Partnerships in agricultural innovation: Who puts them together and are they enough?

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. However, recent studies that view this role as one of innovation brokering point to the fact that it involves a range of innovation management tasks that go beyond simply linking to sources of researchbased knowledge and include: linking to input and output markets, network development, conflict resolution, and helping negotiate changes in the policy environment, working practices, standards and regulations and financing arrangements. But who should perform this linking task and what forms of brokering really matter? Studies in the Netherlands point to the emergence of specialist brokering organisations, which include privatised public agencies and civil society organisations that rely on a mixture of public and private funding. This section presents the findings from an agricultural research-into-use support programme operating in Asia and Africa, which has focused on finding ways to embed research into the wider set of networks involved in innovation. This has included the establishment of pilot specialist agencies to broker linkages for innovation