Working across disciplines – the pitfalls and opportunities

Sophie Rigg, Research and Learning Coordinator on the Christian Aid BRACED projects in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, reflects on how a multi-disciplinary approach to development supports resilience.

One of my key areas of interest in BRACED is the impact of cross-disciplinary relations on the project, the partners and on development in practice. Following the negotiations on the Sendai framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and in the run up to the Sustainable Development Goals this is an increasingly relevant area for investigation.

The Christian Aid BRACED projects bring together people from development, meteorological science, communications and academic sectors with pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. Last March, the partners all met for the first time at workshops in Ouagadougou and Addis Ababa and during participatory field activities in Borana, Ethiopia and Gnagna, Burkina Faso.

During this project development phase, I developed a greater appreciation for the limitations of climate science, the power of radio in development and the importance of climate information for informing livelihood decisions. I listened to men in Borana speak about how they could no longer predict the weather from the movements of the insects and the stars.  Later I heard women in Burkina Faso tell of how the types of information that they needed were different from the men’s as their planting cycles differed. 

These shared exchanges enabled an innovative approach to resilience building and for us to collaboratively develop the programme Theory of Change and activities.  The nuances of climate science were interwoven with the farmers’ traditional ways of understanding the weather and the contextual knowledge of the local development practitioners.  This led to the development of a multi-disciplinary and participatory resilience tool.  This is now being used at the village level to support communities to develop resilience-building plans and to learn how climate information services can be adapted to be more relevant and accessible to these communities. This tool is central for achieving the project’s desired impact and increasing resilience.

However a multi-disciplinary approach is not without challenges.  Differences in language, priorities and organisational cultures can also create barriers and lead to confusion. Academic jargon, for example, can be inaccessible and meteorological science can lead to false assumptions if its probabilistic nature is not understood. 

During my first visit to Burkina Faso in 2014, I found myself presenting on resilience concepts to a room of rather blank faces. It was not that the other partners’ had a poor understanding of resilience.  The problem was that we communicated our thoughts on resilience in very different ways and used different terminology.  Whilst local development partners had a nuanced and contextual understanding of what resilience means for pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in Burkina Faso, my social science background had led me to focus more on its theoretical underpinnings. 

It was clear that the challenge was for us all to learn to speak a shared language, maintain two-way channels of communication and think reflexively about our own limitations and identities within our disciplines.  Developing a shared trust was also key.

As such, communication and learning between partners and stakeholders have become central tenants of the BRACED project and my role within it. The researcher job descriptions developed for BRACED emphasise supporting learning and communication and are not strict academic research positions.  They aim to sit at the interface between research and development policy.  This is innovative and enables us to focus on bridging the gap between disciplines and supporting a genuine co-production of knowledge.

Looking back at BRACED since February 2014, it is clear that all partners are undergoing their own transformation and are finding new ways to work.  This is expanding capacities and blurring the traditional boundaries of disciplines and the identity of organisations. Our multi-disciplinary approach in BRACED is not only valuable for improving the resilience of vulnerable communities in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, but also for transforming all actors involved and defining a new and more holistic approach to development.

Sophie Rigg, Kings College London.

All views are my own and do not reflect the view of Kings College London.