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