Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

Keywords:

Abstract:

Agricultural research organizations, worldwide, are under increasing pressure to undertake impact assessment of their research activities and to better integrate the social, economic and environmental considerations in research planning and implementation. There is a rich literature of impact assessment with examples of evaluation studies that range in methods used, and in the breadth and scope of analysis undertaken. The purpose of this paper is to present a ?state of the art? survey of impact assessment of agricultural research. It is targeted at agricultural researchers and administrators who understand agricultural research well, but have limited experience with impact assessment (IA).
In preparing this paper, the IAEG recognizes that in several institutions in the ASARECA region, agricultural research impact assessment already is ongoing and has produced practical results of use to the organizations involved. (cf. paper by Omiti, Waithaka and Mwangi for this workshop and the paper by Anandajayasekeram and Martella, 1999).
Substantial experience has also been gained by SACCAR which produced several major impact studies for the Southern Africa region, as well as a comprehensive training manual for biological scientists on impact assessment of investments in agricultural and natural resources research (Anandajayasekeram et al, 1996). It is hoped that the experiences in impact assessment summarized by these studies along with the background information provided in this paper will aid workshop participants in the implementation of impact assessment in their respective organizations. The paper follows the spirit of the organizers, as expressed in the lead paper: ?while methodological questions can certainly not be excluded altogether, the focus of this workshop should be on conceptual and institutional matters.? Thus, we focus broadly on some questions of interest given to us by the organizers: (1) What is impact assessment from the perspective of the CGIAR? (2) Why and when should impact assessments be done? (3) Who is doing what in agricultural research impact assessment? (4) What are some of the implementation and institutional issues in impact assessment? (5) What can we learn from the past, and what are the implications for the future? The paper is organized around these broad issues and questions. As a caveat, we would like to recognize that our review is not exhaustive and may be biased towards studies conducted in recent years. However, our bias and limited coverage of the literature does not imply that earlier and omitted literature is less relevant than literature covered,
especially in regard to methodological rigor.