Field Level Learning

Ian Clifton-Everest (Independent Consultant) 28 September 2009, 10:46

Key points to emerge from Fernande and Foster's study are the importance attached by field workers to learning through informal and local networks of colleagues, and the limited number of written resources that field workers find really helpful. The central message seems to be that field workers are looking first and foremost for practical knowledge to guide them through the everyday problems of programme implementation, and the best kind of guidance comes from others who have experience of work in the same context. Chris Blattman's blog, asks how to help field workers engage more fully with research findings.If Fernande and Foster had explored this, they would probably have found that, despite the predilection for learning from colleagues, many practitioners do follow research through professional networks such as the ENN and INEE, but give much less time to learning from these sources than from colleagues. Given that the latter have knowledge that is seen as more immediately useful, it will matter little whether research findings are presented in written form or on podcasts. People will continue to allocate most of their limited time to discussion of practical problems with colleagues rather than reading or listening to research findings. Yes, there are odd moments in the car when one is without the company of colleagues, but even here, many of us will choose to spend time knowledge building with the driver rather than listening to the podcast.. .

If this makes aid workers seem boorish, remember that careers in humanitarian aid tend to be short, and there is a lot of practical knowledge to acquire. Most aid workers are young people. They will have completed formal education relatively recently, and the usual concern of people at this stage with practical knowledge will be intensified by the extreme unfamiliarity of the working environment. Older people who are more familiar with the context of humanitarian aid and who have greater confidence in handling practical problems sometimes begin to hanker after student days and may want to give more time to the scientific literature. They are a population, perhaps to consider in its own right.

Are people helped by knowledge management systems that set out to provide an orientation towards relevant research findings and to give guidance on application? It is a brave individual who sets her/himself up inside an organization to perform this task. Few of us have anything worth saying about the applicability of research findings to anything but a very small number of contexts that we know very well. Anyway, for the reasons given by Fernande and Foster, most field workers will defer to the views of the their co-workers in the field rather than follow advice given from some unit at agency headquarters. If research is to inform action in the field it has to be brought into the informal knowledge management systems that exist at field level. Encouraging more discussion of research findings at field level is difficult because of caution among field workers about the applicability of research findings to everyday problems. Nevertheless, if an agency wishes to take an initiative to get some research findings discussed, its senior and more respected field staff should not find it impossible to convoke an inter-agency meeting do this A local interagency workshop to discuss for example the applicability of some study on cash transfers is likely to evoke participation provided it is understood that discussions are simply exploratory, are not policy making, and will cover practical issues of project implementation, and getting ideas accepted by funders. They should not just focus on theoretical issues like the possible economic benefits brought for local markets.

A more radical proposal - and one that risks being shot down as impractical - is to encourage more research with a sharp focus on field-level problems, and to bring field workers more actively into research activity. This should give field workers a greater sense ownership, as well as ensuring that findings come nearer to answering the questions practitioners are asking. It takes a brave man to tells the research community what kind of work it should do, and perhaps an even braver one to tell over-worked field workers that they should get involved in research. It is worth noting, however, that offers made by funders to support practice oriented research are not always taken up by agencies, seemingly because of difficulties in finding research workers and practitioners with the skills required to work with messy data and less than perfect research designs. If more research workers were willing and able to lead this kind of work, and there were greater insistence by agencies on collection of good quality baseline and impact data, funders would probably respond positively

A further point made by Fernande and Foster is that knowledge building activities tend to be intra-agency intitiatives while the concern of field workers is to capitalize on whatever knowledge exists within their local community of humanitarian workers without regard to ownership by individual agencies. Agencies seem loathe to collaborate in knowledge building projects and there are few non-agency structures around which aid workers can cohere to facilitate exchange of knowledge. Sectoral meetings offer only limited time for information exchange, they are sometimes poorly managed, and participants are often reticent to provide certain key information in these formal settings. The authors draw attention to how the planning process for the CAP has in some instances provided a useful context for information exchange. In some countries planning the use of pooled funds might provide another. Where cluster members have to reach agreement on a coordinated plan for the use of these fund, sharing knowledge about needs and possible strategies is likely to be seen as in the common interest. What fairer way could there for reaching agreement on how money should be used, and who should be funded to do what, than through a collaborative research exercise that draws on everybody's past experience? Anybody wanting funding for such an exercise might take a look at ECHO's funding decision for capacity building.