AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN NATURAL RESOURCE CONSERVATION AND LOCAL LIVELIHOOD

• Sponsoring Institution: State Agricultural Experiment Station
• Project Status: COMPLETE
• Funding Source: STATE
• Reporting Frequency: Annual
• Accession No.: 0205404
• Project Start Date: Apr 1, 2005
• Project End Date: Mar 31, 2006
• Program Code: [(N/A)]- (N/A)

Recipient Organization
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
ITHACA,NY 14853

Performing Department
CIIFAD-INTERNAT'L INST FOR FOOD, AGRIC & DEV

Non Technical Summary
To deal with problems of hunger and malnutrition, natural resource degradation, loss of biodiversity, and rural decline, institutions are needed that can generate and communicate alternative visions for land use, link individual interests and efforts with those of the communities and societies they live in, better balance the competing aspirations for raising agricultural productivity, foster ecological sustainability, and promote rural vitality. We propose a comparative study of hybrid institutions that are proving capable of delivering material benefits to their members while generating public environmental and social goods.

Animal Health Component

25%

Research Effort Categories

Basic

(N/A)

Applied

25%

Developmental

75%

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
131	0120	3030	35%
205	1530	2050	40%
605	6050	3060	25%

Knowledge Area
605 - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics; 205 - Plant Management Systems; 131 - Alternative Uses of Land;

Subject Of Investigation
0120 - Land; 1530 - Rice; 6050 - Communities, areas, and regions;

Field Of Science
2050 - Hydrology; 3060 - Political science; 3030 - Information and communication;

Keywords

natural resource governance

institutional design

biodiversity conservation

conservation enterprise

ecoagriculture

collective action

Goals / Objectives
The overall goal of our research is to advance the understanding of stakeholders and decision makers in sustainable agriculture and natural resource management, worldwide, about how to design, facilitate and evaluate locally-based institutions to enhance their capacities to optimize the delivery of agricultural production, biodiversity conservation and livelihood benefits to their members and to society. To advance this goal we will organize a planning process around the following objectives: 1. To engage scholars and field based leaders of rural institutions in SA and NRM, in a Research Network for designing comparative, collaborative, research for in-depth study of hybrid institutions, to reveal conditions and requirements for their effective performance in supporting ecoagricultural practice. 2. To conduct a needs assessment with our Research Network participants, and other networks of local organizations that demonstrate capacity for advancing the goals of ecoagriculture in a global forum, on the support they need in order to: (a) document their experience in case studies for use by the research team in testing hypotheses about hybrid institutional performance, and (b) promote knowledge-sharing among their members and partners on the good practices that support successful hybrid organizations. 3. To plan the process, the educational content, and the dissemination of multi-media publications on good practice guidelines, protocols and training materials to be produced by the full project. This activity will link social and agricultural scientists with conservation biologists in developing a framework and protocols for use by local farmer organizations to monitor and evaluate biodiversity decisions and outcomes in ecoagricultural systems. 4. To develop a framework for comparative, cross-site analysis with hypotheses, variables, means of measurement and evaluation criteria that will link the deep learning sites with the global case study network.

Project Methods
Our partnering plan will begin with the initial proposed core project partners, and be elaborated during the planning grant. We will design it to optimize the contributions from diverse fields of expertise, and enable the widest possible learning value and policy impact. Our core partners have extensive partnering experience to draw upon, as indicated below, and strong research-focused partnerships to build upon in each of our target countries. We will strive to achieve synergies between national research partners in the Sub-Saharan African countries through direct linkages between CIAT and AHI/ICRAF managed sites. We will specify roles and activities within our core partnership for reaching the four objectives of the planning award, through video conferencing and conference calls. We will begin building our Research Network (Obj 1) through travel to participating countries to meet with prospective partners and examine candidate research sites and situations. During the field visits we will begin negotiating the content, geographic scope and location of our activities and secure commitments for participation in the long term program. We will follow with a workshop at Cornell University where core partners, and one or two strategically selected research partners from each in-depth study site, will begin elaborating the hypotheses and methodologies that will frame our research within and across sites. We will draft our conceptual framework, education and communication strategies, and participatory protocols for engaging local organizations in determining what and how to measure locally and globally relevant biodiversity variables in ecoagricultural systems (Obj 3). And we will formulate a needs assessment on the support that local organizations require to document their experience in case studies. Participants in the Research Network then will launch the needs assessment in concert with EP (Obj 2) via web-based communications that EP facilitates, and through face to face contact in strategic locations. We will use the findings to design the case study component via internet and video conferencing communications. Finally, the Research Network will develop an integrative research design (Obj 4) through iterative rounds of internet based communication, including discussion boards and chat rooms. We will organize and prepare our Long Term Research Application around this design.

Progress 04/01/05 to 03/31/06

Outputs
OUTPUTS: The principal output of our project was a full proposal to USDA's SANREM program for a five-year, multi-national project that was designed to expand local capacities to deliver agricultural production, biodiversity conservation and local livelihood benefits in ecoagricultural landscapes through the strengthening and expansion of hybrid institutions. To produce this output the PI worked with a group of five co-investigators including two colleagues at Cornell in the Department of Natural Resources, the President of Ecoagriculture Partners - an international NGO based in Washington, DC -- and Senior Scientists from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF). We drew upon our respective and collective professional networks to consult with numerous scholars, program and policy leaders and community based organizations in seven developing countries where we anticipated that the type of project we had in mind would be feasible and beneficial. Eventually we selected three countries around which we organized our proposal; Madagascar, Bolivia and Uganda. We traveled to these three countries to examine first hand the capacities and needs of local organizations who were striving to secure sustainable livelihood benefits for their members and communities through various types of sustainable agriculture and natural resource management practices. With leaders of these organizations and various of their technical service providers and champions we evaluated how they might improve their capacities to support ecoagriculture practice through various types of institutional strengthening activities including peer to peer networking across landscapes. We conducted rigorous literature reviews within the multiple domains of ecoagriculture landscape planning and management including biodiversity conservation, sustainable agricultural practice, food and livelihood security and hybrid institutional strengthening. We hired two graduate students as part time research assistants to support the effort. The insight derived from the combination of our personal interviews and consultations, and our review of the literature together with regular meetings among ourselves to assess relevant states of knowledge in these domains and develop conceptual models of relationships among key variables enabled us to prepare a proposal that received among the highest rankings by reviewers. In the final analysis however, our proposal was not selected for funding. PARTICIPANTS: Individuals and partner organizations who worked on the project include those listed below. We also worked with numerous organizations and individuals in Bolivia, Madagascar and Uganda. Information about these may be obtained from the Cornell Ecoagariculture Working Group or Ecoagriculture Partners, see their web pages for contact information. Dr. Jacqueline Ashby, Principal Scientist; Director, Rural Innovation Institute, International Center for Tropical Agriclture (CIAT), A.A. 6713, Cali, Colombia; 57-2-4450066 (phone); 57-2-4450073 (fax); [e-mail] (email) Dr. Louise Buck, Senior Extension Associate, Department of Natural Resources; Research Fellow, Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, 106 Fernow Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; 607-255-5994 (phone); 607-255-5815 (fax); [e-mail] (email) Dr. Thomas Gavin, Professor of Natural Resources and Conservation Biology, 209 Fernow Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; 607-255-2841 (phone); 607-255-0349 (fax); [e-mail] (email) Dr. Sara J Scherr, President, Ecoagriculture Partners, Forest Trends, 1050 Potomac Street, NW, Washington, DC 20007; 202-298-3004 (phone); 202-298-3014 (fax); [e-mail] (email) Dr. Ann Stroud, Senior Scientist; International Center for Research in Agroforesty (ICRAF); Regional Coordinator, African Highlands Insitiative, P.O. Box 26416, Kampala, Uganda; 256-41-220607 (phone); 256-41-223242 (fax); [e-mail] (email) TARGET AUDIENCES: Not relevant to this project. PROJECT MODIFICATIONS: Not relevant to this project.

Impacts
The major outcome of the research and development project proposal process was deeper and more expansive conceptual and practical knowledge on the part of the investigators about relationships among the key variables that frame an ecoagriculture perspective. This outcome was significant given that ecoagriculture is a domain of inquiry and practice that was still emerging. By the end of the project we were better able to articulate how the various components of ecoagriculture systems relate to one another and how a hybrid institutional perspective works to tie together the other elements of the system, enabling it to generate ecoagricultural properties. In addition, a significantly expanded international network of professionals and organizations emerged from the project, with aspirations and expanded capacities to contribute to ecoagriculture thinking and practice. The project team's expanded capacity for intellectual leadership in ecoagriculture carried into our ongoing work. Most notably, Sara Scherr as President of Ecoagriculture Partners (EP), and Louise Buck as the coordinator of Cornell's Ecoagriculture Working Group (CEWG), have continued to build their closely linked programs around conceptual foundations that were laid through the project, particularly regarding the roles of hybrid institutions. Principles that we derived for linking public, private and civic organizations at different administrative levels to form sound management and governance mechanisms for multifunctional landscapes continue to inform our work in supporting ecoagriculture working groups and earning landscapes in Africa, Latin America and the United States. They also provide viable entry points for teaching and learning about ecoagriculture in seminars and classes at Cornell, and for writing about ecoagriculture for diverse audiences. Knowledge gained from the project proposal writing process informed the creation of the Institutional Performance Unit of the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC), see www.landscapemeasures.org. The LMRC was built by the CEWG, EP and collaborators, several of whom participated in the project, following project completion. Various measures and tools for measuring of how and how well institutions are performing in supporting ecoagriculture landscapes have been derived and presented in the LMRC for users around the world, based on intellectual groundwork that was laid by the project. The LMRC is in wide use already, and interest in it is rapidly growing as landscape level analysis for integrating livelihood, production and conservation goals gains academic and practical credibility and momentum. Organizations in a variety of EP's learning landscapes have gained experience with the tools in the LMRC, and have begun to change the way they manage their resources as a result.

Publications

• No publications reported this period