Abstract:
Upgrading local food value chains is a promising approach to invigorating African
food systems. This endeavour warrants multi-disciplinary North-South collaboration and
partnerships through participatory action research (PAR) to help leverage appropriate
upgrading strategies (UPSs) with a focus on local stakeholders. The more disciplines, cultures,and partner institutions that are involved, the more a project will present challenges in terms of
communication and coordinating activities. Our aim was to determine the costs and investigate
whether PAR with a multi-disciplinary approach was feasible in rural Tanzania with over 600
local stakeholders and more than 100 scientists. This article presents a self-evaluation of the
collaboration and communication of project scientists during their research activities. Despite
the overall high satisfaction, the more complex and complicated PAR activities required more
cooperation, instructions and communication among the project scientists than had been
anticipated in this multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural, and multi–institutional context, resulting
in greater tension and dissatisfaction. The findings indicate that this type of large multidisciplinary PAR is challenging in terms of flexibility in the planning of research activities,
the administration of finances, and cross-cultural communication. Potential avenues to overcome these obstacles include a) more communication on PAR activities across cultures to
develop a shared vocabulary; b) developing other modes of shared responsibility for a more
horizontal collaboration; and c) more face-to-face cross-cultural activities to overcome cultural,
disciplinary and geographical distance.
