Sustainable Management

Community-based studies were conducted in rural areas of Haiphong, Vietnam, and Accra, Ghana, during 2014 and 2015. The main aim of the study was to support women smallholder farmers and stakeholders in understanding their current complex situations for making practical and sustainable decisions in developing an integrated master plan for reducing (initially) their workload. However, as a more in-depth understanding started to develop, it became clear that their quality of life is the main issue (of which workload was only one dimension of the sustainable farming system as a whole). This was done by introducing women and all relevant stakeholders to an innovative systems-based framework, namely, the Evolutionary Learning Laboratory (ELLab), for use through two community-based, participatory projects in the poorest regions of the world. Various stakeholders engaged with each other in sharing their mental models about the issues involved in determining the quality of life of the disadvantaged and marginalized women farmers. These mental models served as inputs for developing systems models to help develop a shared understanding of the bigger systems in which women farmers in both countries are operating. Income, work pressure, and health were identified as the major determinants of the quality of life of women in both countries, while “dignity” was also identified by women in Ghana as an important factor. This chapter also discusses the value and validity of the ELLab approach in dealing with complex problems in cross-cultural and different environmental settings. Outcomes from each case study were discussed and compared to provide evidence of the practical contributions of this research to sustainable management through engaging and addressing the real concerns and needs of the marginalized groups in the two regions. Both case studies have shown that the systems-based ELLab has proved to be a powerful management framework to address complex problems in which relationships of natural (environmental) and human factors, cultural differences, and socioeconomic aspects and relationships among stakeholders are all intrinsically interwoven. The ELLab clearly supported the development of systemically defined management plans for the two cases.