Agricultural policies in sub-Saharan Africa have paid insufficient attention to sustainable intensification. In Uganda, agricultural productivity has stagnated with aggregate increases in crop production being attributed to expansion of cultivated land area. To enhance sustainable crop intensification, the Ugandan Government collaborated with stakeholders to develop agricultural policies using an evidence-based approach. Previously, evidence-based decision-making tended to focus on the evidence base rather than evidence and its interactions within the broader policy context.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is increasingly seen as a promising approach to feed the growing world population under climate change. The review explored how institutional perspectives are reflected in the CSA literature. In total, 137 publications were analyzed using institutional analysis framework, of which 55.5% make specific reference to institutional dimensions. While the CSA concept encompasses three pillars (productivity, adaptation, and mitigation), the literature has hardly addressed them in an integrated way.
Innovation platforms are by nature democratic spaces for joint problem identification, analysis, prioritization, and the collective design and implementation of activities to overcome problems. They are part of agricultural systems, and only a very small number of the stakeholders will be represented in the innovation platforms. This article sustainability and sucess criterea ofinnovation platforms
Increasingly, (inter)national development organisations are investing in programmes for youth in agribusiness throughout Africa.
This case study zooms in on multi-stakeholder processes in the East and Central Africa (ECA) Action Area or Flagship that were launched on 20 May 2013 in Bukavu, DR Congo. The ECA Flagship encom-passes the Rwanda, DR Congo, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia Action Sites. More specifically, the case study describes and reflects upon the first two years of CGIAR Humidtropics in DR Congo. aiming to outline the multi-stakeholder process as it unfolded and highlight lessons that can be learned from this.
To support the multi-stakeholder process in Burundi, the national research institute ISABU (Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Bu-rundi) was requested to act as the facilitating organisation. ISABU had previously partnered with the CGIAR centres in Burundi under the CIALCA program that had supported partnerships to coordinate activities and stimulate demand-driven research. With the aim of building on existing collaboration and activities, it was decided to re-engage with former CIALCA partners, including ISABU.
Humidtropics adopts an integrated systems perspective. Instead of tar-geting one single pre-selected commodity and trying to boost its produc-tivity at farm level, Humidtropics focuses on stimulating productivity, nat-ural resource management (NRM) and institutional innovations across different levels in order to achieve more sustainable impacts. It consid-ers all farm enterprises and their interactions, as well as nutrition, social differentiation (e.g.
This paper provides a retrospective look at a systems-oriented research program, on the increasing occurrence of parasitic weeds in rainfed rice in sub-Saharan Africa, to qualitatively assess merits and identify challenges of such approach. Was gained a broad contextual overview of the problem and different stakeholders' roles, which enabled identification of entry points for innovations in parasitic weed management
The innovation systems (IS) approach—developed by Richard Nelson, Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Ake Lundvall, amongst others—has become perhaps the dominant approach in the academic literature for the study of innovation. It has also exerted considerable influence on policy. This paper examines both the theory underpinning the IS approach, which bears considerable affinities with Austrian economics, and also its policy implications.
Grand societal challenges, such as global warming, can only be adequately dealt with through wide-ranging changes in technology, production and consumption, and ways of life, that is, through innovation. Furthermore, change will involve a variety of sectors or parts of the economy and society, and these change processes must be sufficiently consistent in order to achieve the desired results. This poses huge challenges for policy-making. This paper focus on implications for the governance of innovation policy, i.e., policies influencing a country’s innovation performance.