Returning Results: Survey of Dissemination Practices

Barriers to knowledge exchange: background to the survey

Systemic problems in institutional structure and reward systems inhibit the sharing of knowledge between researchers and local people include:

• Insitutional disincentives to equitable knowledge sharing between researchers and local people;
• Reward systems evaluate researchers' progress based on numbers of papers published, not on field impact or accountability to local partners;
• Scientists are trained to communicate with other scientists, not with the public; and,
• Education and wider communication of results is often ignored or not valued by the scientific community.

The survey of dissemination practices

Towards the end of 2007, PPI and its partner in this activity, CIFOR, began application of a survey among researchers and academics to better understand the institutional obstacles and disincentives to knowledge exchange and returning results within research institutions and academia. In addition, PPI has collected lessons learned from a range of practitioners and researchers in Asia, Africa and Latin America who are challenging conventional processes and are undertaking research with and for local communities.

The survey addresses researcher and institutional practices in dissemination of research results to discern points of tension and leverage points for constructive change. Partners involved in the survey include: The Non-Timber Forest Products Exchange Programme for South and Southeast Asia (PFNM/EP), the Center for Tropical Research in Mexico (CITRO), Mulheres da Mata (Women of the Forest) project in Brazil, and CIFOR's regional offices in Africa (Cameroon, Zambia, Burkina Faso).

The Knowledge Exchange Survey was applied in eight countries from three regions: Africa, Asia, and the Americas. A first analysis of this survey is synthethized in the article Out of the loop: Why research rarely reaches policy makers and the public – and what can be done, published in Biotropica in 2009. As a follow up of this project, PPI collaborators are working on the upcoming Knowledge Exchange Manual, which compiles the inputs, experience and cases captured during the implementation of the Survey for Dissemination Practices.