Following their first formation in Indonesia over 25 years ago, Farmer Field Schools (FFS) have served as a “proof of concept” of how transformative learning can help governments, donors and development stakeholders achieve development objectives. The FFS approach, which has now been used in more than 90 countries by more than 12 million small farmers (FAO, 2016), not only creates a space in which the practical needs of smallholders to solve production-related issues can be addressed but also fosters personal and community-level transformation through empowerment.
Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture (ARISA) was implemented by CSIRO in collaboration with Indonesian partners. This multi-year program seeks to strengthen collaboration between public research organisations and agribusinesses in order to incubate and deliver technology and business solutions appropriate to smallholder farmers. The geographic focus of the program was Eastern Indonesia.
We look at the trade-off between smallholder cocoa intensification and the ecosystem in Indonesia and investigate the determinants of environmental efficiency in cocoa production. In our analysis, we apply a distance output function that includes cocoa production and the abundance of native rainforest plants as outputs. Our data set, based on a household and environment survey conducted in 2015, allows us to analyze 208 cocoa producers with both measured and self-reported data. We find that the intensification of cocoa farms results in higher ecosystem degradation.
Agricultural information is transferred through social interactions; therefore, ties to agricultural informants and network structures within farmers’ local neighborhoods determine their information-gathering abilities. This paper uses a spatial autoregressive model that takes account of spatial autocorrelation to examine such network connections, including friendship networks and advice networks, upon farmers’ knowledge-gathering abilities during formal agricultural training.
According to the authors of this paper, actual methods of scaling are rather empirical and based on the premise of ‘find out what works in one place and do more of the same, in another place’. These methods thus would not sufficiently take into account complex realities beyond the concepts of innovation transfer, dissemination, diffusion and adoption. As a consequence, scaling initiatives often do not produce the desired effect.
This paper critically discusses the modification and application of one particular participatory approach to agricultural systems analysis (Rapid Appraisal of Agricultural Innovation Systems [RAAIS]) to agricultural adaptation in Southeast Kazakhstan. We consider the overall effectiveness of the method as a research tool, practical issues in the implementation of workshops, definition of and selection of participant groups, as well as the questions of participation and empowerment within the workshops themselves.
Increasingly, value chain approaches are integrated with multi-stakeholder processes to facilitate inclusive innovation and value chain upgrading of smallholders. This pathway to smallholder integration into agri-food markets has received limited analysis. This article analyses this integration through a case study of an ongoing smallholder dairy development programme in Tanzania.
The capacity scoring questionnaire is an instrument that can be used when assessing the systems capacities of innovation partnerships or organizations in order to identify strengths and weaknesses and monitor change over time. It thus supports the design and implementation of successful capacity development interventions for agricultural innovation. This questionnaire has been developed in two versions (Version 1 and Version 2) and has been piloted in several countries in the context of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS).
The capacity scoring questionnaire is an instrument that can be used when assessing the systems capacities of innovation partnerships or organizations in order to identify strengths and weaknesses and monitor change over time. It thus supports the design and implementation of successful capacity development interventions for agricultural innovation. This questionnaire has been developed in two versions (Version 1 and Version 2) and has been piloted in several countries in the context of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS).
The Excel workbook contains some preconfigured spreadsheets that can be used for entering data collected through the capacity scoring questionnaire (Version 1 and Version 2), which has been developed in the context of the the CDAIS project, and to perform some basic analysis as well as visualize the data.