Transdisciplinary research is widely advocated as an approach to address complex sustainability challenges. Yet it has rarely been evaluated whether participants actually learn, change their practices, or benefit from the collaboration. This talk presents a framework for evaluating collaborative learning processes from the perspective of societal stakeholders —i.e. smallholder dairy farmers in Nakuru County, Kenya.
Drawing on a two-year collaborative learning process aimed at co-developing innovations to reduce milk losses, I integrate Kirkpatrick's four-level evaluation scheme with second-order cybernetics and organizational learning theory (Learning Loops) to assess: what farmers found useful about the process, what they learned, how their new knowledge translated into changed practices, and what concrete benefits they experienced. Results show that farmers engaged in single-, double-, and triple-loop learning, with an average increase in milk production of 80% across both groups.