This report describes issues presented and discussed at a workshop held in Rwanda from 6 - 8 September 2012, focused on strengthening capacity in agricultural innovation in post-conflict and protracted crisis (2PC) countries. It was the first workshop of its kind that attempted to bring participants from 2PC countries around the globe to rally around a common cause.
Starting with background information, the report presents a summary of the plenary presentations of the workshop, which includes a brief on the post-conflict and protracted crisis environment in the 15 participating countries (Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Central African Republic, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan). Some countries like Afghanistan qualified all in one as conflict, post-conflict and protracted crisis country.
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.
This paper looks at two aspects of institutional development in a university setting. It looks at how the design of South – North collaboration may have a bearing on the type of partnership that evolves. And it addresses the issue of how institutional commitment influences the depth and intensity of change processes.
The 2012 RUFORUM Biennial Conference is the third in the series. The main objective of the Biennial conferences is to provide a platform for agricultural research for development stakeholders in Africa and beyond to actively exchange findings and experiences, while at the same time learning lessons towards improving performance of the agricultural sector and ultimately people’s livelihoods. The biennial conference is RUFORUM’s most comprehensive meeting for the diversity of stakeholders in agriculture.
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) partnered with the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI) in 2011 to conduct a series of policy dialogues on the prioritization of demand-driven agricultural research for development in South Asia. Dialogues were conducted with a wide range of stakeholders in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal in mid-2012 and this report captures feedback from those dialogues.
This publication, consisting of several modules, includes participatory research approaches for examining a wide range of questions regarding if and how farming practices are being modified to deal with a changing environment, and the constraints and opportunities these changes pose for both men and women.
This study, supported by the Challenge Program Water and Food (CPWF-Project 35), demonstrates the case of multiple-use of water through seasonal aquaculture interventions for improved rice–fish production systems in the Bangladesh floodplains. The project focused on community-based fish culture initiatives, increasingly adopted in the agro-ecological zones of the major floodplains of the Padma, Testa, and Brahmaputra basin.
Innovation is an important challenge for European agriculture, but little is known about the performance of the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS). This report contributes towards this knowledge, as it reports on experiences from different countries and regions. The systems are very different between countries, regions and sectors.
The paper aims to identify barriers to the development of Learning and Innovation Networks for sustainable agriculture (LINSA). In such networks, social learning processes take place, and knowledge about sustainable agriculture is co-produced by connecting between the different frames and social worlds of the stakeholders with the help of boundary objects. Studying such processes at the interface between different knowledge spheres of research, policy and practice requires a specific methodology.