HUB RESEARCH PAPER - Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel

Process consultation revisited 15
local agricultural school and an indigenous non-governmental organization. The engineers, in
close collaboration with local facilitators, are working with demonstration fields and even
simulations of plowing in experimental sandboxes. Farmers, assisted by young students of the
local agriculture school, discuss with the technicians their experiences and problems with
plowing on those difficult slope lands. They talk about the occurrence of erosion and fertility
problems and discover new ways of fertilization and soil conservation. A remarkable event
happens, when the farmers start to speak their local language, Quichua. The European
coordinator in this project showed a deep interest to learn this language instead of Spanish. By
learning Quichua, he made ‘real’ contact that opened a broader conversational space. The
farmers have far more words in Quichua to distinguish different types and qualities of soil,
depending on the land use and the cultivation of the land. They have in their local language
different words for soil appropriate for wood or grass or farming land, taking into account the
slope and the characteristics of the soil. This ancestral knowledge seems never to have been
translated into Spanish, but it still belongs to the ancient community of practice (e.g., Wenger,
1998) when they start to interact about their practices in the fields.
This experience contrasts with another irrigation project where water engineers had been
developing irrigation pipes for slope landing isolation of all stakeholders involved. Here the
farmers could only be convinced to use the pipes when they got special financial support for it.
The technology was not developed jointly but straight from the irrigation laboratory. A ‘multi-
voiced’ joint learning space in which all stakeholders/voices could engage in social learning for
interdependence (e.g., Bouwen & Taillieu, 2004) and become co-owner of the problem/project
isn’t created. Hence, after the experimental period the farmers turned back to their non-
sustainable existing practices of spraying the land.