Duncan Green's blog for Oxfam GB is wide-ranging, knowledgeable and engaged in many pressing development debates. Thanks to him for this video of a short presentation by Elinor Ostrom, joint winner of this year's Peace Prize for Economics. She talks about the crucial role of learning about and respecting how communities manage common resources in the battle against environmental degradation.

The challenge with recognizing the value of local innovations in development is not as daunting as the power to push it to action.

With my on-going work in Ghana, I noticed a range of knowledge/innovations by and with our local farmers here in Ghana. Some are very typical/indigenous; others are a mix of indigenous and scientific; and still others are purely scientific. As part of my data collection, I am getting a broad idea of the ranges in the communities and then will explore the role of ICTs in documenting both current and historical innovations for dissemination and for improvement through research.

With regard to exchange of knowledge from these multiple sources, I am talking to researchers, extension officers, local farmers, and other collaborators to understand the current communication modes and patterns. Based on these, I can recommend on what new tools to deploy into the system to facilitate knowledge sharing. At the moment, my result is showing a complex system consisting of -

i) very strong communication network among farmers;

ii) strong communication among extension officers;

iii) relatively weak communication network among researchers;

iv) very weak communication network across these systems.

So the issue of knowledge flow from research to the end users needs to be looked at. On the other hand, I am looking at the possibility of utilizing these same systems in getting farmers local innovations/knowledge back to research as well as disseminating them among other farmers.

It is also interesting to note that, there are other intermediaries within the system that are doing a number of things to get information from one actor to the other in the chain of actors within the sector. However, they don't talk to each other. Librarians are there trying hard to organize and make information accessible to the users; community information centers are also doing their own things; other NGOs and development organizations are also trying to liaise between producers and processors; and then the agricultural extension office remains to be the "white elephant" of knowledge transfer. But the issue is, where do all these intermediaries draw their knowledge packages from in order to make them available to the end user since there is little link - (huge gap) between them, "researchers" and the "local people"?

The situation calls for policy consideration! Researchers, extension workers and almost all other stakeholders I have talked to far in Ghana do value farmers local innovations but there is no national or institutional policies supporting or encouraging the documentation and use of these innovation in their work. Individual initiatives don't have much support and thus dropped eventually. A strong national policy will facilitate the incorporation into curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels of our universities at the same time with the various Ministries within the government.

Without national, regional and global policy to support this move, our work will continue to be based on individual initiatives that may start and end. Development organizations need to be driven and guided by national policies on local content for their interventions to have impact.

But the dilemma is that, policy makers also need some evidence in order to support national programs of research into local content. It is therefore time for us to engage the international development community to begin - provide the seed and then we can push it for the national governments to water, and we (the advocates/practitioners) will ensure good cultural practices for a good harvest.

Good luck to you in Brussels - Pete suggest I share this here as well. More will come as I work on the data.

Ben