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.
The Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF or the Framework) is a powerful new approach to the design, implementation, monitoring, management, and evaluation of development programs. Originally conceived to address well-documented problems in the narrow field of capacity development, the Framework...
The Convergence of Sciences programme has spent the past decade exploring new pathways for agricultural innovation that focus on enabling smallholders to capture opportunity. Its approach relies on bringing together different actors who can achieve major change in an agriculture...
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the role that benchmarking can play in rural and agricultural innovations. Although generally known as 'traditional sector', rural activities are far from static but rather driven by old and new challenges pleading...
A lo largo de su historia, los servicios de Extensión y Asistencia Técnica en América Latina y el Caribe han sido un instrumento focalizado, mayormente, hacia la pequeña agricultura como una forma de mejorar las condiciones de vida en el entorno rural y llevar tecnologías (conocimientos) que sirvan...
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) partnered with the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI) in 2011 to conduct a series of policy dialogues on the prioritization of demand-driven agricultural research for development in South Asia. Dialogues were conducted...