Njas-Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences最新文献

This paper presents and discusses a diagnostic framework to identify institutional processes in the creation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for agricultural innovation. The diagnostic framework proposed here combines a conceptualisation of institutions with a conceptualisation of technology. We argue that a performative notion of institutions provides a better tool for institutional diagnostics than the common understanding of institutions as ‘rules of the game’. The paper furthermore proposes to conceptualise technology as affordance, in contrast to a more common understanding of technology as an input. We explore the value of our diagnostic framework by analysing the literature on PPPs for agricultural innovation and unpublished data from a PPP initiative for smallholder sorghum production, based on an agreement between Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO) and Nile Breweries Limited (NBL). In the discussion and conclusion section we evaluate the benefits of our diagnostic framework and discuss how the empirical issues it brings forward create important lessons for analysis of innovation for African smallholder farming and institutional diagnostics more generally.

The global food price crises of 2007–8 and 2010 and subsequent policy debates have led to increased recognition that the drivers of food insecurity and associated policies transcend the boundaries of traditional governmental sectors and jurisdictions. Building on this insight, many governments of countries facing food insecurity have developed, or are in the progress of developing, integrated food security strategies. However, in spite of their recent popularity, to date little is known about the properties and outcomes of these strategies. This paper aims to help overcoming this gap by proposing a way of diagnosing the expected variety of integrated food security strategies and associated outcomes. Three diagnostic steps are put forward, each of which is linked to a specific theoretical perspective from the Public Policy literature. The first step concerns diagnosing the variety of IFSSs and is referred to as descriptive diagnostics. This type of diagnostics is suggested to be performed by using a policy integration perspective. The second step involves diagnosing what causes variety and change. This step is named explanatory diagnostics and revolves around what ‘mechanisms’ explain (dis)integration. The third diagnostic step focuses on diagnosing the outcomes of IFSSs and is referred to as evaluatory diagnostics. For this type of diagnostics a policy success and failure perspective is proposed. The applicability of these diagnostic steps and associated theories is illustrated through the case of South Africa’s Integrated Food Security Strategy. The paper ends with a discussion of promising methodological approaches and with raising some hypotheses and expectations about performing these types of diagnostics in a Sub-Saharan African context.

Innovation platforms have emerged as a way of enhancing the resilience of agricultural and food systems in the face of environmental change. Consequently, a great deal of theoretical reflection and empirical research have been devoted to the goal of understanding the factors that enhance and constrain their functionality. In this article, we further examine this enquiry by applying the concept of institutional embeddedness, understood as encompassing elements of platform design, structure, and functions as well as aspects of the broader historical, political, and social context to which platforms are connected. We present a case study of sub-national platforms established in three districts of the climatically-stressed Upper West Region of Ghana and charged with facilitating climate change responses at the local level and channelling community priorities into national climate change policy. A different kind of organization − the traditional chief council, the agricultural extension service, and a local NGO − was chosen by members to convene and coordinate the platform in each district. We examine platform members’ accounts of the platform formation and selection of facilitating agent, their vision for platform roles, and their understandings of platform agenda and impacts. We analyse these narratives through the lens of institutional embeddedness, as expressed mostly, but not solely, by the choice of facilitating agents. We illustrate how the organizational position − and related vested interests − of facilitating agents contribute to shaping platform agendas, functions, and outcomes. This process hinges on the deployment of legitimacy claims, which may appeal to cultural tradition, technical expertise, community engagement, and dominant scientific narratives on climate change. Iinstitutional embeddedness is thereby shown to be a critical aspect of agency in multi-actor processes, contributing to framing local understandings of the climate change and to channelling collective efforts towards select response strategies. In conclusion, we stress that the institutional identity of facilitating agents and their relationship to members of the platform and to powerholders in the broader context provides a useful diagnostic lens to analyse the processes that shape the platform’s ability to achieve its goals.

The paper presents institutional diagnostics, which is sensitive to dynamic social and political processes ‘producing’ institutions underlying practices in resource management, climate change adaptation, and food security. The paper is based on a qualitative case study on watershed development interventions conducted in two villages in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. The research showed that resource management, adaptation, and food security institutions in Ethiopia are a result of struggles between containment strategies of the Ethiopian state and counter containment strategies of local communities. While the state’s containment institutions allowed it to mobilize a large number of rural residents for its resource management interventions, the counter containment strategies from local communities limited the potential contribution of the interventions for adaptation and food security endeavors of the state. From an institutional diagnostic perspective two conclusions are made, one empirical and another theoretical. The empirical part of the paper concludes that the Ethiopian state is using institutions to contain its population towards state-driven development pathways, which is essential to understand watershed development and state-led natural resource management interventions. The theoretical portion concludes that although institutions are often portrayed as static elements of social life, in fact they are also dynamic, socially produced, and could be coopted by powerful actors.

Although policymakers and scientists are increasingly embracing the food system perspective, it has been poorly reflected in institutional terms. We aim to fill this gap by addressing the question as to what forms of governance are most appropriate to govern food systems in a more holistic way. The article presents a diagnostic framework consisting of five principles: 1) system-based problem framing to deal with interlinked issues, drivers and feedback loops; 2) connectivity across boundaries to span siloed governance structures and include non-state actors; 3) adaptability to flexibly respond to inherent uncertainties and volatility; 4) inclusiveness to facilitate support and legitimacy; and 5) transformative capacity to overcome path dependencies and create adequate conditions to foster structural change. This framework is used to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of three food governance arrangements in South Africa, each of which deliberately aimed to embrace a holistic perspective. Although promising on paper, the outcomes are disappointing because of a reversion to a technical onedimensional problem framing during the implementation, the dominance of single departments, the limited attention to monitoring and flexible responses and the exclusion of those most affected by food insecurity. We conclude that the tensions between the ambitious objectives of the arrangements and the institutional constraints of implementing them can persist because of inadequate resources to facilitate transformative change. Finally, we propose an agenda to further elaborate the framework and improve its practical usefulness.

The introduction of new rules in an institutional field provides agents with a new set of opportunities and constraints on which they can leverage to change the rules in other institutional fields. Inspired by Elinor Ostrom, we term this causality a ripple effect, born out of the initial institutional changes. In this article we enquired in what ways women farmers could transfer genderblind changes in the market to the household. We developed a diagnostic tool to capture this propagation of effects and tested our framework with a study of the Agricultural Commodity Exchange for Africa (ACE) in Malawi. We found that the introduction of ACE has produced weak but positive effects for women, some of which rippled the changes in the rules to improve their household situation. Some women see in trading with ACE an opportunity to retain freedom and avoid a constraining married position in the household.

The multidimensional nature of food security often leads experts to recommend mobilising all public intervention sectors to ensure that food security policies are inter-sectoral, and not the sole responsibility of a single sector. However, in African contexts such as in Burkina Faso, food security policies are in most cases far from being inter-sectoral. They are instead focused on agricultural production. It is therefore critical to understand why food security policies are what they are, to identify the underlying sectoral logics and to seek for signals of policy changes. This paper aims at contributing methodologically to the literature focusing on institutional diagnostic of food security policies. Drawing on a combination of new institutional approaches and cognitive public policy analysis we explain food security policies in Burkina Faso by three major factors. First, the persistence of agricultural production-oriented policies points to path dependency arising from the way food insecurity has historically been framed around cereal deficits. Second, the instruments used to measure and assess food security are not neutral: they directly shape both policy debates and decision-making. Third, the institutional configuration of the policy debate is characterised by a fragmentation that influences power games between actors supporting different visions of food security. Finally we argue that new concepts such as “nutrition-sensitive agriculture” combined with more open forums may have the potential to lead to more inter-sectoral food security policies.

Securing access to affordable and nutritious food is an urgent topic on the agenda for development strategies in Africa. Intervention strategies targeting food security triggered a long lasting debate whether science and technology driven interventions could be the panacea for hunger eradication. However, contextual factors are extremely important in determining food security, as it is a location specific outcome of how biophysical, geographical, societal and political factors combine. Recent studies emphasize the important role of institutions to understand the persistence of food insecurity or to explain how different actors address food security. This article introduces a special issue that investigates approaches and methods, anchored in different institutionalisms, diagnosing how institutions influence food security levels in diverse African contexts. We draw two main lessons from this special issue. Firstly, there is a clear need for localized ex-ante institutional diagnostics to understand developments in food security in Africa. This can inform and guide decision-makers in designing locally appropriate interventions. Secondly, developing institutional diagnostics in view of sustainable food security requires theoretical triangulation; food insecurity is typically a problem emerging from a configuration of distinct processes. To develop a contextual and precise understanding of how institutions work and to identify what an institutional context ‘is good at’, the special issue argues in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences that is strongly rooted in evolving practices (re)arranging institutions affecting food security.

Field experiments have been embraced in development economics and political science as a core method to learn what development interventions work and why. Scientists across the globe actively engage with development practitioners to evaluate projects and programmes. However, even though field experiments have raised the bar on causality, they are often too narrowly defined and lack focus on structural development problems. Researchers and development practitioners should do more to improve the diagnostic process of the problem under study. Rodrik’s (2010) diagnostic framework provides a useful tool to improve the design and relevance of field experiments. Specifically, more should be done to seek coordination across studies, broaden the scope for interdisciplinary collaborations and seek peer review to increase validation and verification of evaluations. Only then can we increase knowledge aggregation and improve development policy making.

Enforcement of rules and laws designed at the national level is still one of the dominant institutional mechanisms for effective multiscale governance in most countries. At times, such blanket regulations are not only unable to meet practical needs at local levels, but they may conflict with local institutional logics, thereby creating new challenges. This study looks at three institutional arrangements in the agriculture and food security sector in the district of Koutiala, Mali to analyse the institutional variety across scale and the underlying institutional logics. On one side, the Cooperative Law as well as the Seed Law both designed at national level to enable famers’ access to agriculture services and improved seeds have yielded mixed results with regard to anticipated outcomes. The cooperative law is believed to degrade the social cohesion and the mutual support on which vulnerable farmers rely when facing climatic and non-climatic risks whereas the new seed system is found onerous and unaffordable for farmers. On the other side, the local convention for the management of natural resources established as part of ongoing decentralised governance policy seems to resonate with local culture but challenged by other stakeholders. Through exploring these cases, this paper tests bricolage as an analytical framework for doing an institutional diagnostic. It aims at contributing to methodological and theoretical insights on the way sustainable institutions can be generated in conflicting institutional logics in the context of multi-scale governance