Wesley Ward

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Charles Sturt University · Gulbali Institute

Agricultural research in developing countries often involves collaboration between dispersed multicultural teams of scientists from developed and developing countries. The teams use information and computing technologies (ICTs) to communicate between team members, who originate from different cultures using different languages. This paper investiga...

In this article, we use an autoethnographic approach to explore relationships between landholders and government agencies and natural resource management projects. We use this exploration to argue for a holistic, collaborative approach to decision making around the implementation of biodiversity conservation on private and public land. This approac...

Multinational agricultural research teams operating in low-income countries must overcome communication challenges to address agricultural problems and rural poverty. Collaborations between dispersed team members rely on information and computer technologies (ICTs) to facilitate communication and share knowledge and expertise. These collaborations...

Natural resource management in Australia is beset with ‘wicked’ problems: diminishing biodiversity, increasing soil erosion, spreading soil salinity and global climate change all impact private landholders across rural Australia. These problems highlight the complexity of biodiversity conservation, and the need for inclusive, respectful approaches...

Creating international collaborative teams is common to address complex research problems in low‐income countries. Teams involve experts from low‐ and high‐income countries who must share information and communicate across interpersonal, organizational, and national contingencies and geographic and temporal borders. Effective information sharing be...

Complex socio-ecological issues in natural resource management highlight the importance of building and maintaining trust in human interactions when dealing with highly variable landscapes subject to multiple pressures. We investigated how trust can help establish and maintain relationships in research teams that included private landholders in sou...

Agricultural researchers collaborating in international research projects work in very complex communication spaces that face many personal, institutional and international barriers in communication between team members. These can be exacerbated by the software and hardware used for communication between collaborators. I present a tool developed fr...

This presentation investigates the active participation and culturally appropriate inclusion of Australian First Nations’ peoples in the co-initiation, design and implementation of ecological research on private lands in the Murray Darling Basin.

Biodiversity conservation in Australia has largely relied on governments setting aside and managing protected areas and developing measures to protect endangered species. Nearly 60% of the nation’s land mass, however, is managed by private landholders. This provides major opportunities for conserving biodiversity at the landscape scale, as well as...

This presentation combined past examples with future opportunities for collaboration between researchers and communities to address complex problems in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management on private lands in regional Australia. It also gives voice to little heard communities in ecological research - farmers in southern Austral...

This presentation summarises the methodologies used for my PhD studies on face-to-face and online communication between international and local scientists operating in Lao PDR.

The article critically reviews and discusses the findings and recommendations of the Australian Senate Inquiry into the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); and suggests strategies to achieving the SDGs within and beyond Australia. By employing the focus group discussion method, it critically discusses the report as per the Inquiry’s terms of r...

Collaboration is vital for addressing complex environmental issues; from supplying freshwater in the Murray Darling basin and living and thriving in Australia’s wildly fluctuating climate, to managing natural resources such as water, soil, native plants and animals around regional and rural communities that depend on and live with these resources....

Research for agricultural development is often conducted by research teams from developing and developed countries. Blending cultures and contexts in teams influences communication effectiveness, intercultural relations and research outcomes. This study investigated these issues for agricultural research teams operating in Lao People’s Democratic R...

Current agricultural research depends on complex contexts that can impose major barriers for communication within geographically dispersed research teams. Such barriers are multiplied where team members originate from and operate in contrasting cultures and economic circumstances. A case study based in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) sho...

These slides outline my PhD studies into the communication barriers between researchers from different cultures and organisations, and how well common social media address address these barriers for these researchers. The slides were part of a 15-minute presentation at the 2020 conference of the national Australian Science Communicators in Melbourn...

Collaboration is vital for natural resource management (NRM), as no one person or organisation can successfully address all complex facing NRM in Australia. Research institutes and NRM practitioner agencies bring complementary expertise, experience and resources to complex social, institutional and external contexts, often during conflict between d...

The National Agricultural Productivity & Reconciliation Ecology Centre (NAPREC) held its inaugural conference in Deniliquin in the southern Murray–Darling Basin, NSW, Australia, 4–5 October 2017, and attracted an engaged group of farmers, researchers, industry and government representatives. The theme of the conference was ‘Positive Partnerships fo...

Collaborative research teams working in developing countries rely on information and computer technologies (ICTs), both hardware and software, to overcome barriers to information sharing including, language, distance, time, economic development and politics. However, studies have shown impediments to information sharing between team members from di...

Australia provides aid for agricultural research conducted in developing countries. Using interviews with researchers in Australia and Lao PDR, this study presents an innovative model of the linguistic, individual, cultural, economic and political barriers and opportunities for research communication. This model informed an assessment tool to evalu...

Training manual for writing scientific reports and papers by agricultural scientists for whom English is a second language.

This paper reports research findings on how agricultural scientists working on research and development topics in South east Asia communicate with each other. Successful communication between scientists was shown to be vital between team members. However, this contention has not been tested for international research teams from developed and develo...

This report presents research findings from a qualitative investigation into how agricultural scientists involved in international agricultural and rural development projects communicate with each other. Communication is an essential part of agricultural research in developed and developing countries, from initiating and managing projects to evalua...

The Internet has become a major source and vehicle for technological transfer and project development during the 1990s. Three Pacific Island countries—Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu—were connected through Pactok, an inexpensive computer-mediated communication (CMC) system originally developed for non-government organizations (NGOs) through the Pacific Sus...

The paper explores the responses of one group of people living in the Pacific Islands following their connection to Pactok, an early computer mediated communication (CMC) system. In early 1997, 56 Pactok users in five countries-Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu--answered a predominantly quantitative survey on why they used...