Institutional innovations are critical for effective performance of agricultural research centres in natural resource management projects that often include multiple and diverse stakeholders with contrasting objectives and activities. This report shows how institutional histories of projects can be used as tools to help reveal institutional innovations thereby promoting Institutional Learning And Change (ILAC). This report extends an earlier work on using institutional histories over a thirty-year period to understand research practice at an international agricultural research centre, by focusing on applying institutional insights to a current project of the agroecosystems group of ICRISAT with an Indian ‘unconventional’ donor. It draws out lessons for scaling-up of activities in multi-partner initiatives. The report also explores the use of actor-oriented tools for project management and recommends its use to enable collective reflection on partnerships in review and planning meetings of projects. The learning from the historical study and the application of institutional histories in an ongoing project together reveal interesting insights on international agricultural research centres and their efforts towards a transition into learning organizations.
This report documents the history of the systems of rice intensification (SRI, for short) in India in the last few years and presents some of the institutional changes and challenges that SRI throws up. The first part looks at the...
This brief report lays out ten theories of advocacy and policy change. These theories are intended to articulate the policy making process and identify causal connections supported by research to explain how and why a change may or may not...
This report sets out the synthesis of work carried out within the framework of the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) Secretariat Initiative on “The family economy and agricultural innovation: towards new partnerships”. The initiative aimed to stimulate analyses, collect...
This paper aims to set out for policy makers and a range of actors across donor/practitioner/research communities, a series of challenges and opportunities for support to capacity development. It pays particular attention to a systemic approach for understanding and supporting...
This study, conducted by the World Bank at the request of the Government, is motivated by the need to understand Malaysia’s progress in facilitating the shift to a knowledge-focused economy. The assessment has three primary objectives related to the ETP’s...
