This was a discussion paper of a Professorial Lecture of an esteemed colleague, the late Professor Dr. Corazon Lamug of UPLB. I believe the issues raised then remain important today. I accidentally found it in my old files and I wish to share it.
Comments by
Dr. Lex Librero
Discussant
A
CRITIQUE OF THE SOCIAL RESEARCH DESIGNS OF STUDIES ON COMMUNITY-BASED NATURAL
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
BY
DR. CORAZON B. LAMUG
(SEARCA
Professorial Lecture, UP Los Baños, 14 March 2008)
Having a discussant in a professorial
lecture is not unheard of in the academe, but at UPLB it is not normative
behavior either. Therefore, it came to
me as a surprise when Dr. Cora Lamug requested that I serve as discussant for
her professorial lecture. I know that in
most universities abroad academics welcome, in fact they seek, criticisms of
their works from their peers. I have
been exposed to the belief that this is one of the best ways of improving one’s
work. Unfortunately, this academic
culture has not as yet blossomed well enough at UPLB, much less in other
universities in the country, even at this rather late age.
It is, therefore, a very
pleasant and welcome opportunity for me to respond to what an esteemed
colleague has made of the sometimes confused and confusing research in
community-based natural resource management in this country.
Dr. Lamug’s critique of the
research designs employed in CBNRM studies, I would like to believe, has dug
much deeper than most in terms of comparative analysis of research designs, particularly
from the points of view of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory, and
action research.
The first observation that Dr.
Lamug made that caught my eye immediately was stated rather lamely when she
said “Most review of CBNRM focus on research findings.” I have always been vocal against this
simplistic approach to the review of scientific literature, particularly by our
colleagues and graduate students. Look
at any chapter on the review of literature in all graduate theses and
dissertations at the UPLB Library and you will find that not less than 95%
would just report a litany of findings reported by theses and dissertations
done earlier, not much more. Why do I
need to pounce on this right away? Well,
this is not the way to review the scientific literature.
Professor Ivor Davies of Indiana University, in a course that I took
under him, once said, “no body will be interested in your findings, but
everybody will be interested in how you treated the scientific literature you
had access to.” In other words, the
results of your study can only be meaningful if the means by which you arrived at
them were subject to scientific rigor.
Outside of that, the results become spurious. From this point of view, therefore, Dr.
Lamug’s decision to look at the research designs employed in the research
efforts in CBNRM concerns become very significant if only because we are
interested in meaningful new information and knowledge that would hopefully
provide insights into how the existing problems in the environment could be
dealt with effectively and efficiently.
I am elated by the fact that
Dr. Lamug chose to look at the research designs that have been employed in the
study of natural resource management in this country. The classification of research designs into
the four paradigms of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory, and action
research makes the discourse much more philosophical and academic, thereby
elevating a few notches the discourse as it ought to be in an academic
community. However, I shall try to
simplify some of my thoughts on these as we go along, at least for the benefit
of those at my level who may not always feel comfortable with the isms
of academe.
Dr. Lamug has already
explained to us what the four paradigms mean, but let us have a quick review. According to the philosophy espoused by
Auguste Comte and the philosophers that followed him, human thought proceeds
through three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positivistic. The first refers to explaining all phenomena
as happening because of the direct manipulation of supernatural beings or
divine forces as if they physically existed (for example, recall the gods of
Greek mythology). The second is just
like the first but that the supernatural beings have become more abstract
rather than appearing human like. The
third, positivism, abandoned the
supernatural beings and metaphysical abstractions in favor of naturalistic and
empirical explanations. Put simply, we
give meaning to what we can observe or sense.
Interpretivism means that the
social sciences should be concerned with providing interpretation of events and
phenomena in terms of how people involved perceive and understand their own
experiences, not simply quantifying what actually happens in a social
phenomenon. In fact, interpretive sociology deals with how to find reality through the
experiences of individuals involved in the actual social phenomenon.
Critical theory, as explained
by Dr. Lamug, may be viewed from two perspectives, namely: literary criticism
and social theory. We are interested in
social theory, I believe, in this instance.
From the point of view of the social sciences, therefore, critical
theory is concerned with critiquing and changing society as a whole in contrast
to traditional theory which is oriented to understanding and explaining social
phenomena.
Participatory action research,
or simply action research, has been defined as “collective self-reflective
enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the
rationality and justice of their own social practices” (Kemmis and McTraggart,
1988). Hence, research becomes action
research when it is collective activity.
Put simply, action research is actually the Dewey concept of learning,
which is “learning by doing,” and it is known by many names like participatory
research, collaborative inquiry, emancipatory research, action learning, and
contextual action research which are variations of a theme. In other words, a group of individuals would
identify a problem, together do something to resolve the issue, observe how
successful their efforts may be and if not satisfied, try again.
Now, let me proceed further
into the lecture. Dr. Lamug reported
that 74% of the total number of reviewed research reports employed positivism
as research paradigm. About 7% of the
studies employed interpretivism, another 7% critical theory, and 12%
participatory action research. This
tells me that our researchers have been focusing too much on simply describing
the situation in the environment. Only
12 of a hundred have focused on explaining and understanding the actual
experiences of individuals living in coastal areas. This is rather small amount of research. Could this explain why we do not, until now,
fully understand the problems of people living in the coastal areas of the
country?
Dr. Lamug’s critique, I would
like to believe, has dug much deeper than most studies in terms of comparative
analysis of research work in CBNRM. She
also had the foresight of telling us that the paradigms of positivism,
interpretivism, critical theory, and participatory action research, indeed, are
interrelated one way or the other.
Participatory research could be viewed as trying to achieve a clearer
focus on a specific group of individuals being observed from the point of view
of critical theory, and whose actions may be interpreted either from the point
of view of the researcher or the researched and examined within the broad
framework of positivism.
Dr. Lamug, through her
lecture, has attempted to enlighten us on very serious discrepancies both in
terms of our knowledge of and the methods by which we arrive at such knowledge
of CBNRM and its effects on people and society.
For so long a time now, we have been doing research that simply scraped the
surface of a social problem. There are
few in-depth analyses of the problems of CBNRM.
Most of the studies lack in-depth analysis that should logically lead to
a better understanding of why people live the way they do in relation to their
environment.
Has it not occurred to our
colleagues, for example, that we still need to have a much better appreciation
of why our indigenous cousins have a more meaningful understanding of nature
and their environment? At one time in
the recent past, I challenged the researchers of Bicol University
in one seminar, when I asked the participants “why is it that the wild life of
Mayon Volcano understands the volcano much better than the people in its
vicinity?” The wildlife there, including
the small lizards and insects, know when Mayon volcano is acting up. But then again, the people probably know when
Mayon volcano acts up but simply disregard it.
Such human behavior is something that also needs to be understood. There must be a root cause of this problem
situation, and that root cause is something we are not sure of.
Going back to issues raised in
the lecture, I ask: do we really
understand our environment? Some would
say, yes we do but the difference is that we simply do not give a hoot because
our greed is much stronger than our sense of responsibility and even
safety. Now, what then is the connection
between irresponsibility and environmental conditions. It is easy to make motherhood statements, or
cop-out statements, but do we really honestly understand what the real
relationship is between our own thinking and behavior and the natural order of
our environment? Our indigenous cousins
would say, don’t do that because this would happen as a result, and that thing
would result in this thing, and so forth and so on. They have a strong sense of connection with
their environment, and they have a deep understanding of how their lives and
behavior are intertwined with natural conditions in their environment. In a way, we can partly understand this
phenomenon by understanding the indigenous knowledge system of the place.
If it has not come clear to
you, let me try to simplify the message of Dr. Lamug’s lecture this
morning. In terms of research efforts,
we simply describe because interpreting is much more difficult to do. We think that when we have done our
description we are done with our task.
Far from it. The real work of a
researcher is the correct interpretation of meaning and potential meanings and
implications to our lives of what we may have discovered. The problem is, when we do interpret to the
limits of our understanding, we would certainly have to get out of our comfort
zones – this is exactly what prevents us from further pushing our research and
intellectual creativity towards innovative ways of looking at things and
events.
Scientific revolutions happen,
according to science philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn, because of what he
terms as anomalies resulting from discoveries of new ways of doing things. The new ways of doing things resulting from
new interpretations of similar observations unsettle what appears to be a
relative calm within the scientific community.
When these new ways of doing things gain greater adherents among members
of the scientific community questions are raised and an anomaly arises, and
this anomaly would be settled either by accepting or rejecting the newer ways
of doing things. Then another relative
calm sets in until another anomaly arises, and so forth and so on. Of course, this does not happen
overnight. Remember, Copernicus was
forgiven by the Roman Catholic religion only a thousand years later after he
refuted the then dogma of the church that the earth was the center of the
universe and that the heavenly bodies were the ones revolving around it.
As far back as two decades
ago, I had already suggested that at least the UPLB-based social science researchers
had better start doing synthesis work on the voluminous amount of research done
if only to formulate research hypotheses or some other generalization that would
lead to some kind of theorizing.
I am glad that Dr. Lamug has
done this critique because it has shown us clearly that many of the many
research reviewed may not be as useful as the researchers might have thought
initially.
Echoing Dr. Lamug’s conclusion,
I fully agree that our researchers in CBNRM must now try to be much more
purposive in their efforts to unravel the complicated nature of social
conditions. A combination of the four
paradigms sound to me to be highly useful.
This combination of paradigms could, in fact, provide us a better
approach to a clearer understanding of the problem and solution structures of
CBNRM issues. My own take on this,
however, is that I would prefer to reduce effort in mere description of
conditions and put more effort into translation and interpretation of
experiences into lessons and realities that could help us resolve real-world
problems.
I now take this opportunity to
congratulate Dr. Cora Lamug for painstakingly synthesizing the 74 studies in
CBNRM in order to ferret out the lessons that most of us have failed to see. To many social researchers, the work done by
Dr. Lamug would have been daunting. But
I have known Dr. Lamug to be different, one who engages a social issue with
intellectual fervor, trying to understand the social phenomenon through the
eyes of a seasoned scientist. As to the
quality of the lecture this morning, it is a lecture worth the name
professorial lecture.
Congratulations again, Dr. Lamug.
Thank you.
