The relationships between agriculture, the environment, and development are deep and complex. By 2050 a 70 per cent increase in production will be needed to feed an additional 2.7 billion people on an already degraded natural resource base. In light of this and amid the realities of climate change, the agricultural sector is now coming to terms with its potential role for contributing to – rather than diminishing - environmental, institutional, social and economic resilience.
The publication reviews forty years of development experience and concludes that donors and partner countries alike have tended to look at capacity development as mainly a technical process, or as a transfer of knowledge or institutions from North to South.
Successful cases of innovation invariably demonstrate a range of partnerships, alliances and network-like arrangements that connect together knowledge users, knowledge producers and others involved in enabling innovation in the market, policy and civil society arenas. With this comes the realisation that public agricultural research needs to strengthen links to a wider set of players from the private and civil society sectors and, of course, farmers themselves. Public agricultural extension services have traditionally played the role of linking farmers to technology.
This book contains a collection of papers that discuss the experience of an Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) capacity building program in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The program was the AusAID-funded Agricultural Research and Development Support Facility (ARDSF), which ran for fi ve years from 2007 to 2012, and which sought to improve the delivery of services by agricultural research organisations to smallholder farmers.
This synthesis report presents the outputs of the workshop organised by CTA at its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands, 15-17 July 2008. The outputs are presented in two main parts, each corresponding to one of the workshop objectives, and ends with a section on the way forward as suggested by the workshop participants. It also includes a first attempt to come to a consolidated generic framework on AIS performance indicators, based on the outputs of the different working groups.
This presentation argues the need of green growth in agriculture, analyzes features of the innovation systems and ends with some policies practices. The presentation has been prepared for "Innovation and Modernising the Rural Economy", OECD’s 8th Rural Development Policy Conference, 3-5 October 2012 (Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation).
LenCD has prepared a joint statement on results and capacity development (presented in this publication), which stresses that meaningful, sustainable results are premised on proper investments in capacity development and that these results materialize at different levels and at different times, along countries’ development trajectory. To provide evidence in support of this statement, LenCD launched a call for submission of stories.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
This paper, presented at the 8th European IFSA Symposium ( Workshop 6: "Change in knowledge systems and extension services: Role of the new actors") in 2008, discusses the FutureDairy project, which is developing more productive forage and feeding systems and testing technical innovations such as robotic milking in Australian pasture based dairy systems.
The focus of this paper is on how the institutional arrangements within the on-farm sector of the New Zealand dairy industry influence industry participants and encourage them to be innovative, in the context of industry productivity goals. The authors will present and discuss an approach to policy systems analysis that facilitates shared understanding between system participants and enables strategies for change to be identified.