Jefferson, R. 2001. Transcending Transgenics— Are There “Babies In The Bathwater,” Or Is That A Dorsal Fin? IN Pardey, P.G. The Future of Food Biotechnology Markets and Policies in an International Setting. IFPRI.

Wollenberg, E.; Anderson, J.; Lopez, C. 2005. Though all things differ: pluralism as a basis for cooperation in forests. Bogor, Indonesia, CIFOR. vii, 101p.Beginning in the mid 1990s, practitioners and theoreticians working in forestry and rural development around the world observed that conflicting interests and increasingly different and independent perspectives on forests required a fundamentally new approach to forest decision-making. Relying on recommendations and decisions made by centralized forest departments and experts was no longer sufficient for meet the diverse needs of society. Pluralism offered an alternative that more closely matched social realities. Pluralism could also provide checks and balances to help learning and control power imbalances. In 1997 a working group on pluralism, sustainable forestry and rural development therefore met at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to explore the possibilities for developing cooperation among different groups in the forest sector. One of the conclusions of the workshop was the need for “more research, including comparative analysis and detailed case studies” (1999:8).

von Glasersfeld, E. 2001. The Radical Constructivist View of Science. Foundations of Science special issue on "The Impact of Radical Constructivism on Science. A. Riegler (ed). vol. 6 no. 1-3: 31-43.From the constructivist perspective, science cannot transcend the domain of experience. Scientific theories are seen as models that help to order and manage that domain. As the experiential field expands, models are replaced by others based on novel conceptual constructs. The paper suggests the substitution of 'viability' or 'functional fit' for the notions of Truth and objective representation of an experiencer-independent reality. This by-passes the sceptics' incontrovertible arguments against certain real-world knowledge and proposes the Piagetian conception of cognition as the function that generates ways and means for dealing with the world of experience.

Pimbert, M. 2003. The promise of participation: democratising the management of biodiversity. Seedling. July 2003. GRAIN.Technical advances in breeding – however impressive – are meaningless without farmers. The corporate research model seeks to turn farmers into serfs in a feudal agricultural system, a move which will be devastating to our future food supply. Michel Pimbert identifies some of the reforms needed to encourage democratic participation and more genuine local control in the management of agricultural biodiversity. Emphasis is placed on strengthening diversity, decentralisation and democracy through the regeneration of more localised food systems and economies.

Pardey, P.G. (Ed.) 2001. The Future of Food: Biotechnology Markets and Policies in an International Setting. 330 pp. Published by the International Food Policy Research Institute, distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Nowotny, H. 1995. The dynamics of innovation: On the Multiplicity of the New. Institute for Theory and Social Studies of Sciences, University of Vienna, ETH, Zürich. Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced StudyInaugural Lecture of Academic Year 1994/95 Delivered at Collegium Budapest. October 13, 1994. Public Lectures No. 12. January 1995. ISSN 1217 - 582X ISBN 963 8463 18 X. Collegium Budapest/Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest.Innovation has become a leading slogan for world economies, politicians and science policy-makers alike. It is the driving force of Western consumer societies that have come to expect the new to be replaced by the newest. But in contrast to mere fads and fashions, the consequences of relentless innovation are real. They manifest themselves in changes in life-style, in the ways societies function and in profound changes in outlook and perception. The lecture will ask how innovation became so central and wich mechanism sustain it in science and technology, art and humanities, in social and individual life. One consequence to be further explored is the relative loss in importance of the individual creative act, with implications how we view creativity, knowledge production and even the concept of the individual. Another question to be raised is that of the multiplicity of the new: despite the seeming diversity and multiplicity of options, is there also convergence or a process of synchronization at work?

Operations Evaluation Department. The CGIAR at 31: An Independent Meta-Evaluation of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. World Bank.OED has recently completed a meta-evaluation of the CGIAR as part of an overall evaluation of the Bank's involvement in 70 global programs. At $50 million a year of completely unrestricted funds, the CGIAR currently receives 40 percent of the Development Grant Facility (DGF) grants going to global programs out of the Bank's net income. Increasing competition for such grants to meet a variety of global challenges and the need for selectivity were among the factors leading OED to review the Bank's involvement in global programs, including in the CGIAR. OED concludes that the CGIAR has been a unique instrument of international cooperation. Its productivity-enhancing research has had sizeable impacts on reducing poverty by increasing employment, raising incomes, lowering food prices, and releasing land from cropping. Moreover, further improvements in sustainable agricultural productivity are critical to meet the international community's Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015. But the CGIAR is facing huge challenges, and it is less focused on enhancing agricultural productivity than it used to be. Its current mix of activities reflects neither its comparative advantage nor its core competence. The CGIAR has not responded sufficiently at the System level to the biotechnology revolution, the increasing importance of intellectual property rights, and the growth of private sector research. And the current reforms in the CGIAR's organizational structure, governance, and management do not go far enough to address the challenges arising from the radically changed external and internal environment facing the CGIAR.

Wheatley, C. 2002. Sustaining development oriented civil society organizations in the rural South: resource mobilization options, strategies, success factors and research issues. Working Document prepared for the Participatory Research Project, International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Cali, Colombia.This paper considers the options for Civil Society Organisations in the South to develop a more sustainable source of financial and other resources than is currently provided through short-term donor funded projects. In the North, and especially in the USA, the term “non-profits” is used to refer to similar organizations involved in welfare and service delivery. While NGOs are seen in the South as one type of actor amongst many (including the state, private sector and foreign donors etc), non-profits in the North are usually studied in relative isolation as a distinct sector. Two parallel but very separate literatures have developed that separate South and North, and which create a barrier to learning between the two. This paper uses relevant concepts, ideas and examples from both worlds in an attempt to bridge this gap in the area of organizational self-reliance, resource mobilization and self-finance.

Pretty, J. 1995. Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practice for Sustainability and Self-Reliance. Joseph Henry Press.It is becoming increasingly clear that a more sustainable agriculture can bring economic, environmental, and social benefits to farmers, communities, and nations. Regenerating Agriculture draws together for the first time new empirical evidence from a diverse range of agroecological and community settings to show the impacts of more sustainable practices. Twenty cases involving widespread success from Brazil, Burkina Faso, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lesotho, Mali, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, and Sri Lanka are presented, and are supported by field- and community-level data from more than 50 projects and programs in 28 countries. Despite this emerging evidence, many farmers still depend on high levels of external inputs. Regenerating Agriculture, identifies the common elements of successful programs and shows how those still using "modernist" approaches to agriculture can successfully turn to sustainable farming.The first chapter outlines the scale of the challenge and includes analysis of sustainable agriculture's characteristics and underlying philosophies and values. Pretty then presents analyses of the processes of agricultural modernization, focusing on both production- and conservation-oriented programs and policies and the common elements of success. Almost all of these successes have been achieved despite existing, biased policy environments that strongly favor "modern" approaches to agricultural development, and at the same time discriminate against sustainability.Regenerating Agriculture examines policy frameworks and institutional processes, then sets out 25 effective policies that are known to work to support the transition to greater sustainability and self-reliance in agriculture.

Pretty, J. and R. Hine. 2001. Reducing Food Poverty with Sustainable Agriculture: A Summary of New Evidence. Center for Environment and Society. University of Essex. Occasional Paper 2001-2.

Nowotny, H., P. Scott and M. Gibbons. 2004. Re-Thinking Science: Mode 2 in Societal Context In: Technology, Innovation and Knowledge. Management Book Series, Vol. 2.: Knowledge Creation, Diffusion and Use in Innovation Networks & Clusters: A Comparative Systems Approach Across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Greenwood Publishing Group Praeger Books, USA.Eight years ago the three authors of this contribution, along with three others, published The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (Gibbons et al 1994). Reviews were mixed. Some philosophers, historians and sociologists of science regarded the argument in the book as either simplistic or banal (or perhaps both), while science policy analysts worried about the empirical evidence for the trends identified in the book (or argued that these trends were not new). However, the book sold well. Its broad thesis, that the production of knowledge and the process of research were being radically transformed, struck a chord of recognition among both researchers and policy makers. It seemed to make sense of familiar but disparate policies and practices which they were either encouraging or experiencing.Of course, like all theses that gain a certain popularity (and notoriety) it was radically simplified, collapsed into a single phrase, almost a slogan - ‘Mode 2’. The old paradigm of scientific discovery (‘Mode 1’) characterised by the hegemony of disciplinary science, with its strong sense of an internal hierarchy between the disciplines and driven by the autonomy of scientists and their host institutions, the universities, was being superseded – although not replaced- by a new paradigm of knowledge production (‘Mode 2’) which was socially distributed, application-oriented, trans-disciplinary and subject to multiple accountabilities. Those with most to gain from such a thesis espoused it most warmly - politicians and civil servants struggling to create better mechanisms to link science with innovation, researchers in professional disciplines such as management struggling to wriggle out from under the condescension of more established, and more ‘academic’, disciplines and researchers in newer universities, other non-university higher education institutions or outside the academic, and scientific, systems strictly defined. Those with most to lose were most sceptical - researchers in those established disciplines and institutions who feared that the quality of science would be eroded if these levelling ideas gained political currency and that their own autonomy would be curtailed if more explicit links were established between research and innovation. Both reactions were predictable. A generation ago Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions aroused far more interest among social scientists, even humanists, who not only felt a shock of recognition in his account of paradigm shift but also saw that it could enhance the legitimacy of their disciplines, than among natural scientists, who saw Kuhn’s companion idea of incommensurability as a threat not only to universal, or ‘objective’, truth but also to progressive experimentally based research (Kuhn, 1962/1070). His own discipline, physics, was most resistant of all to his ideas. However, in the case of The New Production of Knowledge there was a new twist. The ‘Mode 2’ thesis, however simplified, was recognisably derived from the argument presented in the book. So as authors we could not object.Our critics may even have regarded us as hoist by our own petard, because inherent in the very notion of ‘Mode 2’, or socially distributed knowledge, is the idea that it cannot be authoritatively encoded in traditional forms of scholarly publication. If nurse researchers pounced on ‘Mode 2’ to reduce their subordination to medical research, or if global accountancy companies placed ‘Mode 2’ at the heart of newly established ‘Centres for Business Knowledge’, both of which are actual examples, who were we - the authors - to complain?It was partly to resist this collapse into relativism and over-simplification of the argument presented in The New Production of Knowledge, partly to answer the valid criticisms of that argument and partly to develop our broader thesis that the present three authors wrote a second book Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001). Yet the difficulty remains - how to describe and defend in traditional academic discourse (‘Mode 1’ in our own terminology) ideas that attempt to analyse how that discourse is being transcended (‘Mode 2’). ‘Mode 2’ is not only a concept, inherently open to manipulation or exploitation by others (even in ways of which we may disapprove); it is also a project, an example of the social distribution of knowledge which it seeks to describe.

Operations Evaluation Department. 2003. Natural Resources Management Research in the CGIAR: A Meta-Evaluation. World Bank.First, NRM research is indisputably central to sustainable productivity increases in agriculture and to improvements to rural livelihoods worldwide. The CGIAR is correct to emphasize NRM and germplasm research as the twin pillars on which to base its program to enhance agricultural productivity. CGIAR NRM research has the potential to generate significant GPGs in the form of new knowledge, especially concerning core processes, analytical and measurement methods, and meta-data sets offering global coverage.Second, the CGIAR’s NRM research has made key intellectual contributions in several areas important to achieving the goals of improving rural livelihoods, food security, and agricultural productivity, notably related to problems of water management, tropical deforestation, characterization of agro-ecosystems, and sustainable NRM in marginal lands. These important past accomplishments not withstanding, the CGIAR presently falls short of realizing its considerable potential to generate significant GPGs, due primarily to System-level issues of focus and framework. Satisfactory resolution of these issues (discussed in detail in Section 4) would do much to push the CGIAR to the frontier of its potential.Third, and related to the preceding point, CGIAR NRM research programs sometimes appear to venture beyond the System’s core competencies without providing a compelling case as to why the research is strategically important. The CGIAR, perhaps through the new Science Council, needs to identify explicitly its core competencies and related areas of comparative advantage vis-à-vis other prospective GPG providers, and then to establish clear boundaries on the work that Centers and SPs undertake, even when leveraging core resources with additional, restricted donor resources. The early 1990s’ expansion of the System added scope without commensurate growth in real funding, thereby increasing the pressure to leverage resources and leading to drift in the research program. This threatens the traditional excellence of CGIAR science, NRM research included. 8. Fourth, the CGIAR has made significant, productive investments in training individual national agricultural research and extension system (NARES) scientists and, in a few cases, in helping develop NARES institutional capacity and regional networks and subregional organizations (SROs) related to NRM. Such capacity building seems to have declined in recent years, however, although the need remains acute. Given funding and personnel challenges facing many NARES, perhaps especially in the social science disciplines and in Africa, NRM-related capacity building poses a serious challenge that demands System-wide attention.Fifth, perhaps predictably, the resources-oriented Centers are generally doing more and better work in integrated NRM than are the more established, commodity-oriented Centers, with the ecoregional Centers falling somewhere in between. Although a few System-wide Programs (SPs) are making significant advances toward addressing global problems such as tropical deforestation, the SPs on the whole have objectives that far outreach their resources or authority, thereby limiting their effectiveness.Finally, and most importantly, NRM research has appropriately attracted considerable, increasing interest and resources over the past decade, although these have perhaps been insufficiently tightly focused on those topics and functions in which the CGIAR can make tangible, high-return contributions to GPGs: in contributing to sustainable agricultural productivity increases and to improving the livelihoods and reducing the vulnerability of the rural poor. The CGIAR’s NRM research can be justified by the System’s impressive, well-established agricultural impacts, but only so long as the NRM research portfolio stays true to the System’s core agricultural productivity agenda. Otherwise, impact assessment of the NRM portfolio becomes a reasonable demand of donors bearing a fiduciary responsibility for wise use of their resources.

van Wijk, C. and M. Garcia. 2001. Having it both ways: Local participatory learning informing global policy and programme management. IN C. Leeuwis and R. Pyburn (eds.)Wheelbarrows Full of Frogs: Social learning in rural resource management. Kumarian Press.

Lambrou, Y. and R. Laub. 2004. Gender Perspectives on the Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and Desertification. Sustainable Development Department, FAO.The paper provides a gender-sensitive perspective on the three Rio Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change, and Desertification. First, the Rio conventions are placed in their historical context and their administrative and financial framework. Secondly, the main gender issues relevant to the three conventions are exposed. A comparative overview of the level of gender mainstreaming in each of the international instruments relating to the Rio Conventions at study here is given. The essay concludes with a review of a few key issues in convention implementation, in relationship with gender.

Akerkar, S. 2001. Gender and Participation Overview. Institute of Development Studies. ISBN 1 85864 385 6.Concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘gender’ have been a part of emancipatory discourse and practices for the last decade. Advocates of these concepts have claimed that they allow the representation of the most marginalised groups – women and the poor. However both approaches have also been accused of being co-opted and providing lip service to the interests of the most marginalised sections that they claim to represent.A common mistake of some applications of gender and participation approaches is the failure to be aware of conflicting interests between groups. Both approaches have had to encounter a similar set of questions from critics, such as: To what extent can gender take account not only of the differences between men and women, but also of differences between women, and between men, along the axes of class, age, ethnicity, race, caste, sexuality etc.? And to what extent have participatory methods allowed expression of divergent voices along the lines of gender, as well as other differences?The similarity of questions posed in both cases has now led people using both approaches to take a critical note of and learn from each other. This report looks at convergences between approaches to gender and to participation, how these have been played out, and how they have been or could be constructively integrated into projects, programmes, policies, and institutions. In the following section, background is given on the concepts of gender and participation, why there has not been more interaction in the past, and attempts for learning across these two approaches. Part three looks at efforts to combine participatory methodologies and gender in projects. Part four describes ways in which the two have been used to influence policy and to what extent measures have been institutionalised. Part five concludes the paper, draws out recommendations for policy, projects and programmes, and identifies gaps in research on this area. This report forms part of the Cutting Edge Gender knowledge Pack on Gender and Participation which also includes a summary of this report, a copy of the BRIDGE bulletin in brief on the same theme and a collection of supporting resources.

Dickson, D. 2005. Can Africa pioneer a new way of doing science? SCIDEVNET article. 24 Jan 2005. Those keen to build a greater scientific capacity in Africa must not fall into the trap of encouraging outdated views on how science should be practiced. If all goes well, the next few months will see a groundswell of political support for the idea that science and technology should be given a key role to play in the alleviation of poverty on the African continent. Already this idea is gaining currency in development circles. Two weeks ago, for example, the secretary-general of the United Nations received a report emphasising that greater investment in science and technology is essential for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (see Science advice 'essential' to meet development goals). Similarly the World Bank has launched a new initiative designed to put all its assistance programmes through what its president James Wolfensohn describes as "the lens of science and technology". This initiative will place a particular emphasis on looking at how lessons drawn from the role of science and technology in promoting social and economic development in Asia can now be applied to the African continent (see World Bank puts science back on the agenda). And similar issues will be high on the agenda next week at a seminar in London organised jointly by the Canadian and British governments, being held under the title 'Building science and technology capacity with African partners'.All this is good news; all too often in recent years, as we have frequently argued, the potential contribution of science and technology to development has, for a variety of reasons, been underplayed within aid policies. But enthusiasm for this change of heart needs to be tempered. It is essential that the type of initiatives and practices being promoted are genuinely responsive to the needs and resources of African states; conversely, steps must to be taken to avoid supporting out-dated practices that are in the process of being abandoned elsewhere.To put it at its simplest, science and technology must not be seen by policy-makers as determinants of development, in the sense of encouraging the idea greater investment in science and technology will somehow lead automatically to social and economic progress (epitomised in the concept of the 'magic bullet'). Rather, both must be seen, as Keith Bezanson and Geoff Oldham argued in this editorial column two weeks ago, as components of broader 'systems of innovation', in which other elements, ranging from intellectual property laws to strengthened university-industry links, have just as essential a role to play (see Rethinking science aid).

Cooperrider, D., Srivastva, S. 2000. Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life. IN: Appreciative Inquiry: Rethinking Human Organization Toward a Positive Theory of Change. Stipes Publishing. ISBN: 87563-931-3This chapter presents a conceptual refiguration of action-research based on a "sociorationalist" view of science. The position that is developed can be summarized as follows: For action-research to reach its potential as a vehicle for social innovation it needs to begin advancing theoretical knowledge of consequence; that good theory may be one of the best means human beings have for affecting change in a postindustrial world; that the discipline's steadfast commitment to a problem solving view of the world acts as a primary constraint on its imagination and contribution to knowledge; that appreciative inquiry represents a viable complement to conventional forms of action-research; and finally, that through our assumptions and choice of method we largely create the world we later discover.

Falvey, L. 1996. Agricultural Education in Natural Resource Management. The Crawford Fund for International Development, Melbourne Australia and Institute for International Development Limited, Adelaide Australia. ISBN 0 646 29363 X.

Wiens. P. The gendered nature of local institutional arrangements for natural resources management. A critical knowledge gap for promoting equitable and sustainable natural resources management in Latin America. IDRC.This paper fleshes out some tentative conclusions about the state of research on gender and natural resource management (NRM) in Latin America. These conclusions are drawn from a review of available literature on the subject and from interviews with gender and NRM scholars working in the field. A critical gap in ongoing research activity about gender and NRM in various contexts in Latin America was found to be the lack of research examining the gendered nature of local institutional arrangements for community-based NRM. The paper concentrates on developing this theme and argues for its importance, given the critical significance of such knowledge for informing appropriate interventions intended to contribute to equitable and sustainable NRM in Latin America. The paper has been written to provide guidance to IDRC’s MINGA Program Initiative, as relates to the team’s search for appropriate research strategies for strengthening gender equity as it pertains to NRM in the region.