The Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) is a network of organizations, enterprises and individuals that focuses on bringing new products, processes and forms of organization into economic use, together with the institutions and policies that affect their behaviour and performance. In the small North East Indian state of Tripura, System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has grown to develop into an innovation system where various stakeholders have come together to make the state self-sufficient in food grains.

The present case study investigated a policy-induced agricultural innovation network in Brandenburg.

This report has the aim of contributing to the PRO AKIS overall goal of exploring and identifying the possibilities, conditions and requirements of rural networks to enhance the farmers’ ability to create, test, implement and evaluate innovation in cooperation with other actors.In particular, the report presents two cases: the Small Fruit Cluster (SFC) and the Drosophila Suzukii Monitoring (DSM) network. The SFC is a nationwide, multi-actor network composed of several actors, interacting in the small fruit sector in Portugal.

Motivated by donor interest in innovative thinking on food security, the authors conducted an interdisciplinary, triangulation analysis of four divergent conceptual frameworks, each relevant to diagnosing food insecurity in developing countries. They found notable tensions as well as synergistic interactions between agroecology, agricultural innovation systems, social–ecological systems, and political ecology. Cross-framework interactions enhance our understanding of how sectoral and macro-economic development strategies impact on livelihoods, availability, and access.

Processes of designing for systemic innovation for sustainable development (SD) through the lens of three long-term case studies are reported. All case studies, which originated from the SLIM (Social Learning for the Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at Catchment Scale) Project, funded within the EU Fifth Framework Program (2001–2004), constitute inquiry pathways that are explored using a critical incident approach.

The extensive case study on ‘Improving Public Agricultural Extension Services in Bangladesh Using the M4P Approach’ illustrates Katalyst project’s experience in terms of designing interventions in the Local Government Services (LGS) sector, from testing them in small scale towards scaling-up and the accompanying challenges. The case study shows how innovative public-private partnerships create a vast impact on the lives of poor farmers in Bangladesh.