The European Innovation Partnership for agricultural productivity and sustainability (EIP-AGRI), which can be perceived as a platform based on interaction among farmers, researchers, and advisors/extensionists, represents a useful tool for a better understanding of applied innovation processes.
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.
The privatization of agricultural research and extension establishments worldwide has led to the development of a market for services designed to support agricultural innovation. However, due to market and systemic failures, both supply side and demand side parties in this market have experienced constraints in effecting transactions and establishing the necessary relationships to engage in demand-driven innovation processes.
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.
Explicitly integrating reflection in the learning process of multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) increases the likelihood that purposeful change will occur. When reflectivity is made part of learning in MSPs, learning will become clearer and better articulated and it will contribute more strongly to purposeful change in a complex context. MSP facilitators should deliberately include reflective learning sessions and tools in the process design and implementation.
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion in the scientific literature on the advantages and disadvantages of privatization of extension and advisory services and the shift from thinking in terms of the traditional Agricultural Knowledge System towards a broader Agricultural Innovation System.
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.
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach for fully co-creating research into environmental problems with the public. The paper argues this is mostly done for manifest environmental problems that clearly threaten livelihoods and have highly predictable impacts. But the conventional PAR approach is not suitable when the impacts are poorly understood and pose a low threat to livelihoods. Such latent environmental problems do not have a clear conflict to be resolved; instead, the community’s inertia should be overcome.
Innovation platforms are groups of individuals or stakeholder representatives with different backgrounds and interests. They come together to diagnose problems, identify opportunities, and find ways to achieve their goals. When innovation platforms are set up by development projects, their processes are usually facilitated by the support organization.
This Economic and Sector Work paper, “Enhancing Agricultural Innovation: How to Go Beyond the Strengthening of Research Systems,” was initiated as a result of the international workshop, “Development of Research Systems to Support the Changing Agricultural Sector,” organized by the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank in June 2004 in Washington, DC.