In the Netherlands, agroforestry is still in its infancy with silvoarable agroforestry systems being the most rarely adopted form of agroforestry. In order to reach a broader adoption of agroforestry, many regulatory and practical obstacles have to be overcome. By using a systems innovation approach this paper show that this transition process can be facilitated and accelerated in a targeted manner. System innovations in agriculture are multi-objective changes on the technological, social, economic and institutional level.
This paper reports the activities carried out in the first Regional Agroforestry Innovation Networks (RAINs) meeting organized in Italy where Agroforestry Innovation Network project (AFINET) project is focused on the multipurpose olive tree systems in the territory around Orvieto Municipality, Umbria Region, Central Italy.
AFINET is one of the seventeen thematic networks that the European Union has financed under the H2020 framework and it is supervised by the EIP-Agri in order to foster innovation in Europe. The main topic of AFINET is agroforestry a practice of deliberately integrating woody vegetation with crops and/or animal systems and the promotion of this practice to foster climate changes. AFINET follows a multi-actor approach linked to the nine Regional Innovations Networks created to identify main challenges and develop main innovations about agroforestry.
These Proceedings report on the second International Conference of the Convergence of Sciences (CoS) programme in Elmina (2009). The first International Conference was four years earlier in the same location, where it was discussed how to follow up on the findings of the first CoS Programme phase (entitled CoS1 running from 2001 to 2006). The Conference was intended to introduce the focus on “innovation systems”, and how to enhance these systems for smallholder farmers’ development.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
This report describes the 2012 NAIS Assessment was piloted in 4 countries: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire, open-ended interview questions, and data mining of secondary sources. A team led by a national coordinator took charge of data collection from various partner organizations in each country.
The purposes of this course are to review the major reforms being considered internationally that aim to change the policy and institutional structure and operations of public sector agricultural extension systems, and to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each of these reforms as illustrated by the selected case studies. Aside from the introductory chapter, the course is organized into nine modules, which are conceived as part of a larger framework.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
Land and property rights, migration, and citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social, economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing contemporary issues related to land, migration, and citizenship, including how they intersect in various contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets them against the regional and global meta-trends of which policy makers and practitioners should be aware for conflict-sensitive planning.