This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
Grants for agricultural innovation are common but grant funds specifically targeted to smallholder farmers remain relatively rare. Nevertheless, they are receiving increasing recognition as a promising venue for agricultural innovation. They stimulate smallholders to experiment with improved practices, to become proactive and to engage with research and extension providers. The systematic review covered three modalities of disbursing these grants to smallholder farmers and their organisations: vouchers, competitive grants and farmer-led innovation support funds.
This webinar aimed to inform interested applicants on the process for the submission of a preliminary proposal as the first step in the LEAP-Agri Call 2017.LEAP-Agri is a partnership between partners from 19 European and African countries and the EU aimed at research and innovation for food and nutrition security as well as sustainable agriculture, including aquaculture. The partnership is an ERA-NET co-fund financed by funders from these countries with additional finances from the European Commission.
This paper addresses the question how public-private partnerships (PPPs) function as systemic innovation policy instruments within agricultural innovation systems. Public-private partnerships are a popular government tool to promote innovations. However, the wide ranging nature of PPPs make it difficult to assess their effects beyond the direct impacts they generate for the partners.
This policy brief reports on a recent study, implemented by RUAF Foundation and supported by the Food & Business Knowledge Platform (F&BKP) and the CGIAR Water, Land and Ecosystems Research Program (WLE/ IWMI), on the role of the private sector in building more sustainable and resilient city region food systems
The aim of this study is to explore how the governance of a global food value chain can facilitate the value chain’s market orientation. The study applies a multiple case study design. Four in-depth case studies were conducted on global food value chains from New Zealand to Western Europe dealing with the products apples, kiwis, venison and lamb. Interviews were conducted with actors from these four value chains in the Netherlands as well as in New Zealand. In each value chain actors with similar functions were interviewed in order to make the results comparable.
This paper shows there is a fundamental significance of Social Learning to agricultural innovation, which can be operationalized by framing agricultural innovation as changes in understanding, practices and relationships. The use of Social Learning as a design framework supports the emergence of agricultural innovations that bring equitable benefits, are sustainable and are innovated in context.
In the Netherlands, agroforestry is still in its infancy with silvoarable agroforestry systems being the most rarely adopted form of agroforestry. In order to reach a broader adoption of agroforestry, many regulatory and practical obstacles have to be overcome. By using a systems innovation approach this paper show that this transition process can be facilitated and accelerated in a targeted manner. System innovations in agriculture are multi-objective changes on the technological, social, economic and institutional level.
According to transition science, system innovation requires experimentation and social learning to explore the potential of innovations for sustainable development. However, the transition science literature does not elaborate much on the learning processes involved. Senge's Field of Change provides a more detailed approach to the role of learning and action in innovation. We linked the Field of Change to transition management literature in order to explore social learning in an agricultural innovation experiment in the Netherlands called the ‘New Mixed Farm’.
In this paper the authors used a network perspective to study the micro level of agricultural innovation systems and investigate the different roles and functions that collaborating actors have to perform to spread their innovation both horizontally and vertically. Based on a literature review, we distinguish between three separate network functions: (1) learning and knowledge co-creation, (2) upscaling and institutional entrepreneurship and (3) outscaling and innovation brokerage.