Not many national agricultural research institutions in developing countries are sufficiently oriented towards generating development impacts. Observers explain the problem by the way research institutes operate, in particular by organizational variables such as the lack of capability in planning and M&E, and the feeble influence that farmers have on research programs. This paper argues that part of the syndrome is the poor knowledge of public researchers about the actual significance of their work for agricultural development. Many agricultural policy makers and researchers misconceive the innovation processes in agriculture by assuming that research is the only source of technical change and that productivity change can always be put down to preceeding research results. Their assumption has consequences. One is that only few research institutions make efforts to analyze their impact. If they do, most are content with measuring the change in technology use or in the production figures of the respeS,.tive commodity, expecting that technical change will be favorable for rural development anyway. As a consequence, research institutes often do not see the necessity to study agricultural innovation and their own role in it more thoroughly. This is in sharp contrast to the widely shared recognition of the complexity of agricultural development and the increasing demand for a greater accountability of public development agencies. In fact, the causal chain between an investment in Research and Development (R&D) projects and agricultural change is quite long. As the analysis moves away from the origin-research-and down along the assumed succession of effects, the observed changes become less and less attributable to the initial research investment. The variety of actors increases and hence the possibility of conflicting views on the ongoing change and the factors driving it. To this, add that we observed negative trends as well; e.g. the depletion of natural resources or the dwindling biodiversity. Claiming positive research "impacts" without a serious effort to understand the real change process is less and less credible-and it prevents research institutes learning from previous experience and becoming more development-minded. The objective of impact assessment is a greater impact orientation of research. Research institutions clearly need to strengthen their impact orientation if they are to reverse the downward trend in funding. The term "impact orientation" characterizes a research organization that is focused on impact, uniting the different approaches to improve research under the perspective of their contribution to achieving impact. Impact orientation expresses itself in such features as a good comprehension of how impact is achieved, sufficient organizational capacity, intensive communication with all stakeholders, client and service orientation, and the use of planning and M&E techniques. Important aspects of an impact orientation are to better understand the processes of agricultural change, to clarify hypotheses along the impact pathway, and to critically assess them. An alternative approach to understanding research impact is the pathway concept. The paper introduces the concept of impact pathways in order to better conceptualize the processes by which research achieves development impacts. This is not another impact assessment method but rather a means to integrate and organize information so that the role of research in development becomes more transparent. An impact pathway describes the chain of events linking research and agricultural development. It establishes a series of measurement points; e.g., research input, research output, rates of technology use, production figures, indicators of social change. It names the change processes that are supposed to link these points. At least three processes may be distinguished: (1) the research process leading to the research outputs, (2) the agricultural innovation process leading to technical change, and (3) the agricultural (rural) development process leading to economic and social change. By combining measurable indicators with process analyses, pathway analysis can help to address the attribution problem and take account of the many factors, other than research, that may be driving change. The three different processes may be studied separately while maintaining a comprehensive view on the way impact is generated. Thus, pathway analysis can reveal opportunities for research as well as identify problem situations in which it would be pointless to conduct research as a result of, say, the conditions in commodity markets and infrastructure or the availability of complementary services. Pathway analyses can also help to generate plausible arguments demonstrating how research activities actually feed into the development process. The paper presents ideas and examples generated during a series of workshops where a regional project "Strengthening Impact Orientation inAgricultural Research in Eastem and Central Africa" was planned by representatives of the "Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in East and Central Africa (ASARECA)" with support from the German Development Co-operation (GTZ).

English

0310|AGRIS 0301|AL-Economics Program|R01PROCE

Juan Carlos Mendieta

CIMMYT Publications Collection