For further information contact: Peter Okoth

The importance of social, cultural, and gender priorities and constraints in driving both the processes of land degradation and those that lead to the development of soil fertility management innovations has been acknowledged by TSBF-CIAT since its inception. The role of social scientists in multidisciplinary projects includes strategic social science research as well as collaborating and building linkages with biophysical scientists by identifying and understanding the social factors that limit the appropriateness, and hence the adoption or rejection, of given technologies. Key outputs from strategic social science research have included methods and principles for working with farmers and local knowledge systems. A significant contribution has been the development of typologies of farmers and land users that relate biophysical variability to socio-cultural, economic and gender variability.

TSBF-CIAT has also pioneered research to characterise farmers' knowledge and practices of soil fertility management, with particular attention to how successful components of this knowledge can be scaled up to wider communities. These research methods have generated a better understanding of local knowledge of soil ecology, farmer decision making, and the role of social networks in generating, sharing or withholding of ISFM knowledge. Such results, particularly on how farmers perceive soil variability, degradation and improvement processes, have contributed to the development of more farmer-driven research hypotheses in otherwise biophysically oriented projects.

Future strategic research will continue to focus on the challenges and opportunities faced by the scientific community in interdisciplinary research and processes. We will also ensure that farmers' priorities and constraints are meaningfully integrated within the ISFM research agenda. TSBF-CIAT will move forward on identifying and working with the most vulnerable sectors of society so that our research is relevant to their priorities and constraints, and will sustainably improve their livelihoods.