Experiences of Prolinnova partners were presented at the international symposium on Innovation and Sustainable Development in Agriculture and Food (ISDA) held on 28–30 June 2010 in Montpellier, southern France, as part of Hot Topic 4 “Acting collectively: what kinds of institutions, policies and forms of governance can strengthen society’s capacity for resilience”. The paper entitled “Towards a farmer-governed approach to agricultural research for development: lessons from international experiences with Local Innovation Support Funds” written by Mariana Wongtschowski, Bernard Triomphe (CIRAD), Anton Krone, Ann Waters-Bayer and Laurens van Veldhuizen, came in the session on “Financing innovation for sustainability”. It can be found on the conference website under http://www.isda2010.net/var/isda2010/storage/original/application/dbd28c…. During the presentation made by Ann, the LISF experiences in Ambo, Ethiopia, were highlighted [ISDA_presentation LISF; PDF file: 805 KB] and sparked off several questions and comments, also from Prolinnova research partners in Uganda and Kenya who were also at the symposium.
Another presentation related to Prolinnova was made by Nqe Dlamini from South Africa, who showed some experiences with and results of farmer-led documentation and evaluation of LISFs. The paper, entitled “Photovoice as a tool for planning and measuring impact of community-based economic development initiatives” [PDF; 544 KB], by Anton Krone, Nqe Dlamini, Margaret Jack, Nancy Erbstein, Jonathan London, David Miller and Maxwell Mudhara.
Prolinnova was also represented at a roundtable organised by the World Bank and CIRAD (French Centre for Agricultural Research for Development) on “Innovation systems in practice: challenges and perspectives”. A two-page statement was prepared for this session [ISDA World Bank roundtable statement Prolinnova; MS Word file: 30 KB]. In addition, Prolinnova perspectives were brought into the final roundtable at the symposium, in which people from different stakeholder groups summarised emerging issues of “Innovation systems: links to be developed between research, policy and society” (http://www.isda2010.net/program/program2/round_tables).
In total, about 500 people from over 60 countries attended the ISDA symposium, which gave many opportunities for dialogue between researchers and others stakeholders in agricultural research and development in the North and the South – especially during the coffee and lunch breaks!