News from the ILAC Initiative - February 2011 | Institutional Learning and Change Initiative

News from the ILAC Initiative:

ILAC’s New Mission

Following the recent changes in the CGIAR, ILAC adapted its mission and strategy to better contribute to the change process. The ILAC initiative continues to foster learning from experience and use of the lessons learned to improve the design and implementation of agricultural research and development programs; however, our future work will emphasize helping the CGIAR Consortium Office and the Centers to develop new ways of partnership and research models, and by creating a space for reflection on the future of the CGIAR.
ILAC’s strategy detailing the actions to be implemented to reach these goals has been recently published and can be found in http://www.cgiar-ilac.org/files/ideas_for_change_ilac_17feb.pdf .

ILAC’s Activities

The ILAC team met with several key stakeholders to exchange ideas on what role ILAC should play in the change process. The stakeholders consulted included CIDA, IDRC, World Bank, USAID, Rockefeller Foundation, Guelph University, FAO, GFAR, IFAD, Bioversity International and DGIS.

Following its new strategy, ILAC is collaborating with the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF), CGIAR ICT-KM Unit, CIMMYT and Bioversity International on a series of activities. More partnerships are envisaged for the future.

ILAC continues its partnership with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia in developing an impact evaluation project, funded by IFAD. The initial outputs from this collaboration are BetterEvaluation.org and a synthesis analysis report, described below.

Workshop in Vientiane

The ILAC Team attended a workshop organized by CPWF in Vientiane, Laos in January 2011. The workshop brought together, for the first time, the leaders from six river basins: Ganges, Limpopo, Volta, Nile, Mekong and Andes region. The participants had the opportunity to discuss aspects of the coordination of the projects, such as monitoring and evaluation, communication, organizational learning knowledge sharing amongst basins, future directions of the CPWF, budget, and the creation of topic working groups. These groups create an organized space for the CPWF’s members to discuss important issues related to their work. ILAC is actively participating in the topic working group is ‘learning to innovate’ or L2i.

The L2i topic working group discusses the implementation of structure of decentralized experimentation with centralized learning; ILAC supports this initiative by providing intellectual and operational inputs. ILAC aims to learn from this pilot project and replicate this initiative among other projects in the CGIAR, in an attempt to facilitate organizational learning.

During the event, Javier Ekboir, ILAC Coordinator, led a discussion on innovation research, and Cristina Sette, Programme Specialist, was one of the facilitators of the discussion on organizational learning and contributed to the design of learning strategies.

ILAC sponsored the participation of Nadia Manning from ICT-KM to help the CPWF KM team to identify possible opportunities for knowledge sharing within basins and cross basins. Conditional on the future structure of the ICT-KM team, ILAC will continue a close relationship with it on capturing and documenting the learning which will occur in the decentralized experimentation with a centralized learning initiative.

Positioning Analysis

ILAC has been working closely with Bioversity’s Communication’s team in helping it with an internal and external exercise to review its long term strategy and positioning. Among several activities, the exercise included identifying relations among Bioversity’s stakeholders and competitors (using the Net-Map tools), interviews and questionnaires.

ILAC Initiative Publications

Barahona, C. (2010). Randomised Control Trials for the Impact Evaluation of Development Initiatives: A Statistician’s Point of View. ILAC Working Paper No 13. Rome, Institutional Learning and Change (ILAC) Initiative. http://www.cgiar-ilac.org/content/working-papers
This paper contains the technical and practical reflections of a statistician on the use of Randomised Control Trial designs (RCT) for evaluating the impact of development initiatives. It is divided into three parts. The first part discusses RCTs in impact evaluation, their origin, how they have developed and the debate that has been generated in the evaluation circles. The second part examines difficult issues faced in applying RCT designs to the impact evaluation of development initiatives, to what extent this type of design can be applied rigorously, the validity of the assumptions underlying RCT designs in this context, and the opportunities and constraints inherent in their adoption. The third part discusses the some of the ethical issues raised by RCTs, the need to establish ethical standards for studies about development options and the need for an open mind in the selection of research methods and tools.
Lilja, N., Kristjanson, P., Watts, J. (2010). Rethinking Impact: understanding the complexity of poverty and change - overview. Development in Practice 20(8): 917-932.
The international workshop ‘Rethinking Impact: Understanding the Complexity of Poverty and Change’ (Cali, Colombia, 26–28 March 2008) explored the challenges inherent in evaluating agricultural research-for-development efforts, identifying lessons and approaches for sustainably improving livelihoods. Use-oriented research which links knowledge with action has greater welfare and development impacts. Researchers must help to link diverse stakeholders in order to create and share knowledge for effective, sustainable action. The legitimacy of such boundary-spanning work needs to be recognised and rewarded, and sufficient resources dedicated to it. Traditional economic-impact assessment does little justice to complex poverty-related activities, which require a diversity of methods and enhanced capacity.

Coming publications:
• ILAC Working Paper on Applying Innovation System Principles
• ILAC Briefs on dealing with complexity and organizational learning

ILAC publications are available for free download on the ILAC website (www.cgiar-ilac.org). A limited number of paper copies may be obtained upon request. Contact ilac@cgiar.org for more information.

BetterEvaluation.org

As part of the IFAD funded project entitled "Impact Evaluation Approaches for Collaborative Agricultural Research & Development", a platform called BetterEvaluation.org is under development

BetterEvaluation will provide an interactive platform that assists users to identify potentially useful methods, provide information and advice, link them to more detailed guidance, and provide examples of methods in use. It will include methods for evaluation tasks that are often left out of evaluation tool boxes, such as methods for identifying and prioritizing relevant values, for synthesizing data, and for undertaking causal analysis when traditional experimental and quasi-experimental research designs are not possible or appropriate. It will link users to each other, encourage users to generate and upload content, and facilitate the rating of evaluation resources by users.

More information can be found at http://www.cgiar-ilac.org/content/betterevaluation

Evaluation of Collaborative Research

Among the IFAD funded project activities is a synthesis report on evaluation methods and approaches being used in collaborative agricultural research, in the CGIAR and beyond. The study has been carried out by Dr Gillian Westhorp from Community Matters, Australia. The final report is expected to be ready in May 2011.

Events attended by ILAC Members

Cristina Sette attended the European Evaluation Society annual conference, held in Prague, Czech Republic in October 2010

Javier Ekboir and Cristina Sette attended the American Evaluation Association annual conference, held in San Antonio, USA in November 2010

Javier Ekboir attended the international conference on “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” from 10-12 February, 2011 in New Delhi, India. Interesting videos were produced and can be found at http://2020conference.ifpri.info/

News and Events from the Broader Community

Events

Network of Networks on Impact Evaluation (NONIE) Meeting
NONIE have announced a call for proposals for the next NONIE meeting, 28 - 29 March 2011, Paris, France. More information at http://www.worldbank.org/ieg/nonie/

International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS): Global Assembly 2011
Theme: “Evaluation in Turbulent Times: the Crises of Food, Fuel and Finances”.
When: 11-15 April 2011
Venue: Kempinski Hotel, Amman, Jordan
For more information about this International Conference visit the www.IDEAS-int.org website.

Conference 'Mind the Gap: From Evidence to Policy Impact'
The Mind the Gap conference on impact evaluation will address these questions and offer possible solutions. The conference will take place in Cuernavaca, Mexico, 15-17 June 2011, and is co-hosted by The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico (INSP), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and the Center for Labor and Social Distributive Studies in coordination with the Impact Evaluation Network (CEDLAS-IEN). For more information visit the site http://www.impactevaluation2011.org/

Conference 'Creativity, Innovation and Economic Development'
9th Globelics International Conference, 15-17 November 2011, Buenos Aires, Argentina
For more information visit the site http://www.globelics.org/