The CSIRO Agriculture and Food & the CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council (ISPC) Secretariat are collaborating to explore the nature of agri-food systems innovation and impact. This workshop report is a record of the key outcomes from a workshop held on the 14-15 December 2016 in Canberra, Australia
This study examines interventions in two agricultural development projects in Ghana which aimed to build competitiveness of selected value chains to generate growth and reduce poverty – the Northern Rural Growth Project, implemented between 2009 and 2016, and the Market Oriented Agriculture Programme, which began in 2004 and is still in place.
This practitioner’s guide, a companion volume to The Innovation Paradox picks up where the previous report left off. It aims to help policy makers in developing countries better formulate innovation policies. It does so by providing a rigorous typology of innovation policy instruments, including evidence of impact—and more importantly, the critical conditions in terms of institutional capabilities to successfully implement these policy instruments in developing countries.
The goal of this paper is to access the state, specify trends, compare with other EU states, and identify intervention needs of Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) in Bulgaria, and assist policy formation for the next programing period. Modern scientific approaches of SWOT, Strategic Orientation, Gap Analysis, Comparative Institutional Analysis, etc. are used to identify actors and relations, trends in development, assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, formulate adequate strategy, and specify overall and public intervention needs of AKIS in the country.
“Business as usual” is no longer an option for a food-secure future. Pastoralism can be an innovative system: a time-tested, undervalued alternative to high-input and resource-intensive farming, and a valuable lesson for the much needed evolution towards ‘farming with nature’, with largely-untapped potential for income growth and employment in marginal areas.
Agricultural innovations are seen as a key avenue to improve nutrition and health in smallholder farm households. But details of these agriculture-nutrition-health linkages are not yet well understood. While there is a broad literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, most studies primarily focus on impacts in terms of productivity and income. Nutrition and health impacts have rarely been analyzed. In this article, we argue that future impact studies should include nutrition and health dimensions more explicitly.
This paper contends that the exclusion of millions of poor from agricultural development gains is inexorably linked to the innovation system features that have evolved over time. An oft repeated lament of the Government of India about the inadequacy of reforms in agricultural research and extension, is used to explore the structure and institutions of agricultural innovation. Three main components of the agricultural innovation system, are the agricultural research and extension actors, the farming communities, and policy making agencies.
In recent years the there has been an increasing recognition of the potential of the innovation systems concept to provide new ways of making more effective use of agricultural research and improve its impact on socially desirable outcomes. This paper documents the experiences of a group of researchers in India who experimented with this framework and tried to operationalise its principles in project design. The paper comments on some of the implications of using this approach and the challenges it presents for implementers of agricultural research projects in developing countries.
Globalization, urbanization and new market demands - together with ever-increasing quality and safety requirements - are putting significantly greater pressures on agrifood stakeholders in the world. The ability to respond to new challenges and opportunities is important not just for producers but also for industries in developing countries. This paper aims to present what "innovation response capacity" entails, especially for natural resourcebased industries in a developing country context.
There are divergent views on what capacity development might mean in relation to agricultural biotechnology. The core of this debate is whether this should involve the development of human capital and research infrastructure, or whether it should encompass a wider range of activities which also include developing the capacity to use knowledge productively. This paper uses the innovation systems concept to shed light on this discussion, arguing that it is innovation capacity rather than science and technology capacity that has to be developed.