The final project consortium included partners from Makerere University Kampala (Uganda), Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Go Organic (Uganda/Kenya) and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (Austria).
The initial objectives of the project were to use the case of the International Training Course on Organic Agriculture (ITCOA) to analyze
- the impact of such a program on values, beliefs and competencies of participants;
- the impact of the program at sector level;
- to analyze the validity and relevance of student action research in transdisciplinary programs and
- to integrate the findings in a general reflection on action learning in a transdisciplinary setting.
During the research process, the work program proved to be too ambitious, and in agreement with the donor the project narrowed the focus to address objectives (1) and (3) in a comprehensive way.
To address objective 1 (to analyze the impact of the ITCOA on values, beliefs and competencies of participants), we combined concepts of sustainability learning – in particular transformative social learning – with established research instruments such as the Environmental Attitudes Inventory and the Graduate Study Cooperative Survey. The developed analytical framework was implemented as an ex-post online survey with 117 alumni of the ITCOA as respondents. Our findings showed that ITCOA created transformative learning experiences that positively predicted perceived personal and employer’s influence on sustainability, professional and personal competencies at graduation and environmental attitudes. The study is thus in clear support for experiential, social and transdisciplinary university courses to support a sustainability transition. The study was accepted for review by the International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education.
To address objective 3 (to analyze the validity and relevance of student action research in transdisciplinary programs), we used the data collected by ITCOA participants in the years 2011-2014 on agroecosystem health in four farming systems in Uganda. Despite the challenges arising from a heterogeneous dataset, we found the data relevant to address the research question: “Does certified organic agriculture increase agroecosystem health?”. It is a popular assumption that certified organic agriculture certainly contributes to the social, economic and ecological health of agroecosystems. The data gathered by ITCOA participants demonstrated that positive effects of certified organic agriculture cannot be taken for granted in the case of smallholder farming systems in Uganda. Ecological health is at risk if organic farming does not go beyond ‘not spraying’; economic health is at risk if the focus on single cash crops leads to lock-in situations; social health is at risk when additional income from organic farming does not compensate for the reduced production of staple crops in a market-oriented system. The study was accepted for review by the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability.
