This paper examines how the different institutional innovations arising from various permutations of linkages and interactions of ARD organizations (national, international advanced agricultural research centres and universities) influenced the different outcomes in addressing identified ARD problems.

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.

The emergence of a globalised knowledge economy, and the contemporary views of innovation capacity that this trend enables and informs, provides a new context in which development assistance to agricultural research and development needs to be considered. The main argument in this paper, which focuses on The Netherlands, is that development assistance should use this emerging scenario to identify niches where inputs can add value to the R&D investments of others, particularly in activities that help wire up innovation systems, linking R&D to other activities and actors in society.

Since 2012, hundreds of organisations across West Africa have shown a series of ten videos on Fighting striga and improving soil fertility to farmer groups and rural communities. This paper asks if a village would change its social structure just because they watched these videos? Field research in Mali revealed that the answer is yes, sometimes, especially if they watched the videos in groups and saw other farmers in the videos doing group activities.

We are facing complex societal problems such as climate change, human conflict, poverty and inequality, and need innovative solutions. Multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) are more and more seen as a critical way of coming to such innovative solutions. It is thought that when multiple stakeholders are able to meet, share experiences, learn together and contribute to decisions, new and innovative ways of dealing with problems are found and turned into action. Still, much remains to be understood about the role and effectiveness of social learning in multi-stakeholder settings.

Recent experiences in participatory video-making raise the question of how best to use this medium for enhancing local seed innovation systems. Embedded in a mini-process of participatory action research, two styles of participatory video—scripted and scriptless—were tested and assessed together with farmers and facilitators in Bogra District, Bangladesh.

Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the contents of this book are organised around a number of case studies, grouped into two main chapters.

The present manual provides a reference framework for the strategic and operational work in the field of capacity development. It is addressed to all staff of ADC in Austria as well as in the coordination offices, to non-governmental and implementing organisations, to stakeholders in partner countries, other donors and members of the public interested in development policy. 

This report refers to the workshop which was held on October 21-25, 2013 at ILRI Campus in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop involved a variety of sessions which made use of presentations, card exercises, group work and discussions to facilitate the engagement of the participants in sharing, learning, discussing and planning around CapDev in CGIAR. This report provides an overview of the workshop sessions, focusing mainly on the key discussion topics, results and next steps.

This paper introduces the Multilevel Stakeholder Influence Mapping (MSIM) tool, which aims to assist analysts in the study of power dynamics across levels within climate adaptation regimes. The tool is adapted from the Stakeholder Influence-Mapping tool (2005) of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). MSIM is a simple visual tool to examine and display the relative power/influence that different individuals and groups have over a focal issue—in this case, climate change adaptation of smallholder farmers.