What makes TriQuest different
A global wave of evidence-to-use innovation is under way: rapid synthesis units, embedded researchers and participatory agenda-setting. TriQuest brings this discipline to rural-facing development, and starts with questions surfaced from practice.
Questions come from the ground
They are surfaced systematically from Sarpanches, elected women representatives, SHG and CLF leaders, frontline practitioners and public-system actors.
It changes the question
Take just transition. The usual question is what happens to a mine after closure. TriQuest asks what assets, rights, livelihoods and capabilities communities need for their second transition, having already been transformed once when mining arrived. In agrivoltaics, the question goes beyond megawatts and income to what happened to the farmer, the land’s productive use and the livelihood.
It measures what happens next
It looks past expenditure, installations and people trained, to absorption, productive use, value unlocked, returns to public investment, and who actually benefits.
Practice is the co-author, not a field site
Practitioners discover, surface the question, shape the inquiry, interpret findings and translate them.
Use is designed in, not bolted on
Every study names its pathway to use at the outset.
It starts with a live portfolio
TriQuest begins with studies already under way with academic and policy partners. See the Register.
What guides the work, and what guards it
Guidance
- Practice first
- The question starts on the ground.
- Rural-facing scope
- Field and meso level: infrastructure, institutions, markets, public investment, technology, energy.
- Even keel
- Practice, academia and policy share agenda, design, data and credit.
- Rigour with relevance
- Sound enough for peer review, usable by those who act.
- What works and what doesn’t
- Both are evidence.
- Embrace the difficult
- Complex, hard-to-quantify questions are taken on.
- Lean but networked
- Partner widely rather than build large.
Guardrails
- Guard the agenda
- Dominant voices must not skew priorities.
- Communities are knowledge-holders, not subjects
- Consent, attribution and return of findings are non-negotiable.
- Independent inquiry
- Questions, methods and findings are held to the Advisory Board’s standards.
- Label maturity
- Emerging learning, validated evidence and final findings are never conflated.
- Not a documentation unit
- Routine practice documentation stays with practitioners.
- No parallel thematic teams
- TriQuest draws on existing expertise.
- Open by default
- Outputs are public goods, and data is shared responsibly.
TriQuest is housed at Transform Rural India, with its own independent Advisory Board, Senior Fellows, Convenor and team. Its ambition is to set the standard for practice-grounded development knowledge, building with the best on even keel.