What are key characteristics of rural innovators? How are their experiences similar for women and men, and how are they different? To examine these questions, this study draw on individual interviews with 336 rural women and men known in their communities for trying out new things in agriculture. The data form part of 84 GENNOVATE community case studies from 19 countries. Building on study participants’ own reflections and experiences with innovation in their agricultural livelihoods, we combine variable-oriented analysis and analysis of specific individuals’ lived experience.
In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens’ decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery.
Using Nepal as a case, this paper illustrates how farmers and their supporting institutions are evolving and co-producing climate sensitive technologies on demand. Drawing upon the hypothesis of induced innovation, the authors examine the extent to which resource endowments have influenced the evolution of technological and institutional innovations in Nepal’s agricultural research and development. This study reveals that Nepal has developed a novel multilevel institutional partnership, including collaboration with farmers and other non-governmental organizations in recent years.
This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.
Agricultural mechanization in developing countries has taken at least two contested innovation pathways—the “incumbent trajectory” that promotes industrial agriculture, and an “alternative pathway” that supports small-scale mechanization for sustainable development of hillside farming systems.
The paper studies the entrepreneurial behavior of large cardamom growers in Lamjung District, Nepal and was conducted from December 2017 to June 2018 in Marshyangdi Rural Municipality of Lamjung district. The Rural Municipality was selected purposely for the study due to the recent establishment of Cardamom Zone under the Prime Minister Agriculture Modernization Project in the Municipality focusing on large cardamom development. Altogether 80 large cardamom growers were selected randomly from 454 large cardamom growers of the study site.
Agricultural innovation is a process that takes a multitude of different forms, and, within this process, agricultural research and expertise are mobilised at different points in time for different purposes. This paper uses two key analytical principles to establish how research is actually put into use. The first, which concerns the configurations of organisations and their relationships associated with innovation, reveals the additional set of resources and expertise that research needs to be married to, and sheds light on the types of arrangements that allow this marriage to take place.
This paper presents the processes, general guidelines lessons and experiences pertaining to “good practices” for organizing and forming Agricultural Innovation Platforms in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site, covering three countries (Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo) with widely differing social political environments to address agricultural development challenges.
This paper examines how the different institutional innovations arising from various permutations of linkages and interactions of ARD organizations (national, international advanced agricultural research centres and universities) influenced the different outcomes in addressing identified ARD problems.
This study identifies entry points for innovation for sustainable intensification of agricultural systems. An agricultural innovation systems approach is used to provide a holistic image of (relations between) constraints faced by different stakeholder groups, the dimensions and causes of these constraints, and intervention levels, timeframes and types of innovations needed. The authors aim at showing that constraints for sustainable intensification of agricultural systems are mainly of economic and institutional nature.