Elske van de Fliert

• PhD
• Associate Professor at The University of Queensland

Gender considerations have been part of climate change adaptation planning in the Global South for the last two decades. Despite this, studies have reported a gap in understanding how organisations incorporate people's diverse experiences of climate risks into planning and implementing adaptation strategies, particularly for women disproportionatel...

The study examines why certain discourses on gender are more powerful than others in describing intentions for gender inclusion in development projects. A critical discourse analysis was carried out on texts of climate change adaptation projects implemented during 2009–2020 in rural Bangladesh. This article argues that gender is currently not consi...

The food sovereignty movement is a global alliance of peasants aiming to create democratic, sustainable, and decentralized food systems. The radical strategy of the movement, aimed at promoting a global peasant identity and collective action for food systems’ transformation, is a community development endeavour that encompasses processes of social...

In climate change adaptation, non-climatic stressors is a concept that is used to describe the different types of stressors that people are faced with to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Usually, however, this concept is loosely applied in the literature. In the current study, we conducted interviews with farmers in drought-prone rice-produc...

The impacts of climate change pose imminent and far-reaching challenges for communities across the world. Marginalised communities, particularly in the Global South, who already stand facing socioeconomic hardship, face even further threats in a warming world. Development agencies in recent years have focussed their attention on adaptation at the l...

Drought, which is expected to occur more frequently under the climate change regime, is a major challenge in rice cultivation. This paper aims to unpack the decision-making processes of rice farmers when faced with drought. The study was conducted in two drought-prone rice-farming communities in the Philippines, with 87 rice farmers as the main par...

Energy poverty is an alarming problem affecting nearly half of the global population who rely on solid fuels for cooking. Numerous interventions are in operation aiming to reduce the number of affected people, yet many have not achieved the desired level of change. This paper offers a novel perspective to conceptualise inertia towards entirely aban...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an argument showing the importance of education as a disaster response activity, and why it must figure more prominently in financial and material support for humanitarian disasters. Design/methodology/approach A critical review of the literature and case studies that have considered humanitarian r...

Around the world, more than two thirds of the population persist with traditional cooking practices that are deeply embedded within cultural and social norms. This paper discusses insights from a qualitative study on how changes emerge and unfold in these socially embedded energy practices. The research draws on social practice theory to help make...

The term “positive deviance” has become increasingly popular in recent years, resulting in the co-existence of multiple definitions and applications scattered among diverse sources of academic literature. The aim of this paper is to bring conceptual clarity to the term by providing a comprehensive synthesis and review of the positive deviance liter...

This chapter explores how impact assessment of agricultural research for development (AR4D), which applies a holistic approach, can provide important insights about the contribution of research to changes in people's livelihood. It argues that an impact assessment framework that takes into consideration a broad set of livelihood indicators is bette...

Billions of people around the world remain without access to modern energy services, the majority of whom live in rural locations. To support the deployment of these critical services, energy planners must consider complex interdisciplinary factors in the process of evaluating and deciding upon locally appropriate energy solutions. A key mechanism...

"This scoping study is the rst research initiative aimed at compiling existing evaluation cases with proven methodologies to assess and document evidence-based approaches in the eld of Communication for Development that may be used for designing rural communication services as part of agricultural and rural development policies. It draws on a liter...

Smallholder cattle production is one of the most important enterprises for the majority of people in West Nusa Tenggara as a source of income. This paper reports on how gender played a role in innovation uptake in cattle farming across three ethnic groups (Sasaknese, Sumbawanese and Balinese) and recommendations for a communication strategy design...

This paper discusses key learnings from an exploratory study on types of change occurring in energy related cook stove practice in rural India. Sharing these learnings is important for moving forward a research agenda on understanding how social practices such as cooking – and associated energy use behaviour – emerge, persist and change over time....

Since the late 1990s, there has been a great deal of investment by both the Vietnamese government and international development agencies in the economic development of the Northwest Highlands of Vietnam, a highly diverse region experiencing variable stages of transition towards more market-oriented development and social change. A shift towards a r...

Rural youth outmigration is a phenomenon that can change the agricultural landscape of farming communities. The Philippines has witnessed an unprecedented youth exodus from rural to urban areas in past decades. This paper explored this issue in rice farming communities in two Philippine provinces, Aurora and Albay. Sixty-eight farmers' children age...

A longitudinal survey was conducted in 2013 to document the productivity of the Sesbania grandiflora feeding system for cattle fattening in central Lombok. Sesbania is integrated into the intensive rice-growing region by planting it along the rice bunds surrounding the rice fields. The hamlet of Nyerot in the subdistrict of Jonggat was chosen for t...

The report ‘Funding for Media Development by Major Donors Outside the United States’ (2009) provides an overview of some of the main agencies involved in the funding of media development — a broad term that includes funding of ICTs in development and community media — in Europe and elsewhere. Guy Berger (2010: 549) has pointed out that there is som...

One can argue that CSC policy has evolved both as a response to deliberate attempts at policy making from top-down and in response to grassroots needs. There are, as we know, a myriad interventions aimed at achieving a variety of results — from behaviour change to advocacy, mobilisation and radical change. If the policy related to the diffusion of...

The employment of participatory approaches in development projects has been a required element of project design for many donor organisations over the past 10–20 years. The assumption is that participation of stakeholders will cause decision-making processes to be more inclusive and, therefore, instigate ownership over development processes, which,...

The advent of information technologies, social networking technologies, advances in hardware and software and the increased accent on the provision of public information have led to major advancements and possibilities for the delivery of access to information on a scale that was not possible in earlier years. CSC, like other areas, has been impact...

The subtitle of this volume The Basis for a Renewal was deliberately chosen not only for its provocative possibilities but also because it reflects a genuine belief that this field has somewhat lost its way and is meandering along in a context rather ironically characterised by a global expansion and a multiplicity of Communication for Social Chang...

Development and social change take place within the complex realities of individual people, families, communities, organisation, nations and regions, with elements of each higher level adding to the complexity of the lower ones. It has been demonstrated over and over again that change processes involving societal problems, such as those relating to...

It is unusual for CSC academics to explore issues related to power precisely because communication is often seen in development as the ‘missing link’. John Durham Peters (1999: 2) has referred to this ceaseless quest for a communication Utopia as a ‘registry of modern longing’, for ideal communication, for a communication that will make all the dif...

Over the past two decades, CSC has been practised under a wide variety of names, such as Communication for Development (abbreviated in different ways such as ComDev, C4D and DevComm), Information, Communication and Technology for Development (ICT4D), Learning for Social Change, and Social and Behavioural Communication, to name a few. This has creat...

Social change is a loaded term. It is not limited to behavioural change or a change in attitudes or awareness but fundamentally indicates a change that stems from the adoption of new practices, new ways of doing things by a community or individual, change that is a consequence of new ideas, new processes, new structures and a new ethic of practice,...

Rural youth outmigration is a phenomenon that can change the agricultural landscape of farming communities. The Philippines has witnessed an unprecedented youth exodus from rural to urban areas in past decades. This paper explored this issue in rice farming communities in two Philippine provinces, Aurora and Albay. Sixty-eight farmers’ children age...

Since the late 1990s, various agricultural research projects have been carried out in the Northwest Highlands of Vietnam by the Vietnamese government, research institutes and international development agencies. Most of them projects aimed at economic development through increasing agricultural production and improving market engagement. However, a...

Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Conservation Agriculture in Southeast Asia Hanoi . 10th - 15th December 2012

The yield gap in rice production can be narrowed by improving farmers’ access to information. In recent years, the Philippines has witnessed a profusion of information and communication technology (ICT) interventions expected to increase Filipino famers’ access to rice farming information, led by the PhilRice Farmers’ Text Center. Despite the...

We evaluated the impact of sweetpotato weevil ( Cylas formicarius (Fabricius); Coleoptera: Apionidae) and of other direct pests and diseases (rats, Ceratocystis fimbriata, white grubs, rootrots and root cracks), and the effectiveness of C. formicarius sex pheromone traps at the farm level in four villages in East and Central Java, Indonesia during...

This paper describes our learning experiences to engage farmers through participatory action research. The current knowledge of participatory research through social learning within the context of agriculture in Papua New Guinea (PNG) is limited. Until this study, no attempt had been made to document aspects of knowing by farmers in PNG. The main o...

Agricultural research in Indonesia has resulted in limited impact in farmers’ fields, particularly in the more marginal areas, because innovations are often not suited to the specific agroecological and socioeconomic conditions. In addition, the physical and institutional separation between the strategic research, regional adaptation and local deve...

Agricultural development is fundamentally a social process in which people construct solutions to their problems, often by modifying both new technologies and their own production systems to take advantage of new opportunities offered by the technologies. Hence, agricultural change is an immensely complex process, with a high degree of non-linearit...

The International Potato Center used the farmer field school (FFS) model in several of its research and development activities on potato and sweetpotato integrated pest, disease and crop management as a platform for participatory research (PR) and/or farmer learning. Four approaches are roughly distinguished based on how the FFS was used, different...

The International Potato Center employed the farmer field school (FFS) model in several of its research and development activities relating to potato and sweetpotato integrated pest, disease and crop management as a platform for participatory research and/or farmer learning. Four approached can roughly be distinguished in how the FFS was used, diff...

Sustainable agriculture emphasises the fundamental role of the human component in a production system, as opposed to conventional agriculture, which centres on technologies. Therefore, it is characterised by the abilities and behaviours that farmers display, including the knowledge and skills they possess, decision-making processes they apply, and...

This paper offers a conceptualmodel for participatory research projects thataim to improve the sustainability ofagriculture and natural resource management.The purpose of the model is to provide asystematic framework that can guide the designof participatory research projects, theiranalysis, and the documentation of results. Inthe model, conceptual...

Based on experiences of integrated pest management (IPM) development and imple- mentation efforts in Asia, this chapter elaborates on implications of the choice for an appropriate form of learning platform for separate steps in a research and develop- ment cycle, in order to contribute to sustainable agricultural development. The achievement of hig...

A pilot program of sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam) integrated crop management (ICM)-farmer field schools (FFSs) was implemented in six com- munities in Indonesia, using protocols developed jointly by a team of farmers, researchers, and development workers. Monitoring and evaluation studies showed that participation in the FFS enhanced farmer...

Summary Developing capacity of trainers requires a methodology consistent with the approaches future trainers are expected to apply. For farmer field school (FFS) facilitators, this means that trainers should preferably be trained in an FFS setting. Research projects aimed at developing tailored FFS protocols for a specific crop or constraint area,...

SUMMARY This paper offers a conceptual model for integrative, participatory research for sustainable agriculture aimed at achieving impact. The purpose of the model is to provide a systematic framework for farmer participatory research that can guide the design of projects, their analysis and the documentation of results. In the model, explicit bou...

A methodological framework for integrative, participatory research and development is presented as a methodological example for designing, conducting and evaluating research and development projects targeting poor farmers. The framework was developed in the context of the International Potato Center's (CIP) sweetpotato Integrated Crop Management (I...

A participatory needs assessment on root crops production-postharvest use systems was conducted in eight major root crop production provinces of Vietnam in 1998/99 as a collaborative effort of six Vietnamese institutions, International Potato Center, and UPWARD. Sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam) production data showed that the greatest opportu...

Summary In order to bend high-external input agriculture, having faced the many unfavourable sides of its technologies, towards more sustainable systems, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an appropriate first step to follow. IPM both allows the ecosystem to regai n its natural balance, and teaches farmers ecological principles through easily obse...

Investment in agricultural extension, as well as its design and practice, are usually based on the assumption that agricultural science generates technology (“applied science“), which extension experts transfer to “users“. This model negates local knowledge and creativity, ignores farmers' self-confidence and social energy as important sources of c...

An evaluation study of the National Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Programme in Indonesia was conducted in one Central-Javanese district looking into processes and effects occurring at the village level when sustainable practices in rice cultivation, which contrast in many respects with the prevailing high-external- input technology, are introduc...

Smallholder estate crops integrated pest management (IPM) is characterised by the need for adaptive implementation of effective pest control options by knowledgeable and skilled individual farmers, in the context of collective decision making and action for sustainable management of the larger ecosystem and manoeuvring of market opportunities. The...

A comprehensive tool for sweetpotato management, providing information across the disciplines of plant pathology, crop nutrition, entomology and pest management, all integrated in a single expert system