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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Wed, 7 May 2014 17:07:53 +0200
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My name is Anna Augustyn. I come from Poland, have a background in social sciences (rural sociology) and in the last 10 years have been working as a researcher and consultant in rural / agricultural policies. Among others, I contributed to the EU FP7-funded project RuDI – Impact Assessment of Rural Development Policies incl. LEADER (http://www.rudi-europe.net/) - and in the recent 4 years with various expertise for the European Network for Rural Development (http://enrd.ec.europa.eu/) e.g. developing methodologies of network self-assessment, evidence-based and strongly applied policy research and analysis for the European Commission. I am an outspoken fan of participatory action research (PAR) as well as using visuals for research purposes. 

 

I joined the discussion for multiple reasons. The main one is the project that I’m incubating right now in Portugal and which is about linking knowledge of researchers (evolutionary biologists) with actors of the fish chain in the context of species conservation and food security. I'm curious to learn how to facilitate their communication and whether the findings from their research can be anyhow useful for local communities. And will researchers be willing to learn from locals, too? This is the very first time they interact, and thus still too early to talk about impacts, but let’s see what the life brings :) The other reason is that I'm currently doing a screening of literature on impact assessment methodologies for a project in Hungary and look for some fresh input. 



When assessing ex-post impacts one could also reflect how agricultural research was planned, by whom and with whom, because the issues begin already there. I think in the EU context the issue may be influenced in setting up agricultural research agendas, priorities, programmes, projects etc. With colleagues of mine we run workshops with researchers and practitioners in various EU countries, where we observed that there is a lack of joint effort/reflexivity (or it is very limited) on defining in which directions agricultural research should be going. Practitioners told us that very often researchers approach them with ideas that are rarely corresponding with their actual needs. Also, often because it is nowadays ‘trendy’ to make transdisciplinary research and researchers need practitioners as formal partners to obtain project funding. So our lesson learnt from this is: better and more inclusive research agenda setting could likely help to achieve greater impacts. In some countries/projects there are good practices already, but still it is not a mainstream on our small continent.  

 

I am also looking for possible answers to some questions that nurture my other activities more recently: 1) How to define agricultural research? (esp. the boundary between agricultural/rural); 2) How to measure impacts of ‘excellent’ and ‘less-excellent’ agricultural research?; 3) How to identify and communicate intangible impacts?; 4) How to assess transaction costs against impacts of agricultural research?

 

Anna Augustyn

Free-lance consultant, 

Wrzeciono 8/38, 

Warsaw

Poland 

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ania-augustyn/4a/4a2/165  

e-mail: ania.augustyn (at) yahoo.de



[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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