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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Mon, 19 May 2014 16:37:19 +0200
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I am Doris Marquardt, active in GCARD (Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development) matters since 2009, currently working at the European Academy (EURAC) in Bolzano, Italy, before that at the Germany-based Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Development in Central and Eastern Europe (IAMO), primarily focusing in my on RD and community development issues in practice supplemented by social networking and policy design at a theoretical and practical level. Thanks to the organizers and contributors to the interesting conference.

 

Picking up Message 41 (by Atse Yapi) on partial adoption of innovation, two other approaches appear also feasible:

a) not to ask for "that" innovation, e.g. a certain technology that should be spread within a project/programme, but considering that most definitions of innovation state that it has to be seen in a context, e.g. innovative in a certain region;

b) defining/seeing the aim of the intervention or one of its sub-objectives, i.e. e.g. advisory service or information campaigns, not solely as the adoption of innovation, but stimulating changing behaviour (one could simply go along the steps noted in the theories of adopting innovation (information transfer --> knowledge --> ambition .....).



Such transformation of the evaluation design brings us to Message 43 (by Andrea Sonnino) on the need for ex-ante definition of the evaluation scheme, with which I totally agree. Yet it might be worthwhile to be supplemented by investigating the impact of parallel action, e.g. flows of information which occur independently from the programme/project to be evaluated,  - be it intended as intervention or not - and strive for comparison, because, not seldom, action which is not triggered by an intervention (often called "informal" activities) turn out to be more effective in information and innovation transfer, as certain interventions. Indeed, eventually such “informal action” (e.g. mouth-to-mouth propaganda), which occurs in parallel to the intervention to be evaluated, has at least indirectly benefitted from e.g. research results or experiences with funded projects. Thus, the borders between direct and indirect and non-impact of intervention in such comparison, i.e. an extended with/without comparison as it also investigates the impact of other activities and intervention, are difficult to draw, because information flows and their have to be traced. Here, network analysis, which was also used as an example in the background document for this e-mail conference, can be a helpful instrument. 



In the background document, network analysis was mentioned as a qualitative means for evaluation, but it can also be applied with quantitative results, the challenge then is (as often) to gather the data to be fed into the analysis. My question therefore - has anybody experience with applying (quantitative) network analysis in the context of evaluating interventions in the fields of advisory service, information transfer or adoption of innovation, at larger scale? If so, it would be great to exchange experiences in pragmatic way of data collection.



Dr. Doris Marquardt

EURAC Research

Institute for Regional Development and Location Management

Viale Druso 1; I-39100 Bolzano

Italy

E-mail: doris.marquardt (at) eurac.edu

Phone: +39 0471 055332

Mobile: +39 3420204319

Fax: +39 0471 055 429

www.eurac.edu 



[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/217706/ ].



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