Alternatives to Slash and Burn Programme: what have we learned,

where to next?

Anne-Marie Izac2nd Chair, GSG of ASB

(Consortium Chief Officer, Chief Science Officer, Senior Science Advisor)

Outline

1. Looking back to the beginning: initial ASB objectives and 5 lessons

2. Looking ahead: ASB and future lessons for the evolving set of CRPs

1. Initial ASB objective: 1st lesson

• Reduce deforestation by S/B agriculture. By providing ecologically and economically sustainable options for farmers + scientific evidence to policy-makers

• ToC: providing new scientific evidence & improved practices would trigger in deforestation

• 1st lesson: ToC: far too simplistic/naive about how science can influence rest of world

1. What ASB did differently on partnerships and research approaches

• For 1st time in CGIAR: teams of biophysical x social scientists, from ≠ institutions, within- outside CGIAR, national, international, some stakeholders

• Interdisciplinary, multi institutional teams

• Spent 2-3 years on team building + ‘characterisation’, priority-setting across research sites

• Worked at different spatial scales

1. Second and third lessons

• 2nd lesson: interdisciplinary & multiinstitutional approaches thus developed (e.g., ASB matrix) produced relevant, useful results that uni disciplinary and uni institutional approaches could not have produced

• 3rd lesson: governance and mgt structure needs to be aligned with science implemented (inclusive, transparent, accountable)

• both lessons used in criteria, principles for current CRPs: new, wider partnerships required, CRP governance to be inclusive

• Interdisciplinary work still difficult in CRPs, particularly biophysical x social scientists; governance still an issue in various CRPs

1. 4th lesson

• Lesson 4: to generate new knowledge, IPGs, essential: baseline/benchmark in multiple sites; understanding of processes at play in ≠ environments, at ≠ spatial-temporal scales before can scale up

• Today, CRPs struggling with ’baseline analysis’, work at multiple scales, credible scaling up. Realising only now importance of this for RBM.

1. 5th lesson

• Initial ToC too simplistic, subsequently disproved by empirical evidence. Today’s ToC less naive about influence of science.

• 5th lesson: flexibility, willingness to learn from mistakes, asking existential questions, re-inventing program: essential to evolve realistic ToC overtime

1. To summarise, External Review of ASB, 2005

… ‘ASB has created the world’s pre-eminent system for use-driven, comparative scientific investigation of human-environment interactions at the forest margin across the pan tropic domain…. ASB has developed an effective and efficient governing structure that successfully integrates capabilities and concerns across CGIAR Centers, tropical regions, scales and disciplines’.

2. Looking ahead

• ASB should keep breaking new ground for CGIAR. Show how transdisciplinary approaches accelerate discovery and innovation and the application of innovations for complex problems

• Contribute new perspective to debates on reproducibility of:– Achievements (innovations) in a specific

geographical location to other places– Successes in influencing policy-making

2. Looking ahead: main challenge

• Providing more secure, diversified & healthy food grown in more and more difficult conditions, whilst decreasing the environmental footprint of agriculture and decreasing inequalities

• Complex, interconnections, uncertainties, beyond any discipline’s reach. Requires ‘transformative’ integration of many sciences (life, natural, social, human health, mathematical) and perspective of stakeholders

• Inter/multidisciplinary approaches insufficient to promote collaboration and synthesis needed to produce truly innovative solutions to large–scale, complex problems.

Complex, multidimensional challenges

Source: IAASTD, 2008

2. Transdisciplinary approaches

• Change in scientific culture: reality is multidimensional, so is knowledge.

• New ways of thinking, new tools & approaches by working together across disciplines &with stakeholders. Builds upon but transcends reductionism, linear logic.

• Systematic approach, based on overall coherence rather than unity

• Creative “convergence–divergence” process that brings areas of knowledge together into a new system to spin off applications and elements that can in turn be recombined and integrated

• Results in new social distribution of knowledge

• ASB has more experience than most in working toward this, including in having governance & mgt structure aligned, facilitating open scientific culture

Source: Izac et al,06

More integrative approaches

In conclusion

• ASB’s experience: 5 lessons relevant for all CRPs today. On essentiality of partnerships; alignment of governance & mgt with research needs; importance of working at ≠ scales, in ≠ countries and of learning from mistakes, re-creating

• Comparative advantage of CGIAR today: capacity to work globally from many sites, across institutions & disciplines to more rapidly design robust options. ASB has significantly contributed

• Given complexity of challenges ahead, more transformative changes are now needed, more urgently. ASB is more nimble than CRPs; can continue to break new ground for CGIAR

In conclusion, for a new science

• Complex challenges ahead require more integrative and collaborative approaches:

– Using transdisciplinary approaches that transcend disciplinary boundaries , involving stakeholders

– To design truly innovative approaches, better tuned to complexity, uncertainty, constant change

• Huge, exciting challenge for ASB scientists: new type of science needed, new way of conceiving role of research in society

• Recent recognition of this need (e.g., US Academy of Sciences, Special Rapporteur to the UN on the right to food) and of transformative improvements resulting from such approaches (medicine, engineering)