International partnership to carry out collaborative research and development programs has been implemented for a long time. However, with globalization, the economic, social, political and cultural diversity of interacting partners reached levels where this variety of collaborators often has shown some weaknesses in issues like governance. Strong and sound partnerships must be manageable in order to ensure the achievement of the set objectives.

More and more, development organizations are under pressure to demonstrate that their programs result in significant and lasting changes in the well-being of their intended beneficiaries. However, such "impacts" are often the product of a confluence of events for which no single agency or group of agencies can realistically claim full credit. As a result, assessing development impacts is problematic, yet many organizations continue to struggle to measure results far beyond the reach of their programs

This paper is an attempt to take stock of the authors' work. In Section 2, the authors reflect upon the emergence and fairly rapid diffusion of the concept ‘national system of innovation’ as well as related concepts. In Section 3,  they describe how the Aalborg-version of the concept evolved by a combination of ideas that moved from production structure towards including all elements and relationships contributing to innovation and competence building.

The paper explores the implications of rural livelihood diversity for agricultural innovation policies. It summarises literature on the nature of rural poverty, with particular emphasis on the relative roles of farm and non-farm income. It also reviews the various roles, direct and indirect, that agricultural innovation can play in rural poverty reduction. Finally, it uses an agricultural knowledge and information systems (AKIS) perspective to argue for a differentiated approach to targeting agricultural innovations, based on an analysis of rural assets.

This paper explores the use of actor-oriented approaches in natural resource-based development. It begins by reviewing the need to bring an analysis of actor linkages, coalitions and information flows higher on the agenda in planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Various tools which could assist in doing this are introduced and their use is illustrated in case studies of natural resource-based research and development (R&D) projects in Nepal and Bangladesh.

This document is on the Programma sull'Innovazione e lo Sviluppo Agroindustriale (PISA), which is an international program whose general objective is to support innovative projects of agroindustrial development aimed at generating value-added and employment in the rural sector of developing countries.