Suchergebnisse

There is a growing recognition that programs that seek to change people's lives are intervening in complex systems, which puts a particular set of requirements on program monitoring and evaluation. Developing complexity-aware program monitoring and evaluation systems within existing organizations is difficult because they challenge traditional orthodoxy. Little has been written about the practical experience of doing so. This article describes the development of a complexity-aware evaluation approach in the CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems. We outline the design and methods used including trend lines, panel data, after action reviews, building and testing theories of change, outcome evidencing and realist synthesis. We identify and describe a set of design principles for developing complexity-aware program monitoring and evaluation. Finally, we discuss important lessons and recommendations for other programs facing similar challenges. These include developing evaluation designs that meet both learning and accountability requirements; making evaluation a part of a program's overall approach to achieving impact; and, ensuring evaluation cumulatively builds useful theory as to how different types of program trigger change in different contexts.

The Bolivian National Constitution of 2009 prohibits the commercialization of genetically modified organisms, but the decree permitting the unique event of glyphosate resistance was enacted earlier. Herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean is the only transgenic crop grown by farmers in Bolivia, introduced initially by farmers. This pilot study of smallholders was conducted in the midst of political sensitivities and exceptional weather. Results support the hypotheses that adoption of HT soybeans is associated with use of less toxic herbicides and that Mennonite farmers are a primary source of HT seed and related information. The association that subsidized non-HT growers is the major source for conventional seed. Using a control function approach to address endogeneity and selection bias with censored outcome variables, we find that HT soybean adoption has a large, positive impact on household off-farm income and is positively related to off-farm work of the second major contributor to soybean production (wife or children of household head), but not that of the first (household head).

Many rural poor and marginalized people strive to make a living in social-ecological systems that are characterized by multiple and often inequitable interactions across agents, scale and space. Uncertainty and inequality in such systems require research and development interventions to be adaptive, support learning and to engage with underlying drivers of poverty. Such complexity-aware approaches to planning, monitoring and evaluating development interventions are gaining strength, yet, there is still little empirical evidence of what it takes to implement them in practice. In this paper, we share learning from an agricultural research program that used participatory action research and theory of change to foster learning and support transformative change in aquatic agricultural systems. We reflect on our use of critical reflection within participatory agricultural research interventions, and our use of theory of change to collectively surface and revisit assumptions about how change happens. We share learning on the importance of being strengths-based in engaging stakeholders across scales and building a common goal as a starting point, and then staging a more critical practice as capacity is built and opportunities for digging deeper emerge.