Policy approved – and implemented?

I want to use this blog to help you to use Net-Map in your own work. This is why  – every once in a while – I give you examples of how exactly I tackle a concrete question in the field.
For example: Policy approval and implementation in Nigeria.
The Nigeria Strategy Support Program of the International [...]

What if we’re not quite sure?

Normally the aim of research is to find things out and to present results that we are sure of and clear about. What a pain that reality is often so messy and opaque and no matter how well research is done, when it comes to social phenomena, different people might see them in different ways!
So [...]

General or specific questions?

Yesterday I sat with a group of colleagues at IFPRI to discuss our plans for supporting the Nigeria Strategy Support Program to better understand how research influences (or doesn’t) agricultural policy making in the country. We want to know this for two reasons:

IFPRI is pretty active in Nigeria and aims [...]

Julius Nyangaga about using SNA to understand innovation systems

Dr Eva Schiffer recently took us (a group of researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute, ILRI) through an introductory session to Social Network Analysis – the concept, the methodologies, its application.  Most of us were from the innovation side of the research world where qualitative constructs and processes in systems are easily appreciated. But [...]

Jennifer Hauck asks: Who is actually `the community`?

When writing a contribution for a conference my colleague Eva Youkhana and I came across a number of authors who complain, that communities or target groups are usually homogenised. Villages are perceived to be entities, user groups, such as fishermen are grouped together based on their activities. During our research on rural water use and [...]

Make sure you know what they mean by this…

Today I tried to make sense of Net-Maps that workshop participants drew some weeks back in individual silent sessions. We had discussed the procedure, the general question, kinds of links, meaning of influence with the group, but mapping the networks was something that each participant did on their own. During the workshop we used the [...]

Mapping the structure of big networks of individual actors (without getting overwhelmed)

So what do you do if you are interested in understanding the structure of a network of individuals and the network is too big or your resources too small, to interview each and every one of the 500 members as to who they are linked to? Sometimes, for getting a bigger picture of the structure, [...]

What it feels like

I’m just coming out of an intense session with 70 or so members of the KM4Dev community, mapping out the networks that members of the community have with each other. It was intense because of the size of the group (we worked in sub-groups) but also because we experimented with the format and came up [...]

Understanding your community

Now I’m not talking about a rural village but a community of practice. Today I had a great discussion with some of my colleagues of Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) about how to best map out this community of practice at our annual meeting in Lisbon next week. Who are we, what are the roles [...]

Integrating research and governance

Sounds great. But how do you do it? How can we as researchers for development do projects that have an impact on governance in the countries we work in? Or, is there a problem in this question already, as it sounds like: First we do research, then we go and have an impact.
Should the question [...]