How effective are multi-stakeholder scenarios-building processes to bring diverse actors together and create a policy-making tool to support sustainable development and promote food security in the developing world under climate change? The effectiveness of a participatory scenario development process highlights the importance of “boundary work” that links actors and organizations involved in generating knowledge on the one hand, and practitioners and policymakers who take actions based on that knowledge on the other.

This paper looks at the process of agricultural innovation and the contribution agricultural research can make. To be able to analyse the process of agricultural innovation, three dimensions are distinguished: 1) opportunity assessment to identify ‘entry points for change’, defined drawing on the expertise and experience of many actors; 2) experimentation under realistic circumstances, leading to ‘tested and tried promising new practices’; and 3) bringing into routine use for ‘impact at scale’, which invariably incurs in further adaptation to fit a diversity of ‘local realities’.

This paper highlights seven key issues which are critical to effective platform facilitation and have not received the attention they deserve: the dynamic and evolving nature of platforms; power dynamics; gender equity; external versus internal facilitation; sustainability of the process; issues of scale; and monitoring and evaluation. These issues and implications for facilitation of innovation platforms are discussed based on examples from the field and in relation to current theories.

This publication reports the results of a study using the methodology already applied in a previous ex post analysis of five case studies across Latin America. Apart from delivering concrete results that are useful for ongoing IDB projects in Guyana, the study further explores the possibility of using this methodology as a basis for land-use management and in the development of infrastructure projects. VPS/ESG intends to build on the work presented in this report by reviewing the options available for modeling land-use and land-cover change in Latin America. 

In this book, West African research associates from the CoS-SIS programme describe how they initiated innovation platforms and facilitated the different steps in a CIG cycle. The stories show that the facilitation of innovation platforms is not easy: it requires specific skills and a lot of time, and is very much determined by the context. But they also illustrate that there are creative ways of dealing with the challenges and unpredictable situations that facilitators face.

Within the last four years, a number of high profile reports outlining new strategies for pulling African agriculture out of its current impasse have emerged. These include the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme of NEPAD, and the InterAcademy Council Report commissioned by UN Secretary General Koffi Annan.

The paper defines and explains the concept of gender equality in advisory services and discusses the opportunities that gender equality in RAS would potentially create for global and local food production, women’s economic empowerment, household food security and nutrition as well as the challenges in achieving this.

Sustainable intensification of smallholder farming is a serious option for satisfying 2050 global cereal requirements and alleviating persistent poverty. That option seems far off for Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) where technology-driven productivity growth has largely failed. The article revisits this issue from a number of angles: current approaches to enlisting SSA smallholders in agricultural development; the history of the phenomenal productivity growth in the USA, The Netherlands and Green Revolution Asia; and the current framework conditions for SSA productivity growth.

The guide on Reflexive Monitoring in Action offers principles, practical guidelines as well as theory and tools. Additional tools, developed more recently, are provided separately. The guide and tools focus on three target groups: Reflexive monitors Consultants, innovation brokers and action researchers who are (or will be) handling the actual monitoring Innovation managers Project managers or innovation champions who feel responsible for the progress of the innovation process and the realisation of the system innovation ambition.

This policy brief presents, explains and illustrates the five key recommendations that came out of the joint learning process during the JOLISAA project: 1. Build on innovation “in the social wild”; 2. Combine local and external knowledge and ideas to enhance innovative capacity; 3. Encourage access to diverse value chains to lower the innovation risks; 4. Support unpredictable innovation processes; 5. Address the multiple dimensions of innovation.