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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Fri, 23 May 2014 09:11:46 +0200
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This is Mario Pareja, again, responding to Message 65 by Huu-Nhuan Nguyen.



I am in agreement that the sustainable livelihood framework could be used for measuring impacts from agricultural research for development (AR4D). However, I expand, and place stress on the limitations  - additional to the ones mentioned by Nhuan and to the ones I stated in my previous messages - that need to be taken into consideration. They are the following: 



(1) The baseline. Where do we start from? This is very difficult to assess since, in most cases, baselines studies are only conducted for development projects but not for AR4D institutions. With the latter, you deal with a larger and more complicated set of production systems and livelihoods and so of variables (economic, social, environmental, institutional) and regional diversities. This is a major limitation to assess impacts from research, development and innovation (R&D&I) institutions, such as national agricultural research systems (NARS) and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centers. You are often limited to measure impacts from a particular technology and/or on a particular production activity in a particular region (just as a development project). But this is not the real world you may want to address. 



(2) Adoption data. Even if you can "see" a technology adopted you can never be sure where it comes from. Is it a result of the R&D and extension efforts of the particular institution your are evaluating, or is it a combination effort of various of them? And, farmers may adopt not exactly the technology or innovation the institution developed but an adapted, by themselves, version of it. How do you recognize the innovation?  



(3) Indicators. The economic ones are simple to come up with and have been standardized in several studies. But the other dimensions, that most participants of the e-mail conference seem to consider important, such as social and environmental dimensions, how do we measure them? Science has been reluctant to place more efforts into the development and validation of social and environmental indicators that could be a measure of impacts directly resulting from R&D&I and not from public policies. 



(4) Attribution issues. Any of the impact dimensions is affected by a multiplicity of factors related to policies that government may implement and they affect adoption, or not, of the innovation (incentives, disincentives). Many institutions may contribute to the polishing of the innovation (and that is natural and good!) so here there is an additional confounding factor. 



Possible solutions: 



(1) NARs and CGIAR centers should have and/or strengthen their own socio/economic units to gather and standardize data: improve on baselines, tracking information (monitoring) of adoption rates and possibly modifications of technologies made by farmers, manage a set of indicators to measure impact, etc. 



(2) A menu of indicators should be developed and made available to the agricultural R&D&I institutions to measure economic, social and environmental impacts (I must add, based on our experience, that "institutional" impacts are also important) resulting from their innovations. 



(3) Streamline the "evaluation culture" within the national and international R&D&I institutions. Many of them think they are above the good and the bad and, with the excuse that "research takes time", they refuse to adopt a strict, evidence-based evaluation system of individual researchers, projects, programs and of the institution.     



Mario R. Pareja

Ingeniero Agrónomo, M.S., Ph.D.

independent consultant 

Paraje El Colorado, Canelones,

Uruguay 

Telephone: 598-2-3654394 or 598-98372634

e-mail: parejamr (at) gmail.com



 [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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