The story of an action research project (II)

 Chapter 2: An old friend comes to the rescue

The GSD application required three referees. It was decent to let them know its fate. Later in the first week of March 2022, I shot emails to the three of them. Only one responded.

Richard Atkinson had worked for a UK-based research agency and then his own firm for over two decades. Our paths had crossed when he had come to Kenya in the 2000s to undertake what became annual lifestyle trend studies for Nokia, the then dominant mobile phone manufacturer. Between 2007 and COVID-19, Richard, his colleagues and I would conduct dozens of research projects in Liberia, Côte d'Ivore, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana and Mozambique for a raft of tech, NGO and business clients. At the time of the GSD application, Richard was teaching in the School of Design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Richard in our research bunker at Mpala

Richard had obtained his PhD from Oxford University with a thesis on youth culture. Having been a quant – you should flip through my PhD thesis from page 83 – he had introduced me to ethnographic research and I was hooked. 

Professorial in mannerisms and looks – forgetful, a bit disorganised, knowledgeable, well read, bearded and with a mop of unruly hair going grey, he once appeared in our 'research bunker' with totally unmatched socks and couldn't find his sneakers on his way out, and on the final night, he left in driving rain with an umbrella and saucepan, the latter to fend off any wild animals on his walk back to his bungalow – he could turn a half hour conversation into 10 pages of text. He had been writing a book over the previous eight years based on his research experiences in Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. When Communities Design Aid: Creating Solutions to Poverty That People Own, Use and Need was published in 2022 and details when and why development aid doesn’t work and concludes with proposals for community-led “Participative Development Goals.” 

Unsurprisingly, he was game – his response to my initial email included lines like “this work needs to be done…” and “give me a couple of months to think something up…” 

Sometime in May, he got back with a plan – he would start scouring UK research funding websites, in particular the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) one, for relevant grant calls. Soon, this search would identify a call to do with research with indigenous researchers and peoples. This appeared relevant given that the 2020-2023 drought had affected traditional pastoralists in Northern Kenya to a great and devastating extent. 

We began working on the bid document whose deadline was 9 August 2022, the same day as national elections in Kenya. I hit the books and journal papers once again, this time with some authority because I now considered myself an agri-pastoralist with an intense exposure to it vagaries in those dozen years in Umande where the farm was located in Laikipia East. 

Richard had recruited two RCA colleagues from the School of Design soon after the start of this proposal writing: John Makepeace, a specialist in futures methods and Gareth Loudon, Professor of Creativity and head of its Innovation Design Engineering and Global Innovation Design programmes. Zoom meetings between the four of us and Richard’s prolific writing generated pages of Google Doc text. A budget outline was beginning to take shape in the hands of John. As the Principal Investigator, Gareth’s experience, wisdom and calm delivery guided the team forward but as 9 August approached, we realised we had so much more to do and could not possibly meet the deadline. Richard, ever so sensitive, called me to ask how I felt about this. I don’t know what I said. I knew how I felt – my future looked bleaker just as the presidential and Laikipia gubernatorial election results would mirror.

We regrouped at the start of 2023. This time, the RCA team opted to go for an open call. This is a research proposal which may not fall within the specific themes put out by the research councils; applicants could conceive a project within the general remit of the council and not necessarily in response to a specific ‘brief’. There are no hard deadlines which probably informed what was to become the Future Pastoralism research proposal and project.

We identified Laikipia North as the location for the prospective work. After almost a year-long search for a local research institution for RCA to partner with, I reached out to Mpala Research Centre & Wildlife Foundation, also in Laikipia North. MRC sits within the 48,000 acre Mpala Ranch. The land was bequeathed to Princeton University by an alum in the 1980s and has been a landscape-level “living laboratory” for Princeton staff and students ever since as well as a site for local natural science researchers. It is jointly managed and operated under a trust by Princeton University, Smithsonian Institution, Kenya Wildlife Service, National Museums of Kenya and the Wildlife Research and Training Institute.

MRC is a very active and productive research institution – at the last count, they were publishing scholarly papers at the average rate of about one article each week. In 2023, they were embarking on a new strategic path which included a master plan to expand and improve physical infrastructure, hiring C-level staff and broadening the scope of research undertaken to include the humanities and social sciences. When I first contacted the newly installed Executive Director, Dr Winnie Kiiru, in March to match-make MRC and RCA, she told me that an arts / design / humanities project with the college was “music to [her] ears.” The RCA team were, later in the year, to receive an internal research development grant to fund a pilot study which we undertook in October and November 2023 working out of MRC.

John and the local research facilitation team with a participant during fieldwork in Il Motiok, Laikipia North

The story of an action research project (I)

Chapter 1: The Harvard GSD application

Like much of the world outside China, COVID-19 arrived in Kenya during March 2020. It could have killed me or my business. Forgivingly, it chose to do the latter.

I had maintained a research office in Nanyuki since September 2013 after emigrating from Nairobi. The small town sits on the Equator and was the headquarters of Laikipia County at the time. We were able to go into the office every weekday and some weekends until December 2020 when the landlady requested us to vacate. The hospitality business in which compound the office was located had closed down. She wanted to renovate the whole place. Admittedly, I was not reluctant to leave and get in her way.

2020 was also the start of one of the driest and longest droughts in Kenya in almost 40 years. Northern Kenya, that half of the country north of the Equator, is generally arid and bore the brunt of the drought which was to last until 2023. Grounded by the pandemic and working from home, I witnessed the effects of this particular drought at close quarters. 

We had had two previous periods of extreme dry weather in my part of Laikipia since buying the small farm in 2010. The first, around 2014, had dried up fishponds with hundreds of tilapia. Dark-to-light grey on the top, this fish tends to turn over and expose the white underside when they die. The ponds had turned cloudy.

The second drought came around in 2017. We led the cattle, goats and sheep into the fruit orchard – bananas, oranges, mangoes – and trees planted over the previous seven years. During these two droughts, I was commuting to work or away on research assignments so could not count myself as an eye witness to these events. This time, in 2020, there was nowhere to go. 

  

Views of Laikipia

Laikipia East is close to the Northwest slopes of Mt Kenya. It is under the mountain’s rain shadow and receives a less-than-adequate amount of rainfall most years. Precipitation is less in frequency and volume in most parts of Northern Kenya. This drought – as in the previous two – had dried the river which forms the northern border of the farm and from which our community water project draws its supplies. The two large elevated tanks fed by the community-sourced water and two smaller rainwater collection tanks connected to the roof of my little house were soon depleted.

The livestock had chewed – to the roots – much of the pasture on the main grazing paddock and were now browsing in the drought reserve area made up of tall grasses and shrubs. The hayfield we had planted in 2019 after the first two droughts produced a decent amount of bales – 120 – slightly less that half of which had been sold to a neighbour. The animals were soon to consume what was left.

Herders in Lekiji, Laikipia North

Amidst this climatic onslaught, I wondered how the pastoralist of Northern Kenya were fairing. Reports of animal deaths had begun appearing on mainstream and social media. Raids by pastoralists on private ranches, conservancies and farms and human deaths and injuries had been documented by investigative journalists. 

Designer and activist Victor Papanek has written about “ecological illiteracy,” describing how humans degrade natural environments expecting the damage to fix itself. Restoration of land and livelihoods gets a lot tougher when the circularity of human activity and the environmental consequences of it – by way of droughts and floods for instance – converge. It was in this milieu that I wrote, over November and December 2021, an application to join Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). 

Since my graduate student days in the early 2000s, I had occasionally – probably once a year – popped open the GSD website and marvelled at the faculty members, student profiles, facilities and programmes at the GSD. Nothing more. This time though, I went in deep. With a bias towards architecture and urban planning, there were showcases of environmental design projects as well as many other topical practice areas. 

And then there was the DDes (Doctor of Design) programme. Applications were open, closing in December with March 2022 set as the date for acceptance notices. All you had to do was write a research proposal, craft a personal statement and pay a fee. 

I hit the books and journal articles, reading up on the effects of global warming in drylands, the impacts of biodiversity loss and land degradation on wildlife habitats and pastoralists production systems, land regeneration techniques and "ecologically intentional design" (after Nathan Stegall’s philosophy). I intended to explore natural, designed and social routes to the restoration of large expanses of environmentally degraded habitats. In other words, to manipulate architecture, design and people in the service of environmentally distressed Northern Kenya. 

Having no background in and spotty knowledge of many of these fields, I reflected upon what I considered credible accounts of the most recent droughts in Kenya with my farm as the crime scene. The application generalised the effects of these droughts on Northern Kenya and what I could do about it.

On 1 March 2022, the email from GSD popped into my inbox. The message was not in the body of the email; no, you had to log into the application portal. Before doing this, I went outside and sat on the veranda, asking myself what needed to be done – at a practical level – if it was positive and what were the consequences to my professional life if it was negative. Having steeled myself, I went back indoors and logged in. The message began, “Dear Havi: We regret to inform you…” 

I stepped outside again and contemplated what I would do with the rest of my life, COVID-19 having shuttered by social research practice which I had run since 2011.