Page - (000274) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

adaptation-intervention cycles. However, communities in different contexts or locationsmayoften share similar domains of change.Hence, usingpredetermined domains of change should be considered advisable rather than compulsory. Fur- thermore, changes that have occurred outside predefined domains should also be collected (i.e. identified and characterized) for learning purposes in order to improve future adaptation actionM&E. Purposive samplingwas thenused to collect individual level stories of changes through interviews. The sample size for individual interviewswas kept small for experimental reasons. Purposive sampling was preferred to random sampling because the ultimate objective of our adaptationM&Ewas to learn from stories of changes, and ultimately move agricultural extension practices more towards success and away from failure. However, to improve the validity and reliability of thepurposivesampling,discussionswereconducted tocollect storiesofchanges ofmale and female groups of farmers. The most significant change technique (Davies and Dart 2005) was used to collect stories of changes of both individual farmers and gender-based groups. The technique is not based on predefined performance indicators, but on “field- based stories” that givemeaning to people’s reality and effects of projects on that reality. It allows the story tellers (individuals or groups) to describe what has happened in their lives and practices (particularly, in this project, the way they farm) in conjunction with the participatory action research adaptation action. Scientists from the respective countries’ national agricultural research systems collected the stories of change. The collected significant stories were subjected to participatory processing, in whichcharacteristicsofbehavior changes in the storieswerecounted, and then the most significant changeswere selected, substantiated and validated. To select the most significant changesparticipants read the stories onebyoneanddiscussed the characteristicsofchangesdescribedbythe individualsorgender-basedgroups.The substantiation involvedfieldvisitsand triangulationprocesses includingdiscussion with resource persons and groups in the communities to ascertainwhether behav- ioral changesnoted in the storieshadeffectivelyoccurred.Such substantiationhas two objectives: (i) to verify the effectiveness of the occurrence of the change characteristics with the story tellers, other communitymembers and fieldworkers who haveworkedwith the selected communities, (ii) to gather additional data to complement informationobtainedduring the story collection step. Thecharacteristicsofbehaviorchangeswerecountedbyextractingall identified characteristics in the collected stories, then calculating their frequencies of occur- rence, in termsof thepercentagesofpeoplewhosestories included them.This also allowedthe identificationofdomainsof lifewherechangeshadbeen inducedin the selected communities by theparticipatory action researchof theCCAFSprogram. In this chapterwehave chosen to present frequencies of occurrence of behavioral changecharacteristics,butnot theselectionandsubstantiationresults (whichcanbe obtained from the authors on request). 260 J. Somdaet al.