C. Leeuwis

• Wageningen University & Research

Innovation Portfolio Management refers to the systems, processes and mechanisms to intentionally manage innovation investments and decisions within an organization against its mission or strategy. This approach to managing and optimizing innovation and scaling investments is rarely used by public non-profit R&D organizations. This study draws lesso...

CONTEXT Global food systems are confronted with multifaceted challenges, including climate change, malnutrition, and biodiversity loss, disproportionately affecting the livelihoods of millions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Recognizing its potential to address these challenges, innovation is increasingly central in public sector...

CONTEXT A key strategy in progressing towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is scaling innovations to improve livelihoods of marginalized populations globally. Consequently, there has been a heightened emphasis on Agriculture Research for Development (AR4D) innovation teams' ability to swiftly identify innovations that can be scaled for...

In response to a growing understanding that scientific knowledge is not always trusted at face value, many universities organise dialogues to `open up' to society. In four exploratory case studies at the Dutch Wageningen University & Research, we looked into the adherence to dialogue principles and the roles that researchers performed while engagin...

Managing public-bad problems is difficult and arriving at an effective collective response can be an even bigger challenge. Using a socio-ecological systems framework, we explore the role of communication-focused interventions in the management of public bads in six African case-studies. We analyse case-specific livelihood units, public-bad risk co...

Community-Driven Development (CDD) programs compel communities to adopt egalitarian decision-making processes for the duration of the project. However, dominant groups use their power to orchestrate a public performance of social domination and subordinated groups combat social domination via subtle acts of resistance. Rather than conceptualizing s...

There is a growing promotion of agroecological techniques in many Sub-Saharan African countries as a response to the current climatic variability challenges. In the case of Burkina Faso, a number of studies have mentioned the role of Farmers’ Organizations (FOs) in the promotion of agroecological techniques. Although previous studies have highlight...

Tensions between farmers, government and society have recently been running high in the Netherlands. Dutch farmers are furious with the national government because of the ever-stricter nitrogen policy that is supposed to save nature in the Netherlands, in line with European directives. The current plan states that nitrogen emissions need to be redu...

Background Fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, an alien invasive pest from the Americas, was detected in Zambia late 2016 and since has caused significant losses on maize threatening livelihood and food security. Individually, farmers continue to rely on synthetic pesticides, a reactive measure to manage new invasive insect pests, posing risks to...

Complexity-sensitive decision support approaches (CSDSA) have gained prominence in the research for development (R4D) sector. However, limited attention has been given to critically examining the underlying causal assumptions of CSDSAs and their overall effectiveness in navigating complexity and achieving desired outcomes. Scaling Readiness has eme...

Community-Driven Development (CDD) empowers target communities with control over development resources but is criticized for exogenously establishing parallel governance structures that fade away when the intervention ends. Could an unconditional direct transfer to a whole community catalyze endogenous institutional change by creating ‘a distinctiv...

Agroecological techniques (AET) have been recognized by many farmers, NGOs, and farmers’ organizations (FOs) as a promising solution for slowing down the persistent soil fertility degradation in West African drylands. In the context of Burkina, the promotion of AET is the result of the interactions between NGOs and farmers’ knowledge through the in...

In recent decades, the concept of inclusive innovation has been used to refer to how innovation can include actors that are considered marginalised from its processes and outcomes. Contrary to the ‘expert-driven’ approaches prevalent in evaluating the legitimacy of such processes, this paper examines the legitimacy of inclusive innovation from the...

List> ● Agricultural innovation is a coevolution process of hardware, software and orgware. ● Innovation intermediaries is important for the coevolution process of agricultural innovation. ● The roles of STBs have evolved from a knowledge broker to a broader innovation intermediary at the village level. ● Facilitating orgware is more effective...

Potato late blight is seriously undermining productivity and farmers’ practices are contributing to continued late blight prevalence• Farmers have little knowledge about their interdependence in managing late blight• Research and extension should catalyze farmers’ learning on the cause and spreading mechanisms of the disease to initiate a communi...

While the potato crop has enormous potential for food and nutrition security in Ethiopia, potato production is currently threatened by bacterial wilt. Bacterial wilt has become ubiquitous in the Ethiopian seed potato production system. Free movement of latently infected seed potato contributed to the spreading of bacterial wilt in the country. Gove...

The agricultural innovation systems (AIS) in many Sub-Sahara African (SSA) countries lack the structural capacities to support smallholder-inclusive innovation. Multi-stakeholder Innovation Platforms (IPs) have been proposed as systemic instruments to improve the functioning and building of the structural capacities of the Innovation System (IS). T...

p>The Agricultural Innovation System perspective highlights the importance of interaction for learning and innovation, but so far little research is done on the cultural differences of farmers and the effect this has on interaction, knowledge sharing and innovation. We took a cultural perspective to better understand local interaction, knowledge sh...

Of the world’s 570 million farmers, 72% work on two hectares or less, and women’s labor comprises at least 50% (FAO, 2014). Small farms are responsible for 80% of world food production, making them key to addressing looming global food shortages (Lowder et al., 2016). Small farms in developing countries navigate a myriad of challenges, including ac...

Scaling of innovations is a key requirement for addressing societal challenges in sectors such as agriculture. Research for development (R4D) programs, projects and other interventions struggle to make innovations go to scale. Current conceptualizations of scaling are often too simplistic and narrow, and more systemic and multidimensional perspecti...

Between early 2019 and end of 2020 two CGIAR-RTB funded scaling projects employed the Scaling Readiness approach to guide their overall scaling activities and decisions. Scaling approach for flash drying of cassava starch and flour at small scale is a two-year scaling project that aimed at improving cassava processing at small-scale through gains i...

Scaling of innovations is a key requirement for addressing societal challenges in sectors such as agriculture, but research for development programs struggles to make innovations go to scale . There is a gap between new complexity-aware scientific theories and perspectives on innovation and practical approaches that can improve strategic and operat...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), specifically those that are digital and interactive, present opportunities for enhanced intermediation between actors in Ghana’s agricultural extension system. To understand these opportunities, this study investigates the capabilities of ICTs in support of seven forms of intermediation in the cont...

Introduction Development projects are based on explicit or implicit assumptions of how and why a certain intervention will work. Over the past three decades, these assumptions have captured the attention of academics and practitioners alike, sparking interest in the so-called theories of change (Brown, 2020; Prinsen and Nijhof, 2015). In the most c...

Purpose Agricultural extension services in poor countries often identify opinion leaders based on criteria such as wealth and social status. We explore the effectiveness of this top-down approach by analysing the role of so-called model and nodal farmers in the diffusion of malt barley in a highland community in Ethiopia. Research approach We use...

Purpose Digital extension is widely embraced in African agricultural development, promising unprecedented outcomes and impact. Especially phone-based services attract attention as tools for effective and efficient agricultural extension. To date, assessments of digital extension services are generally ex-post in nature, thus consideration of users...

This article investigates possible pathways of habitus change by informal tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is depicted as a person's understanding of the world. Do people adapt their worldview in response to only external stimuli? Through ethnographic fieldwork including participant observations and active semi-struc...

Human decision-making plays a critical and challenging role in the prevention and control of public bads within socio-ecological systems. Farmers daily confront dilemmas regarding public bad management, such as infectious diseases in their crops. Their decisions interplay with multiple factors and may create the risk conditions in which a public ba...

This article is the second in a series of two and presented findings from field-testing an experimental boardgame (Musa-game) with banana farmers in four villages in Eastern Rwanda. The conceptualization and design of the Musa-game were described in Part I. Musa-game gives insights into how farmers’ individual and collective decision-making and act...

This paper argues that supporting food system transformation requires more than obtaining science-based understanding and analysis of how components in the system interact. We argue that changing the emergent properties of food systems (what we call food system synthesis) is a socio-political challenge that is affected by competing views regarding...

What is the role of Information and Communication Technology in the collective management of public bads? We study epidemics of late blight in potato as a collective action challenge in Oromia, Ethiopia. As a highly infectious, air-borne disease, potato late blight represents a public bad: it is non-excludable and non-rival. Managing public bads is...

CONTEXT Addressing new agricultural challenges may benefit from open communication among field extension agents and other actors who hold relevant expertise, including subject matter specialists and applied researchers. OBJECTIVE In the context, this article investigates the contribution of two social media messaging platforms, in Ghana, to facili...

The scaling of innovations (novel technologies, products, services, management practices, organisational models and/or institutional arrangements) is a key requirement and challenge for achieving the impact that One CGIAR strives for. ‘Impact’ or ‘system transformation’ never arises from an isolated innovation or change but involves the uptake of m...

One CGIAR set ambitious targets for reforming the CGIAR system 1. In the last year alone, CGIAR has sharpened its mission and unified under single governance. It has made significant progress in institutional integration, designing common policies and services. It started developing a unified country and regional presence, new research modalities f...

Abstract CONTEXT Addressing new agricultural challenges may benefit from open communication among field extension agents and other actors who hold relevant expertise, including subject matter specialists and applied researchers. OBJECTIVE In the context, this article investigates the contribution of two social media messaging platforms, in Ghana,...

Agricultural development is looked at as a process in which the adoption of innovations plays an important role. In this context, there has been considerable interest in understanding how adoption processes work. This chapter starts from the observation that adoption has been conceptualised in most research and development efforts as a process at t...

Theories of change (ToCs) are development tools that describe how a certain set up of conditions and actions leads to producing specific results. They are used to design, monitor, evaluate, and scale interventions and are increasingly required by both donor and research agencies. In this paper, we explore the links between theories of change and ac...

In Africa, cocoa yields are low, partly due to soil fertility constraints and poor management. While peoples' knowledge, aspirations, and abilities are key factors explaining their behaviour, little is known about the rationales that underpin soil fertility management practices (SFMPs) of cocoa farmers. To address this gap, we conducted an explorat...

Potato late blight remains a threat to food security and livelihood of millions of people in Ethiopia. Despite a rapid dispersal of the disease pathogen and farmers' interdependency in managing it, the literature on agricultural extension and communication tends to frame the disease and its management as a problem of the individual farmer. This stu...

Effective management of crop diseases is a key precondition for sustainable crop production and to improve food security globally. However, learning approaches that improve smallholder farmers’ knowledge, perceptions, and practices to deal with crop diseases by fostering social and technical innovations are seldom studied. A study was conducted to...

This Editorial to the Special Issue “Science of Scaling: connecting the pathways of agricultural research and development for improved food, income and nutrition security” presents the framing, overview and analysis of 10 articles focussed on scaling innovation in the agricultural research for development sector. The publications cut across three c...

Scaling of innovations is a key requirement for addressing societal challenges in sectors such as health, agriculture, and the environment. Research for development (R4D) programs, projects and other interventions struggle to make particular innovations go to scale. Current conceptualizations of scaling are often too simplistic; more systemic and m...

Scaling generalizable solutions delivered through science, technology, and innovation has become a dominant paradigm for achieving the sustainable development goals. In many cases, organizations articulate theories of change that are intended to support the strategic design and guidance of agricultural research and innovation to contribute to impac...

Inclusive innovation remains an under-conceptualised and ambiguous concept despite garnering political and academic interest in recent decades. This paper explores the narratives of inclusive innovation that exist in literature and how these are framed in practice, using a case study of the Kenyan agricultural sector. Findings indicate that while t...

Research for development (R4D) projects increasingly engage in multi-stakeholder innovation platforms (IPs) as an innovation methodology, but there is limited knowledge of how the IP methodology spreads from one context to another. That is, how experimentation with an IP approach in one context leads to it being succesfully replicated in other cont...

Collective action is required to deal with various complex agricultural problems such as invasive weeds and plant diseases that pose a collective risk to farmers. Monitoring systems could help to stimulate collective action and avoid free-riding. The paper develops a novel framework consisting of essential elements of a monitoring system for managi...

There is a growing consensus that one of the key priorities to address food and nutrition security is to aim at the transformation of agriculture and food systems. The private sector can fulfil an important role in this. It is often argued that the success at low income markets (denoted here as Bottom of the Pyramid - BOP) requires innovative and i...

There has been strong research interest in designing and testing learning approaches for enhancing and sustaining the capacity of communities to manage collective action problems. Broadening the perspective from well-known social learning approaches in natural resource management, this study explores how social learning as a communicative process i...

Scaling Readiness is an approach that can support organizations, projects, and programs in achieving their ambitions to scale innovations and achieve impact. Scaling Readiness encourages critical reflection on how ready innovations are for scaling, and what appropriate actions could accelerate or enhance scaling.

Multi-stakeholder platforms have become mainstream in projects, programmes and policy interventions aiming to improve innovation and livelihoods systems, i.e. research for development interventions in low- and middle-income contexts. However, the evidence for multi-stakeholder platforms’ contribution to the performance of research for development i...

In this article we explore whether and how the dynamics of access shape the scaling of modern agricultural technologies. It is based on the experience of an agricultural research for development (AR4D) project called CASCAPE, which aims to validate and scale agricultural best practices for smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. The socio-political dynami...

Scaling of agricultural, food and other livelihoods innovations is one of the biggest challenges for research and development organizations. One of the key problems is the lack of approaches that can facilitate evidence-based decision making on which activities and partnerships can support scaling of innovation towards achieving Sustainable Develop...

This data is a set of literature sources that Scaling Readiness Approach (SRA) was built upon. Specifically, it presents i) Complex Adaptive Systems, ii) innovation Systems, iii) organization science and iv) implementation science literature sources published on different livelihood sectors such as agriculture, health, environment, natural resource...

A soft systems perspective is used to unravel the complex problem of potato bactetial wilt and late blight.

Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research and development projects and programs. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate, and coordinate to overcome challenges and capitalize on opportuni...

Climate change, (a) biotic stresses and environmental degradation are adversely affecting the sustenance of farming communities in Africa. Addressing such challenges requires effective collective action and coordination among stakeholders, which often prove difficult to achieve. Timely and context-specific information on relevant environmental dyna...

Rural communities in Africa are facing numerous challenges related to human health, agricultural production, water scarcity and service delivery. Addressing such challenges requires effective collective action and coordination among stakeholders, which often prove difficult to achieve. Against the background of the increased availability of informa...

Paper presented at the IAMCR 2018 conference under the Participatory Communication Research group.

Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have been playing an increasing role in interventions aiming to generate and scale innovations in agricultural systems. However, the contribution of MSPs in achieving innovations and scaling has been varied, and many factors have been reported to be important for their performance. This paper aims to provide evide...

Questionnaire English t = 1 survey. (DOCX)

Questionnaire French t = 1 enquête. (DOCX)

Questionnaire English t = 2 survey. (DOCX)

Questionnaire French t = 2 enquête. (DOCX)

Agricultural extension in sub-Saharan Africa has often been criticised for its focus on linear knowledge transfer, and limited attention to systemic approaches to service delivery. Currently, the region is experiencing a new-ICT revolution and there are high expectations of new-ICTs to enhance interaction and information exchange in extension servi...

The data represents the participation of stakeholders to 411 different events organized by Humidtropics innovation platforms in Uganda between 2013 and 2016.

This dataset contains cleaned data for analyzing the performance drivers for multi-stakeholder platforms. Specifically it contains: Action area of intervention Calendar day of the event Number of participants divided by 10 Number of participants Average number of objectives/actions per person Average engagement level of participant Month Duration...

Background: In 2012, a donor-supported proof of principle study was launched to eliminate malaria from Rusinga Island, western Kenya, using solar-powered mosquito trapping systems (SMoTS). SMoTS, which also provided power for room lighting and charging mobile telephones, were installed in houses. In view of the involvement of individual and collec...

This paper argues that the CGIAR -through its CGIAR Research Programmes-is struggling to fulfil its international mandate of conducting strategic research that contributes to agricultural development and global food security. Ongoing reforms have resulted in a situation where the CGIAR is assessed as if it were a development organisation. This lead...

Xanthomonas Wilt of Banana (BXW) is a complex problem in the African Great Lakes Region that is affecting the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers. Since the first disease reports from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2001, BXW has been studied widely. The majority of these studies focus on the technological or biophysical d...

Potato is one of the most important food crops for smallholder farmers in the Ethiopian highlands. Diseases, particularly bacterial wilt (caused by Ralstonia solanacearum) and late blight (caused by Phytophthora infestans), are among the major constraints of potato production, despite continuous efforts to control them. Bacterial wilt and late blig...

Effective management of potato diseases such as bacterial wilt and late blight depends to a large extent on farmers’ knowledge of the diseases as well as on the integration of recommended management methods in their daily practices. Late blight has continued to be a dominant potato disease for many decades in Ethiopia, whereas bacterial wilt has em...

The farmer field school (FFS) concept has been widely adopted, and such schools have the reputation of strengthening farmers’ capacity to innovate. Although their impact has been studied widely, what is involved in their scaling and in their becoming an integral part of agricultural innovation systems has been studied much less. In the case of the...

This paper investigated conflicts in participatory protected areas management in Benin to better understand their dynamics. This review paper is based on four articles written from three case-studies of conflicts that emerged and evolved in participatory protected areas management in Benin and a review of literature on the issue of conflicts in par...

This is the second of the series of newsletters that will capture our efforts to develop an approach that will accelerate the scaling of innovations in the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB). The newsletters will capture the major concepts of Scaling Readiness, activities, and information about the RTB cases in which we are d...

This is the third of the series of newsletters that will capture our efforts to develop an approach that will assess and accelerate the scaling of innovations in the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB). This newsletter aims at introducing and giving visibility to the four case studies that are helping the Scaling Readiness tea...

Poster presented during the annual IITA R4D week in Ibadan, Nigeria. The poster presents planned activities on ICT and citizen science for control and prevention of BXW disease in Rwanda

Scaling of agricultural, food and other livelihoods innovations is one of the biggest challenges for research for development (R4D) organizations. For a long time, scaling was done without using evidence which led to disappointing results. Scaling Readiness builds on state-of-the-art science and scientifi c methods in order to: 1. Assess the potent...

This is the first of the series of newsletters that will capture our efforts to develop an approach that will accelerate the scaling of innovations in the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB). The newsletters will capture the major concepts of scaling readiness, activities, and information about the RTB cases in which we are de...

This table is the data set used for studying the changes in the innovation networks in Burundi, DR Congo and Rwanda following a research for development intervention of CGIAR (Integrated Systems for the Humidtropics)

The presentation briefly describes 1. Basics of Innovations and scaling in Research for Development programs, projects 2. Fundamental concepts of scaling readiness approach 3. Scaling Support Processes offered for Research for Development Programs, projects.

The main challenge for researchers and project staff when implementing inclusive approaches in agricultural innovation is how learning and technology adaptation interact and how to reach jointly set targets. We provide a comparative analysis of the learning process induced by adaptive research (AR) in one case and a combined AR with Learning Allian...

Social network analysis (SNA) is a comprehensive approach to identify and target critical scaling stakeholders in a comprehensive manner. It not only considers the characteristics of individuals but also whom they connect for knowledge, seeds, money and solving problems. SNA is applicable to scaling strategies of all technologies where the connecti...

AAIS is a science-based tool that supports analysis of complex agricultural problems with partners, and guides research for development investment decisions to achieve optimal impact.

Multi-stakeholder processes are an increasingly popular mode of intervention in agricultural research for development (AR4D). Recent research findings from ‘so-called’ developing countries indicated evidence of the positive contribution of these multi-stakeholder processes (for example through innovation platforms) to achieving agricultural develop...