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Coping With New Policy Agendas for Agricultural Research : The Role of Institutional Innovations
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Introduction
Over the last
four decades the policy agenda of agricultural research has evolved
significantly from an initial focus on increasing food production to concerns
for the environment, poverty and stakeholder participation. Not only has the
poverty focus become more explicit, but also the concept of poverty has
expanded beyond earlier notions relating to supplies of food, to encompass
wider livelihood concerns. (Carney,
1998). As a result, both national and international agricultural
research systems around the world are finding their output and contribution to
welfare under increasing scrutiny. All too frequently agricultural research
systems are struggling to accomplish new and complex tasks within the confines
of institutional structures and mandates designed decades previously for a much
simpler agenda.
To understand
the challenges that this presents, it is useful to reflect on the way these
agendas and institutional set ups have emerged and evolved. The global perspective
provides useful lessons for
Origin and purpose of agricultural
research systems
During the
1950's and 60's national and international concerns over food shortages,
particularly in
With this
agenda in mind, centralised public sector scientific
research institutes were created to solve the generic problem of increasing the
biological potential of important food crops. The institutional set up
contained international agricultural research centres
and, at the national level, sets of commodity and or disciplinary based
research institutes. The task of transferring technology packages to farmers
was given to the institutionally separate extension system. The task to be
achieved was conceptually quite simple and all the actors in the system held
this same clarity of purpose. This approach resulted in the development and
spread of input responsive, high yielding cereal varieties and the consequent
"green revolution" phenomenon.
The new agendas
Poverty. The green revolution, despite its success in
increasing food production, demonstrated the difficulty of using advances in
agricultural productivity to address complex social phenomena such as poverty.
It brought to attention the fact that the poor did not always have the
resources to benefit directly from new productivity enhancing technology.
Moreover when the poor had land-based resources, research often had difficulty
responding to their specific technological needs, usually in the less favourable production environments. For the landless and
urban poor the need for better entitlements to food (through employment for
example) restrained the benefits that would have otherwise arisen through
cheaper and more abundant food (Lipton and Longhurst,
1989).
Environment. Concerns were also emerging as to the environmental
consequences of an intensive agricultural development strategy reliant on
chemical inputs and heavy consumption of water. Wider environmental concerns
were highlighted by a number of major international conferences and initiatives
during the 1980's. As a consequence the environment is now a mainstream agenda
for agriculture and development policy generally.
Stakeholder participation. There was also a
growing realisation that the hierarchical
institutional arrangements typical of most centralised,
public agricultural research organisations make it
difficult to achieve a client focus in research. Farmer participatory research
arose as a way of addressing this issue. Sustained advocacy during the 1990's
placed the participatory "paradigm" in the mainstream. Public
research organisations in many countries have tried
to accommodate this new agenda with varying levels of enthusiasm and success.
However the institutional context of many public research organisations
has restricted the development of truly participatory and client focussed working practices.
Public vs. Private. In the last decade economic liberalisation along with shifts in globally held
perceptions concerning the role of the State in society have emerged as a major
new policy agenda. This has made institutional concerns of fundamental
importance, focusing attention on the efficiency and proper role of the public
sector in areas such as agricultural research.-
Private sector agricultural research has also grown as a result of the
opportunities that economic and trade liberalisation
are now presenting for private investments in agro-industries such as seed
production, horticultural exports and so forth. Private research has also been
encouraged by improved intellectual property protection regimes and technical
advances associated with biotechnology.
Balancing agendas. The result of this ever expanding range of new
policy agendas is that the "one size fits all" type of agricultural research
organisation found in many countries no longer seems
appropriate. Often these new agendas actually conflict with traditional
internally driven policies and beliefs of the public research sector. Examples
are the need to develop capacity in frontier areas of science, while also
supporting adaptive research for traditional and subsistence sectors; the need
to support, but not to compete with, the private sector; the need to support
competitiveness in global markets such as export horticulture, but not to
displace small-scale producers. All these need to be achieved without losing
sight of either the old agendas of increasing food production
nor the new agendas of poverty and sustainability.
The new
agendas, along with the contraction of public sector funding for research in
recent years, has focused attention on the need for reform of national
agricultural research organisations around the world.
The parallels with the Indian situation are clear.
Policy Response
A common policy
response to these new agendas has been the initiation of impact assessment and
research priority setting exercises. This has often been used by both national
and international agricultural research organisations
to achieve efficient allocation of scare funds and justify their position in
terms of returns to investment. However these approaches fail to quantify
impact in terms of, for instance, poverty. Furthermore such approaches have
difficulty in accommodating analysis of the institutional context of research
and the way this affects research outcomes.
Another
response by national agricultural research organisations
has been the introduction of organisational and
management (O&M) reforms. This generally includes a package of measures
addressing decentralisation, autonomy, accountability,
cost-recovery, transparency, and efficiency (The success of these in the Indian
context is discussed below).
Institutional Innovations
Although not
necessarily an explicit policy response, new and often experimental
institutional arrangements are emerging in many countries as a way of
addressing changing agendas and responding to emerging opportunities. These
types of institutional innovations are often linked to the need to access
R&D and technology more effectively and in many instances have been the
result of initiatives led by private organisations
both the for profit and non-profit sectors. Innovations often blur traditional
institutional distinctions between research and production, usually as a way of
making R&D more client responsive. The specific
features of these institutional innovations are often a response to the
particular institutional set-up of a country and may therefore only be
successful in this national context. Frequently these developments have
significantly changed the institutional roles of different actors, with private
organisations sometimes taking on roles previously
performed by government (see box 1).
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Contract
farming: These usually involve a private organisation
supplying the technology and sometimes credit for inputs to farmer to ensure
a supply of quality produce. The private organisation
usually sells this produce in high value domestic or export markets. A number
of countries have developed strong horti-cultural
export sectors using this approach, for example Growers
associations: These bodies can provide organisational
focus for articulating the technology demands of farmers. In Non-Governmental
Organisations (NGOs): The capacity of
national and international NGOs is growing beyond that of facilitation, and
is increasingly emerging as a significant source of R&D capability, input
supply and marketing services. Also partnerships between public research
institutes and private organisations with a
commitment to social welfare of the poor, can be an
important way of focusing R&D and other services on the poor. Examples
include research foundations such as BAIF in Competitive
research funds: A number of developing countries have established competitive
research funds (CRF). This can improve accountability and research
performance. By stipulating certain selection criteria, CRF can be used to
encourage projects that: address the needs of certain social groups;
encourage diversity of research partnerships; and respond to changing
priorities and agendas. Producers
funded research organisations: For commodities where
producers have a strong institutional base (growers associations,
co-operatives etc) this can be used as a way to mobilise
resources for a dedicated research and training organisation.
This is often a response to the need for location specific adaptive research
and advisory services in high value crops. Examples include sugar research in
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In countries
where the value of these institutional innovations has been recognised,
the policy response has been to seek opportunities for public/private sector
partners in research and allied activities. A related approach has been to use
competitive research funds to encourage a diversity of research partners from
both public and private sectors. This has often been accompanied by the
separation of responsibility in the national agricultural research organisation for agricultural research policy and research
implementation.
Progress in India
Over the last
five years the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), being aware of
the need to respond to both tightening finances, a changing research and policy
environment, and a need to rationaiise existing
research infrastructure and human resources, implemented a series of O&M
reforms. These have focused on improving efficiency and accountability; forging
linkages with new partners; mobilising resources; and
strengthening capacity in frontier areas of science. Priority setting exercises
in major agro-ecosystems, crops and commodities have also been initiated.
Reforms have not yet been applied to the State Agricultural Universities, the
other major component of Indian public sector agricultural research system.
Despite some
imaginative initiatives, the impact of the reforms to date has been less than
expected. While there may have been some , impact on
research practice, administrative and financial procedures have not witnessed
any major change (Paroda and Mruthyunjaya,
2000). Policies now exist whereby ICAR can provide consultancy and contractual
services. However the extent of public/private collaborative research programmes resulting from this has not been as extensive as
the potential implied by the strength of ICAR's human
and scientific capital (Mruthyunjaya and Pal, 1999).
While there seems to be widespread agreement that there is a strong
institutional dimension to this problem, the key challenge is to find ways to
more effectively understand and address the issue. This is where contemporary
policy analysis of the innovation process in other sectors has something to
offer.
The way forward - an agricultural
innovation system?
One approach a
number of countries and international organisations
are adopting in science and technology policy analysis in other sectors is the
National Systems of Innovation (NSI) framework (Freeman, 1987, Lundvall 1992). The NSI provided a conceptual framework to
study innovation performance in systems terms, where flows of knowledge between
actors and institutions in the process are critical to innovative performance
(see
The
contribution of NSI is that it provides a way of analysing
institutional roles and relationships, and the way these change over time, and conceptualises this in terms of an innovation
system. This type of analysis is more inclusive than the narrower notion of a
research system. The distinction being that the latter is a system of
predominantly public sector organisations engaged in
producing technical innovations. In contrast an innovation system encompasses
all the elements of the system or network of private and public sector institutions whose interactions produce, diffuse and use
economically useful knowledge. In contrast to the research system, innovation
systems are viewed as producing both technological and institutional innovations.
The latter creating the evolutionary dynamics that often creates the new
institutional forms that allow the creation and utilisation
of new technology. This process of institutional learning is a central feature
of successful innovation systems.
While the
effectiveness of an innovation system usually requires strong horizontal
linkages between institutional nodes, the political and social structures in
many developing countries tend to encourage central control and top-down
linkages, particularly in public sector organisations.
The institutional innovations generated by private organisations
(see box 1) are an implicit recognition of the shortcomings of these structures
and of the benefits that can be derived from improving connectivity to other nodes
and the need to change institutional capabilities to suit emerging
circumstances.
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The National
Systems of Innovation (NSI) approach recognises
that technical and economic change are a product of, and are shaped by, the
prevailing institutional context rather just by levels of investment in
R&D and that this context is likely to be specific to individual
countries. This is based on the empirical observation that: ·
in countries where there are effective networks linking
different institutional nodes, economic performance has been high; ·
the linkages can take the form of joint research, personal
exchange, cross patenting, purchase of equipment and other channels; ·
innovation as a social process involves learning and this
concerns institutional innovations as much as it does technical ones; ·
the actors or nodes in the innovation system can
be private enterprises, universities and public research institutes. Analysis
based on this NSI framework stresses that it is the performance of the system
as whole that is important. Success tending to be a function of the
interaction and interactive relationships - often partnerships- that
determine the effectiveness of knowledge flows between institutional nodes.
Rather than presenting a blue print for institutional reform, NSI provides a
set of analytical principles to help in the re-mapping of these linkages.
These include:
·
Assessing impediments to flows of knowledge between nodes ·
Assessing the opportunities for and constraints to
interactive learning and institutional linkages ·
Assessing policy and practices that can give rise to
failures of the component parts working as a system. For policy makers, an understanding of
the NIS system can help identify leverage points for enhancing innovative
performance and overall competitiveness. |
The Indian agricultural innovation
system
Recent case
studies in the Indian seed and horticultural sector suggest that patterns of
partnerships are starting to emerge with many of the features that the NSI recognises as important in the creation of a successful
innovation system (Hall et al, 1998, 2000). However much of the initiative that
is stimulating these developments has come from private organisations.
Currently there are limitations to the extent to which - despite policy changes
- the public sector can operationally contribute technology and allied R&D
capability to these emerging partnerships.
Partially this
relates to the administrative delays involved in contracting public sector
scientist and their institutions. It also reflects the narrow research focused
professional mandate of the scientists and their lack of exposure to commercial
applications. Introducing policies that permit these types of contract research
arrangements needs to be supported by institutional changes that allow them to
work efficiently in practice. Linkages are also weak between public sector
institutes, with the result that mutually useful pieces of knowledge are often
locked-up in different organisations.
While
scientists are often interested in engaging in partnerships with the private
sector, public sector institutional hierarchies tend to engender a professional
approach whereby scientifically robust recommendations are devised that can
then be transferred to others. Extension organisations'
continued obsession with feedback, training and demonstration and its inability
to perform more valuable roles such as facilitating linkages have been also
restraining the performance of the innovation system. This tends to stand in
the way of developing iterative working practice that would assist in
developing client-focused research. There is wide recognition by many
scientists of these types of institutional constraint. However mechanisms for
institutional learning and the generation of institutional innovations to
address these problems are not apparent.
Conclusions
In many
countries institutional innovations have been an implicit and explicit response
to the increasingly complex agendas of agricultural research. The NSI framework
provides an approach that allows an analysis of these institutional
developments by conceptualising them as the emergence
of an agricultural innovation system made up of an integrated network of
research and non-research, public and private organisations.
NSI provides a set of principles that can help identify constraints to the
further development of a successful innovation system. In
References
·
Alsop, R., Gilbert, E., Farrington, J. and R Khandelwal (2000) Coalitions of Interest: Partnerships for
Process of Agricultural Change. Sage Publications.
- Carney, D ed. (1998) Sustainable Rural
Livelihoods (
·
- Freeman, C (1987) Technology and Economic
Performance, Lessons from
·
Hall, A, M.V.K. Sivamohan,
·
Hall, A.J., Rasheed Sulaiman
V., N.G Clark, MVS Sivamohan and B Yoganand (2000) Public and Private Sector Partnerships in
Indian Agricultural Research: Emerging Challenges to Creating an Agricultural
Innovation System. Paper presented at the XXIV International Conference of
Agricultural Economists, August 13-18
·
Haque, T (1999) Impact of Contract Farming in
- Lipton. M.&Longhurst,
R. (1989). New Seeds And Poor People. Unwin Hyman,
- Lundvall, B. A (ed)
(1992) National innovation Systems: Towards a Theory of Innovation and
Interactive Learning, Pinter,
·
Mruthyunjaya and S. Pal (2000)
ICAR-Private Sector Interface in Agricultural Research. Background paper for
workshop on ICAR-Private Sector Interface, February 8- 9,2000,
National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research,
·
Paroda, RS and Mruthyunjaya
(1999) NAPS in the Asia Pacific Region A perspective.
·
Porter, G and K Phillips-Howard (1997) "Comparing Contracts:
An Evaluation of Contract Farming Schemes in
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December,
2000 |
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Andy Hall
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Norman Clark
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Rasheed Sulaiman V
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National
Centre for Agricultural |
MVS Sivamohan
and B. Yoganand
International
Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India
This
publication is an output from a research project funded by the United Kingdom
Department for International Development (DFID). The views expressed are not
necessarily those of DFID [R 7502: Crop Post Harvest Programme].
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NCAP has been established by the Indian
Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) with a view to upgrading agricultural
economics research through the integration of economics input in planning,
designing and evaluation of agricultural research programmes
and strengthening the competence in agricultural policy analysis within the
Council. NCAP Policy Briefs are intended to contribute
to debates on important agricultural policy issues. Opinions expressed are
those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Centre. |