The paper aims at finding out how significantly stakeholders are consulted and involved by preparers, Ukrainian publicly-listed agricultural companies, while compiling sustainability reporting (SR) and by assurance providers, during assurance processes of SR. The paper’s main research question may be formulated as follows ‘How deeply stakeholders are involved at Ukrainian agricultural companies in the preparation of their sustainability reporting and assurance?’
There have been repeated calls for a ‘new professionalism’ for carrying out agricultural research for development since the 1990s. At the centre of these calls is a recognition that for agricultural research to support the capacities required to face global patterns of change and their implications on rural livelihoods, requires a more systemic, learning focused and reflexive practice that bridges epistemologies and methodologies.
Technology and innovation are important in addressing complex problems in the agricultural sector in many developing communities. However, ways and mechanisms to integrate them in the agricultural sector are still a challenge due to the lack of clear pathways and trajectories. Value chains are seen as a strong policy instrument to increase profitability in the agricultural sector; there is also debate around whether value chains can be a potential option to organize technology and innovation trajectories in agriculture.
Networks and partnerships are commonly-used tools to foster knowledge sharing between actors and organisations in the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS), but in Europe the policy emphasis on including users, such as farmers and foresters, is relatively recent. This paper assesses user involvement in a diverse set of European Union (EU)-funded and non-EU (formal and informal) multi-actor partnerships. This research used a common methodology to review several forms of multi-actor partnerships involving users and other actors.
Une analyse de trajectoires d’innovations agricoles au Bénin observées dans la longue durée permet d’en identifier les facteurs de diffusion à grande échelle. Beaucoup d’innovations passent inaperçues sur de longs tronçons de leur trajectoire, étant endogènes ou impliquant des acteurs non « conventionnels » et pas d’organisations de recherche. Les innovations qui passent à grande échelle sont en fait des faisceaux d’innovations technologiques, institutionnelles ou organisationnelles qui s’enchaînent les unes en réponse aux contraintes des autres.
Le Tuy, province de l'Ouest du Burkina Faso est une région soudanienne à forte pression démographique et pastorale où se posent avec acuité des problèmes de fertilité des sols. Face à la dégradation des ressources naturelles, opter vivre dans son milieu natal et s'assurer une bonne production agropastorale nécessite de la part des acteurs des actions concertées. Le projet Fertipartenaires aide les producteurs de cette province à se concerter, à réfléchir à leurs problèmes, proposer et expérimenter des solutions et les évaluer afin d'améliorer leur sécurité alimentaire.
FAO and the Centre de Cooperation Internationale pour la Recherche et le Developpement Agricole (CIRAD) organized an expert consultation workshop on developing a methodology for assessing agricultural innovation systems. The meeting was held on 13–15 June 2018 at CIRAD Headquarters in Paris. It brought together 30 experts from academia, research, extension, the private sector, development agencies and government representatives.
Within the context of the European-funded JOLISAA FP7 project (JOint Learning in Innovation Systems in African Agriculture), several agricultural innovation experiences focused on smallholders were assessed in Benin, Kenya and South Africa. Fifty-six cases were characterised through review of grey literature and interviews with resource persons according to a common analytical framework inspired by the innovation systems perspective. Of these, 13 were assessed in greater depth through semistructured interviews, focus-group discussions and multistakeholder workshops.
The farmer field school (FFS) concept has been widely adopted, and such schools have the reputation of strengthening farmers’ capacity to innovate. Although their impact has been studied widely, what is involved in their scaling and in their becoming an integral part of agricultural innovation systems has been studied much less. In the case of the Sustainable Tree Crops Programme in Cameroon, we investigate how a public–private partnership (PPP) did not lead to satisfactory widespread scaling in the cocoa innovation system.
The paper explores the strength of social networks in the agricultural innovation systems (AISs) in Ghana and the effect of AISs on adoption of improved farm technology. The paper uses social network analysis (SNA) tools to identify, map and analyze the AISs and the two-stage Heckman selection model. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods allows testing the differential effects of social networks on technology adoption in the Ghananian Plantain Sector