On June 25, Agrinatura (Sylvain Perret, Director) participated in a webinar organized by the #Steppfos project on “How donors can best link science to policy and scale impact in African food systems”.
Several contributions highlighted entry points for more effective and impactful collaborations between donors, policy-makers and research (e.g. provision of data and evidence, economic modelling), and also underscored enabling and disabling factors (e.g. risks, market conditions, fiscal and financial settings, the geopolitics of innovative technologies, household-level sets of constraints, C markets and finance as a potential key).
Sylvain insisted on policy-making, which usually deals with scaling OUT innovations, in the sense of targeting greater numbers of beneficiaries. The point refers to their readiness and willingness for change. The geopolitics of technology (some promote GMOs, others agroecology or digital transitions, etc.) and the variety of national political set ups lead to also consider scaling UP, or institutionalization, i.e. the willingness and capacity of governments and decision-makers to adapt a given institutional setting (laws and regulations, organisational modalities, power balances) to cater for innovation, to foster its success, to create enabling conditions for change to happen. On the other hand, local conditions, livelihoods at the farm household level, specific cultural settings may be unfit for an innovation that proved successful elsewhere. This is about scaling DEEP, or contextualisation. Are governments and donors willing to also consider these contexts, to cater for local specs?
To navigate such complexity, research can facilitate collaborative processes. The co-development of theories of change, of plausible causal relationships between development actions and investments, and their consequences. This paves the way to continuous Monitoring-Evaluation-Learning and to impact assessment of donors’ interventions, aligned with policy objectives. Should high uncertainty prevail, foresight analyses may further build trust, capacities, along with the provision of data, and ultimately of a shared vision. All of this complements quantitative approaches (economic modelling).
Steppfos: Strengthening Evidence-Based Policy Practice for Sustainable Food Systems. Coordinated by FARA, with contribution by Agrinatura, under the auspices of the AU-EU partnership.