Capacity building for agricultural research for development: Lessons from practice in Papua New Guinea
by Andy Hall & Adiel N. Mbabu (Eds)Publisher: UNU-MERIT, Maastricht
ISBN: 978-92-808-5000-0
This book contains a collection of papers that discuss the experience of an Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) capacity building program in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The program was the AusAID-funded Agricultural Research and Development Support Facility (ARDSF), which ran for five years from 2007 to 2012, and which sought to improve the delivery of services by agricultural research organisations to smallholder farmers. AR4D is an emerging mode of agricultural research practice in the international development community. Definitions of this practice are rather fluid, but its key intent is to directly link investments in research with tangible development outcomes. The way to actually do this is still a work in progress — a gap that this book seeks to fill. However, it seems quite clear that AR4D’s use of systems perspectives on learning, innovation and change have fundamental implications for the way agricultural research is conducted and the way capacity is built.
