Developing the capacities and attitudes of individuals and institutions that are needed for effective and efficient team-work and partnerships to adopt innovative processes is complex and is not readily achieved through simple conventional training programs. In particular, the teams and partnerships in question include multiple stakeholders, use participatory and systems approaches to resolve complex problems, and need to contribute to integrated and sustainable rural development.
effects and trade-offs of different options, and the need to involve a wide range of stakeholders, often with conflicting interests, in collective action. Equally important as traditional technical, economic and biophysical disciplinary skills in such a multifaceted approach to research and innovation, is the social component including negotiation between differing perspectives, policy formulation, institutional change and development, land use and planning, and conflict and information management.
ICRA, for more than two decades, has provided learning programs in ARD thinking and approaches from its bases in Wageningen (The Netherlands) and Montpellier (France), together with field work undertaken jointly with partner organizations in the South. These programs have additionally been supplemented with incountry and regional tailor-made events. By working together in interdisciplinary, multiinstitutional teams together with partner institutions in the South, professional participants learn through hands-on experience to work with a broad range of stakeholders to address complex problems defined by partner organizations, to negotiate, plan and implement solutions, and generate the knowledge needed through joint action learning. The focus of such learning programs is on processes, approaches and attitudes building effective and efficient interdisciplinary teams and multi-institutional partnerships to resolve complex problems.
Collaboration between ICRA, FARA and African partners in 2003
The ARD approach provides ICRA and its African partners with a framework and set of procedures around which to arrange, in a logical manner, the many learning modules and tools that are used in capacity-strengthening programs. The ARD approach also recognizes both spatial and temporal scales and interdependencies, multiple
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FARA Annual Report 2003
1. Advocacy for New ways of doing business The Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Program. During 2003, ICRA was extensively involved in the participatory approach adopted by FARA for the formulation of the CP for Sub-Saharan Africa (the only CP to focus on the needs of a geographic region), and was encouraged by the commitment of stakeholders to discovering a new way of doing business so as to achieve a greater impact from agricultural research and development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D), an approach similar to the ARD approach and procedures that ICRA uses, has been adopted as the umbrella paradigm to provide an overall structure and to bring coherence to the program. The SSA CP thus endorses and complements the ICRA approach to tackling complex issues, and provides an opportunity for ICRA partners and alumni in Africa, together with other advocates of such approaches, to join together in consortia to participate in and fully support the implementation of the essential capacity building and mentoring components of the program.