CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems - Gender ...
Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches
description
Transcript of Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches
![Page 1: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more
integrative research approaches
Anne-Marie IzacCGIAR Consortium
1
Livestock and Fish expert workshop on systems analysis for value chain transformationAmsterdam, 19 November 2014
![Page 2: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
Outline
1. Looking back: 5 key lessons
2. Looking ahead: new research approaches needed - systems analysis and transdisciplinarity
2
![Page 3: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
1. Looking back: five key lessons
• Generic ToC: providing new scientific evidence & improved practices will result in policy changes and adoption of innovations
3
![Page 4: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
1. Looking back: five key lessons
4
• Generic ToC: providing new scientific evidence & improved practices will result in policy changes and adoption of innovations
• 1st lesson: ToC: far too simplistic/naive about how science can influence rest of world
![Page 5: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
Source: R. Rabbinge, 2009 5
![Page 6: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
1. Five key lessons
• 2nd lesson: interdisciplinary & multi-institutional approaches w/ many partners produced relevant, robust results that mono disciplinary and mono institutional approaches could not have produced
• 3rd lesson: governance and mgt structure need to be aligned with science implemented (inclusive, transparent, accountable)
• Interdisciplinary work still difficult, particularly biophysical x social scientists; governance still issue and partnerships variable
6
![Page 7: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: 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
7
![Page 8: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: 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, scientists struggle with ’baseline analysis’, work at multiple scales, credible scaling up. Realising only now importance of this for RBM.
8
![Page 9: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: 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, scientists struggle with ’baseline analysis’, work at multiple scales, credible scaling up. Realising only now importance of this for RBM.
• 5th lesson: flexibility, willingness to learn from mistakes, asking existential questions, re-inventing program: essential to evolve realistic ToC overtime
9
![Page 10: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
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.
10
![Page 11: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
2. Complex, multidimensional challenges
Source: IAASTD, 200811
![Page 12: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
2. Transdisciplinary approaches to accelerate discovery, innovation, application of innovations
• 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, understanding processes, reproducibility of innovations in ≠ locations and reproducibility of policy influence
12
![Page 13: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
Source: Izac et al,06
2. More integrative approaches
13
![Page 14: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
Source: Izac et al, 06
![Page 15: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
2. Looking ahead: research areas that lag behind
• Need to strenghten: – Nutrition, health, food safety – policy research, so based upon robust biophysical x
socio-economic evidence; science-policy interface – NRM in commodity improvement research to
decrease environmental footprint of agriculture, role of ecosystem services in resilience, ‘sustainable intensification’
– research on LT effects of innovations, predicting and monitoring impacts, to better understand processes at play
– research at landscape-regional scales
15
![Page 16: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
In conclusion
• CGIAR’s experience: 5 lessons relevant for all agri research. 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. Ability to take risks, be innovative, as can learn from our mistakes across all research programmes
• Given complexity of challenges ahead, more transformative changes are now needed, more urgently.
16
![Page 17: Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need for systems analysis and more integrative research approaches](https://reader034.fdocuments.us/reader034/viewer/2022042816/559b16971a28ab82308b4719/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
In conclusion, for a new science
• Complex challenges ahead require more integrative and collaborative approaches:
– Using transdisciplinary approaches that transcend disciplinary boundaries, involve stakeholders
– To design truly innovative approaches, better tuned to complexity, uncertainty, constant change, understanding processes at play in scaling up innovations and policy influence
– Re-balancing priorities to squarely address nutrition, health, policy influence, environmental footprint
• Huge, exciting challenge for CGIAR 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)
17