innovation systems and institutional change

Convergence of Sciences


Niels Röling and Dominique Hounkonnou

(CoS-SIS Program Management Committee)INNOVATION IN EXTENSION AND ADVISORY

SERVICES, 15-18 NOV. 2011, NAIROBI

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INNOVATION SYSTEM APPROACH TO ENHANCING SMALLHOLDER

AGRICULTURE IN AFRICA


AGRIC. EXTENSION: SICK BUT NOT DEAD• Not much left after T&V… but lots of initiatives

and experiments• Early 90s: CTA & partners try to capture these:– Donor workshop in Wageningen (first contours of

Neuchâtel initiative, 1994)– Conference in Cameroun

• IAASTD 2009 signed by 58 nations: smallholders key to global food security

• Institutions matter: Innovation System (IS) Approach to development of smallholder agriculture


The SSA-Challenge Programme• Major FARA experiment with an IS approach: 36

Innovation Platforms (IP) in a controlled experimental design ($ 26 million)

• Statistical analysis (Pamuk, Bulte & Adekunle, in prep.): IPs ‘work’, and better than conventional extension and controls: more poverty alleviation, more and more diverse innovative activity

• Statistical analysis (Van Rijn & Bulte, in prep.): mechanism by which IPs work is linkage with external actors; becoming part of network of such actors

• Similar findings from CoS 5 years after: technologies that involve factors over which farmers have no control do not persist (Sterk et al., in prep.)


CoS-SIS: Convergence of Sciences: Strengthening Innovation Systems

• 9 Innovation Platforms, € 4.5 million• Focus on understanding mechanisms• 30 years of promoting science-based technologies to

increase yields per ha have left us with few successes (e.g., Gabre-Mahdin & Haggblade 2004)

• Institutions explain a major proportion of the variance in the quality and quantity of smallholder production (cocoa Ghana, cotton Benin, rice Mali)

• Not absence of institutions: complex institutional context often ‘unhelpful’ for smallholders


Performance Indicators

• Ability to ‘think institutions’, in addition to cost-benefit; technological transfer; participation; etc.

• Not dismiss institutions as ‘politics’ about which one can do little

• Ability to scope and diagnose: translate smallholder constraints into attributes of institutional context

• Analyse actor networks to identify key actors and champions who can take concerted action.

• With those actors: design institutional experiments and measure impact


Experience industrial agricultures• Institutional development preceded

technology-enhanced growth in productivity;• Agricultural leaders developed vision of an

enabling context for family farming: synergy of farmer education, extension, research, credit, crop insurance, subsidies, land tenure, equitable market access, etc.

• Not a uniform package but adaptive, context- and domain-specific


Some Concrete Measures (1)• Develop capacity of commodity research

institutes (e.g., CRIG) to carry out institutional research and experimentation

• Make available competitive research grants for institutional research

• Develop and implement curricula for academic training of agricultural scientists in institutional ‘thinking’ and research


Some Concrete Measures (2)• Initiate a task force in the Ministry of

Agriculture to prioritise (domain-specific?) institutional bottlenecks to smallholder development

• Make available budget for interaction: key stakeholders need to meet, innovation emerges from interaction

• Transform extension into innovation Process facilitation


Unhelpful institutions metaphor

innovation systems and institutional change

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