to work pressure, or a conflict with the boss, there is a greater likelihood that a well meant comment could be interpreted negatively by the recipient of an email. Given that several of the researchers engaged in FTI had multiple responsibilities (more discussed in the following section) and very busy schedule of activities, such communication problems were not un-expected.
Another dimension was that since the team leaders were relatively older and more experienced than the younger researchers associated with those teams (Table 5.1 and 5.2 above), it was not always easy to get the perspectives and insights from the younger members into the discussions, unless specifically invited for an input or feedback, and therefore the phenomenon of groupthink (Gray, 2008:S125), whereby members tend to suppress their differences due to power distortions within the team and face Challenger
disaster. Trained and experienced facilitators realized this challenge (for example the
WUA team leader), and made special efforts to ensure the participation of silent members. Therefore, it is quite likely that the younger members in other three teams might not have adequately contributed their knowledge, experience and insights to their fullest potentials. These dimensions of barriers and challenges to IDR as experienced by FTI teams are further discussed and elaborated in Chapter 7