Capacity development interventions in support of agricultural innovation are more effective when based on systematic and participatory assessments of existing skills and capacity needs. Recognizing that, an instrument has been developed in the context of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project. It consists of a capacity scoring tool that allows assessing innovation capacities, identifying strengths and weaknesses and monitoring capacity changes over time. This paper describes the scoring tool and provides guidelines on how to apply it successfully.
The creative process that leads to farmers’ innovations is rarely studied or described precisely in agricultural sciences. For academic scientists, obvious limitations of farmers’ experiments are e.g. precision, reliability, robustness, accuracy, validity or the correct analysis of cause and effect. Nevertheless, we propose that ‘farmers’ experiments’ underpin innovations that keep organic farming locally tuned for sustainability and adaptable to changing economic, social and ecological conditions.
Increasingly, multi-stakeholder processes have been recognized as being necessary to the development of public policies seeking to promote systemic innovation in response to complex and multidimensional challenges, such as household food security, rural development, and environmental change. Saint Lucia, a small island developing state located in the Caribbean, has been grappling with a wide range of agriculture, food and nutrition security challenges with varying degrees of policy success.
This paper synthesizes Component 2 of the Regoverning Markets Programme. It is based on 38 empirical case studies where small-scale farmers and businesses connected successfully to dynamic markets, doing business with agri-processors and supermarkets. The studies aimed to derive models, strategies and policy principles to guide public and private sector actors in promoting greater participation of small-scale producers in dynamic markets. This publication forms part of the Regoverning Markets project.
Managers and policy makers have struggled to develop effective monitoring systems to track the evolution of research organizations. This paper presents the first components of a novel monitoring system for monitoring such organizations. These components can be used to generate detailed static pictures of the actual activities and partnerships of a large research program or organization, in other words, what the organization is actually doing, with whom, where, how and for what purpose.
This report presents the main results of the EU-funded IN-SIGHT project ‘Strengthening Innovation Processes for Growth and Development’. The authors sketched out a conceptual framework and knowledge base for a more effective European policy on innovation in agriculture and rural areas. Both conceptual framework and knowledge base are consistent with the new European agenda for agricultural and rural policy and sensitive to the diversity of the European agricultural and rural systems.
This is the proceedings of the international conference ‘Innovations in Organic Food System for Sustainable Production and Enhanced Ecosystem Services’. The proceedings are a compilation of peer-reviewed articles based on presentations of 18 speakers invited conference speakers and published as a Special Issue of the scientific journal ‘Sustainable Agriculture Research’ by the Canadian Centre of Science and Education.
This document on Good Practices in Extension Research and Evaluation is developed as a hands on reference manual to help young researchers, research students, and field extension functionaries in choosing the right research methods for conducting quality research and evaluation in extension. This manual has been compiled by the resource persons who participated in the Workshop on ‘Good
Present-day society asks more from agriculture than just the production of food. Agriculture is now required to be concerned with the quality of food, ecosystem services, inclusion of marginalized populations, revitalization of rural territories, energy production, etc. This opening up of the future of agriculture encourages rural actors to experiment with new farming systems, using imagination, creativity and determination to replace dominant models. At the same time, low-cost mass-production systems continue on their way, with promises of a future based on green technologies.
In 2012, the Food Systems Innovation (FSI) initiative was set up between four Australian organisations working to improve the impact of agriculture and food security programs in the Indo-Pacific region. The author was assigned to facilitate a stream of work in the partnership, working as an internal partnership broker in one of the four partner organisations, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).