Producing Development Led Inquiry (DLI) as an approach linking knowledge generation to action

The approaches being used to generate and apply new knowledge were proving good at generating new knowledge but not so good at assisting farmers to apply new knowledge in the field. We were working within a project and had the opportunity to see what other approaches were available. Having examined the available approaches, we felt we had an opportunity to use our learning in the project to build new theory because, as Kurt Lewin said, “there is nothing as useful as a good theory”.

In particular we were able to access the experience and observations generated in the project and to link them to a variety of theories. In particular we linked to inquiring systems theory. While our theory seems to be working fairly well we are aware that there are lots of theories out there that started out working well only to fail.