At the 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture in Bali, CCAFS, IFAD and USDA-FAS organized the Side event “Accelerating innovation development and scaling climate-smart agriculture to drive a transformation in food systems”. High-level representatives of > 20 governments, research, donor, financial and policy institutions, civil society and private sectors discussed their previously shared insights and agreed to act as an “Insight Group” for further related CCAFS research and action.

This paper explores possible pathways for different types of farmers, considering where they might be in the future, beyond 2030 and the era of the SDGs. It outlines some of the necessary interventions, risks and trade-offs associated with these different pathways, for farmers operating in a variety of agricultural systems globally, including cropping, livestock and tree (silvopasture) systems. It also considers the impacts of different disruption scenarios that could radically alter anticipated pathways and offers a range of possible interventions.

The success of multi-stakeholder ARD (Agricultural Research for Development) partnerships is often attributed to stakeholder interaction and knowledge exchange, collective learning and establishment of mutual trust between the partners involved. Achieving these outcomes depends very much on the leadership of the partnership, and how this leadership relates to partnership facilitation and also project coordination and/or management. This brief explores the different skills and attitudes required by leaders of ARD partnerships, and how these relate to different contexts.

Innovation platforms are widely used in agricultural research to connect different stakeholders to achieve common goals. This brief deals with the gender dimension in innovation platform and is part of the series of ‘practice briefs’ intended to help guide agricultural research practitioners who seek to support and implement innovation platforms.

There is sufficient evidence, drawn from surveys of innovation in the public sector and cognitive testing interviews with public sector managers, to develop a framework for measuring public sector innovation. Although many questions that are covered in the Oslo Manual guidelines for measuring innovation in the private sector can be applied with some modifications to the public sector, public sector innovation surveys need to meet policy needs that require collecting additional types of data.

Forests are intrinsically linked to water – forested watersheds provide 75 percent of our accessible freshwater resources (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) – and both forest and water resources are relevant to the achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the important interlinkages, the forest-water nexus is often unaccounted for in policy and planning. For example, three quarters of forests are not managed for soil and water conservation, which poses a fundamental challenge to achieving sustainable and resilient communities and ecosystems.