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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Wed, 7 May 2014 10:50:21 +0200
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I am Silvia Andrea Perez Perdomo. I am from Colombia, but I lived in Uganda for 8 years, which I can say is my second home. Now my third home is here in the Netherlands, where I have been 3 years.

I am particularly interested in this conference on impact assessment of agricultural research because I have been working for more than 15 years in projects related to agricultural research and innovation, working with research and local organisations in Latin American and African countries. Currently I am a PhD candidate at Wageningen University. I am looking at dynamics of innovation-social networks, how these evolve and how they solve their problems, particularly looking how an ambidextrous management in multi-stakeholder innovation platforms  (i.e. balancing the exploration and exploitation of capabilities) can help not only to better conduct research but also serve as collective mechanism to evaluate research, so that different stakeholders adjust dynamically their strategies according to the challenges that they want to tackle,with the combined power of managed and resilient networks. Multi-stakeholder platforms have shown to be incubators of innovation and entrepreneurship. My research is being conducted in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in Rwanda, where the complexity of problems calls for better ways of collective action with dynamic ways of organization of social-innovation networks to face societal problems, whose complexity sometimes represent various dilemmas or paradoxes that are difficult to manage.

Based on my experience and on the finding of my research, I think that for assessing the impact of agricultural research the units of analysis should be the social organization of networks that takes place at different societal levels over time. This implies looking at how people organize themselves to solve different types of problems, and how different arrangements (technological, knowledge, institutional, inter-organizational relationships, etc) made by networks of people change over time with informal and formal agreements. Assessing impact of agricultural assessment by only looking at organisations, or by continuing to observe dysfunctional organisations or systems, doesn't help to accurately "capture" and assess the new dynamics of the network society, globalization and the open innovation paradigm. The dynamics of glo-cal and virtual communities, whose collective work goes further than organisational, geographical or system boundaries need better ways to track and evaluate outcomes, like in agricultural research. In this way, it is necessary to recognize the roles that actors (like community leaders, farmers, teachers, women, to mention a few) play in agricultural research, sometimes in a very informal but crucial way, which sometimes is not recognized and reported in impact assessment reports; these are people who really live the problems and have the contextual knowledge to better contribute to initiatives for research and development.

I am currently developing a methodological tool for tracking what I define as mobile hubs of innovation networks (including mobile learning hubs), to better capture dynamics of networks when they face different challenges (See more http://wu.academia.edu/SilviaAndreaPérezPerdomo). This tool has been used for tracking dynamics of agricultural research in the context of the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Program. I hope to contribute with more insights of my research in this discussion.

Looking forward to hear and learn from other participants,

Silvia Andrea Perez Perdomo 
Hollandseweg 1
Building 201
Office number 5057
P.O. Box 8130
Wageningen University
6700 EW Wageningen, 
The Netherlands
e-mail: silvia.perezperdomo (at) wur.nl

[These comments by Silvia, related to those by Ekanath in Message 2, about assessing the impacts of agricultural research at the network or system level remind me of discussions held during an FAO Expert Consultation on agricultural innovation systems (AIS) and family farming that took place in Rome on 19-21 March 2012 as part of the initial preparations for the 2014 FAO flagship publication, the State of Food and Agriculture, which will be published later this year dedicated to Innovation in Family Farming. For programmes or projects that have been established using the AIS concept to benefit family farmers, participants in the Expert Consultation agreed that, even though it might be difficult, impacts should be measured, so that it will be possible to learn from the experiences as well as provide accountability for investments. They urged that the evaluation process be as participatory as possible, involving stakeholders at all the stages. Potential difficulties that participants mentioned regarding measuring impacts in AIS include dealing with the flexible and dynamic nature of AIS (where, for example, the desired outcomes might evolve over time); the complexity of AIS (with many potentially interlinked components, each of which can influence, directly or indirectly, the success and efficiency of the AIS); the need for an "evidence-based baseline", against which impacts can be measured; as well as the long time intervals that are generally required for research etc. The report of the Expert Consultation is available at http://www.fao.org/docrep/015/an761e/an761e00.pdf ...Moderator].

[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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