CHAPTER 5 - STRENGTHENING THE LINKAGES BETWEEN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

5.1 Programme Overview

Programme 4 is a successor of the old ‘Cross-Ecosystems Programme’ (CEP). It combines three social science Projects of the old Programme. It also includes most elements of the ‘Accelerating the Impact of the Rice Research Programme’, including training and individual country projects.

Previous work on increasing productivity by adding value to rice and reducing drudgery of farm labour was partly curtailed and partly transferred to Programme 2.

Currently the Programme has three Projects. Project 10, ‘Understanding Rural Livelihood Systems for Rice Research Prioritization and Impact Assessment’, combines two earlier projects from the CEP. Project 11, ‘Enhancing Ecological Sustainability and Improving Livelihoods through Ecoregional Approaches to Integrated Natural Resource Management’, evolved from the older CE-6 project, ‘Implementing Ecoregional Approaches to Improve Natural Resource Management in Asia’. The origin of this work is in the Systemwide Ecoregional Initiative launched by the CGIAR in the early 1990s. For the Asian humid and sub-humid tropics, IRRI was chosen as the convening Centre. Project 12, ‘Facilitating Rice Research for Impact’, combines several earlier projects and includes work on developing decision-support systems for knowledge and knowledge-intensive farming systems.

Table 5.1 indicates the financial vicissitudes of these three Projects (and their predecessors) back to 1998. The data suggest high variability in all these Projects against a background of long-term decline in aggregate funding for IRRI. The variability is to be expected, given the larger role that special project funding plays in these activities, although it must be said that Project 10 has been better protected against the general decline in funding than the other Projects.

A first glance at the Project descriptions suggest that this Programme is residual to everything that IRRI should be doing but which is not done in any other Programme. The stated mission of the Programme is to bridge the gap between generation and dissemination of technologies and bring farmers’ perspectives into research planning for improving research relevance and fast tracking of impact. While this encompasses the activities that are currently undertaken in this Programme adequately enough, it appears to have been written after the individual Projects were somehow gathered into the Programme. Had this been written before the Programme was created, it would have been too diffuse to provide an indication as to where the Programme should be heading, and what projects to embark upon.

A more coherent presentation can be made if we separate the Programme into two parts, one consisting of Projects 10 and 11, and the other part being Project 12, each of which has its own rationale. It so happens that each part is closely identified with the work of a particular Division - Social Sciences in the case of Projects 10 (wholly) and 11 (mostly), and International Programs Management Office (IPMO) for Project 12. Therefore, the following assessment of the Programme is bound up with the assessment of the Divisions concerned and includes three sections: Social Science Projects covering Projects 10 and 11, Social Sciences at IRRI discussing social science beyond Programme 4, and Training and Country Programmes dealing with Project 12, ending up with a section on Conclusions.

Table 5.1 - Budgeted and Actual Expenditures¹ on the Direct Costs² of Projects in Programme 4 (and their Predecessors), 1998-2004

¹ Thousand US$.

² Direct costs include the cost of Project implementation such as salaries and benefits of Project staff and related general operating costs.

³ Before 2002 equals the sum of CE-5 and Rl-1.

⁴ Before 2002 equals CE-6.

⁵ Before 2002 equals the sum of CE-4, RL-5, IM-1, IM-2 and IM-4 including Country Projects.

Source: IRRI, Administration and Finance.

5.2 Social Science Projects

5.2.1 Understanding Rural Livelihood Systems

5.2.1.1 Achievements

The planned outputs for Project 10 are: (1) Rice-sector analysis conducted and rice statistics database maintained and shared with NARS; (2) Rural livelihood systems studied and the interaction among technology, infrastructure, and institutions analysed; (3) Constraints to adoption of improved rice technologies assessed; and (4) Impact of rice research on poverty alleviation and sustainable management of natural resources assessed.

Project 10 covers many facets of the social sciences activities, and it is best to divide the outputs of this Project into two broad groups. In the first group, the Social Sciences Division, the primary owner of this Project, serves the rice research community, both within and outside of IRRI, by providing database and useful analysis of the economics of new technology. In the second group, the users of the output are other social science researchers or policy makers. The borderline between these two groups is not sharply defined but the division provides a useful way to proceed with the discussion.

Falling squarely within the first group is the analysis of the constraints to and impact of new technologies. In the case of impact analysis, the Project team has embarked on an ex ante analysis of the introduction of hybrid rice in Tamil Nadu, India, and found that the undoubted yield advantage is neutralized by the lower price fetched by hybrid rice because of its lower quality. The work was later expanded to cover five countries, and the results confirmed. This was conveyed to breeders working on hybrid rice, and quality was given a higher priority among the breeding objectives.

In another ex ante analysis of the impact of stress tolerance, the researchers estimate yield losses due to insects, diseases and abiotic stresses by soliciting the perceptions of researchers, extension workers and farmers, and arrive at the conclusion that drought, submergence and weeds cause more losses than insects and diseases. Stated thus baldly, the results may not appear surprising, but the quantification is important and can lead to further analysis and be used in allocating research resources. More specifically, among the diseases, bacterial leaf blight and blast were identified as the major causes of yield loss, ahead of tungro virus, which had been given priority in IRRI. As a result of this work, there was an adjustment of the Institute’s priorities. Furthermore, the results of the work have been utilized by IRRI to justify investments in particular activities when submitting proposals to donors.

Ex post analysis of the impact of IRRI’s contribution to varietal improvement research was also completed as part of an overall study by the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (TAC CGIAR). The study traces the genealogies of the varieties released by IRRI and by the NARS, and shows that IRRI’s contribution remains quantifiably significant: even though most of the later releases have come from the NARS, they have as their ancestors an IRRI line.

A case study^[38] of the impact of rice research on poverty alleviation in Bangladesh was conducted and indicates that while the poor, who are mostly landless, benefit little directly from rice research, they benefit substantially from the availability of year-round employment and agricultural growth induced rural non-farm activities, as well as from lower rice prices. These findings were made available to the policy makers and civil society groups, through a series of policy dialogues, supported by an externally funded Project called ‘Poverty Elimination through Rice Research Assistance’ (PETRRA). The Dhaka-based Centre for Policy Dialogue invited senior government officials, university teachers and other elites to six dialogues, whose topics include, among others: agriculture’s role in poverty alleviation and strategies and policies to support rural non-farm activities.

This last study shades into the second group of research outputs of Project 10, in which the major users are the broader community of social science researchers and policy makers. The first, which a rice research institute must keep a careful watch over, is the balance of world rice supply and demand. In this respect, IRRI piggybacked on the continuing work at IFPRI which models supply and demand of all agricultural commodities. As the rice model depends on accurate and up-to-date estimates of the various parameters used in the model, it engaged in detailed studies of a number of Asian countries, with special emphasis on rice. These studies have been gathered into a volume entitled Developments in the Asian Rice Economy, published by IRRI in 2002. Since then, staff commitment to this part of the Project has been cut.

Rice sector work is not only confined to this modelling exercise, but extends to other policy issues. A work in progress concerns trade liberalization in the Philippines, funded by the Philippines Government. A paper from this Project shows that while that country has made great progress in increasing rice yields during the Green Revolution, and has brought domestic prices down considerably, those prices have remained static since about 1980 at about the same level as world prices in that year^[39]. Since then world prices have continued to decline. Maintaining domestic prices above world prices through import controls after 1980 merely further impoverishes the Filipino poor who are mostly from rice-deficit households.

At the microeconomic level, Project 10 examines rural livelihoods. Here IRRI, in partnerships with social scientists in the various NARS and capitalizing on data previously collected by IRRI, went to the same households that were drawn upon in the earlier sample survey to collect the current year’s data, to obtain what are known as panel data. One conclusion that has clearly emerged is the diminished role of rice in the incomes of most households as non-farm activities came to provide more and more of household income, and increased income inequality because the distribution of non-farm incomes is more skewed than the distribution of farm incomes. The generation of primary panel data of this kind cannot but be useful to researchers everywhere, and it is to be hoped that IRRI will be able to make them easily accessible.

Another activity is to use GIS to generate a poverty map of Bangladesh, which combines socio-economic data from the aforementioned inquiry into the impact of rice research with bio-physical and climatic data at sub-district levels (an average sub-district in Bangladesh would have about a quarter of a million people). The cross-linking of these data by using GIS is used to uncover relationships which explain household income levels, and that better explain poverty, and thus provide useful policy guidelines. The preliminary results were presented at a workshop attended by a member of the Planning Commission and staff from the Ministry of Agriculture.

5.2.1.2 Assessment

Project 10 is somewhat sprawling. Each of the four outputs expected of the Project is worth pursuing and reaches satisfying results, but they are all quite different and show little possibilities of synergy, except perhaps between Output 3 (‘Constraints to adoption’) and Output 4 (‘Impact of rice research’). The main concern is whether the resources (scientific, financial and managerial) of the Project are being spread too thinly. On the scientific management side, the Programme successfully supplements its resources by drawing from other research institutions: for example, IFPRI on rice supply/demand analysis in Project 10; and with the Economic Growth Centre, Yale University on the impact of germplasm enhancement also in Project 10. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Project remains amorphous in terms of purposes and objectives.

Discussion of how to tackle this problem will have to wait until we examine the role of social sciences in IRRI in the following section. For the moment, what can be proposed is the elimination of the work done on rice sector analysis (except for the rice database and the compilation of the World Rice Statistics). Much of the rice sector analysis can be best done at IFPRI, or by economists at Asian universities. Nonetheless, IRRI economists should maintain watch on work done in this area as background to their work, and at least one person in the Division should have skills in this area.

5.2.2 Enhancing Ecological Sustainability and Improving Livelihoods

5.2.2.1 Achievements

The expected output of Project 11 is ‘the ecoregional concept for INRM adopted and systems approaches applied for improving livelihoods and sustaining natural resources’.

At first sight, the Project appears overly ambitious, aiming as it does "to improve livelihoods of rural communities by enhancing the sustainability of their supporting socio-ecological systems". What makes the Project manageable is the common method of analysis it employs to answer a wide array of questions. The Project employs a systems perspective, and builds upon extant NRM research at the farm or field level, and then brings in additional tools (e.g. GIS) to model and analyse interactions at higher levels of biological, physical and social organization. It thus uses a model developed with the Wageningen University to explore scenarios of resource use and determine trade-offs between objectives. Based on such modelling, multiple-scale and multiple-stakeholder approaches were then implemented in three pilot regions for INRM.

One successful activity provides a glimpse into how such exercises can be translated into policies. One of the test sites happened to be in the Mekong River Delta, where the Government took it to be its task to control saline water intrusion during the dry season in order to promote the expansion of rice production. But this adversely affected the livelihoods of fishers and shrimp farmers, who breached embankments to let saline water into their ponds. Since the pilot study area was nearby, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from IRRI, IWMI, universities in Vietnam and the UK studied the impact of water policies in Mekong River Delta, and the systems framework of the Project was ideally suited for such difficult policy choices, involving the trade-off between rice production and income from shrimp farming and fisheries. The Government had by now realized that its policy to maximize rice production was not working, but what was missing was the design of a new policy to replace the old one. The Project was able to articulate a new policy that had a clear technical backing, but dependent on data and judgments provided by local stakeholders. This convinced the Government of Vietnam, which quickly implemented the new policy.

In another test site in Northern Vietnam, the Project aims to improve the food security of the minority ethnic groups while ensuring sustainability in agricultural production and natural resource base of the fragile environment. The site is obviously complex, both bio-physically and socio-economically. The Project capitalized on and mobilized the knowledge extant in the area, and seriously attempted to scale up location specific studies. While there is no simple ‘technology package’ to deliver to the farmers of the area, it enables them to do something more important: it allows mutual social learning, whereby the interactions it elicits among stakeholders provide better insight into the local social dynamics.

5.2.2.2 Assessment

When IRRI was asked by the CGIAR to convene research employing the ecoregional approach on the Asian humid and sub-humid tropics, it accepted the task somewhat reluctantly, as it did not wish to venture much outside its focus on rice. But having accepted it, it went about the task systematically and deliberately, with the focus on knowledge building and testing out models of interactions at different levels of biological, physical, and social organization. Project 11 is the result, and its output has had clear impact in specific locations, such as the problems faced by the Vietnamese authorities with rice farmers as against fishers and shrimp farms on water and land use in the Mekong Delta as described above. Just as important, it shows how work on integrated NRM should be done, combining as it does, the ‘soft’ but nonetheless necessary participatory approach with the ‘hard’ mathematical modelling and computer simulation. Finally, the Project is one of the few in IRRI where it ventures into areas where non-rice crops are important. Indeed, in the Mekong Delta case, IRRI ironically ends up proposing a policy that would reduce rice production in an area that is otherwise ideal for rice production.

Given the excellent work that is being done in this Project and its sister Project 8, it is a pity that resources are being more constrained, as employment rules and general staff cuts necessitated the departure of a very capable IRF. With this departure, work of this nature has been curtailed because of low IRS time allocation. Fortunately, an important component of this Project is the transfer of technology to national research groups, and it is hoped that they will continue the good work initiated in collaboration with IRRI. Yet IRRI’s management has to carefully consider the usefulness of this type of ecoregional work in its own work in its two production Programmes.

In line with this thinking, it is perhaps best that this Project be housed in the production Programmes. Currently, the Project Leader also heads Project 8 in Programme 3, with which there is a clear overlap, and there are obvious benefits from a merger of the two Projects. However, Programme 2 will also benefit from the kind of work done in Project 11. IRRI’s management can then base its decision on whether to put more resources into the GIS unit that is in charge of this work by seeing whether there is a major demand from the two production Programmes.

5.3 Social Sciences in IRRI

The Social Sciences Division has had a distinguished record of productively contributing to the work of the natural scientists in IRRI, even in the earlier period when IRRI had a single-minded concentration on increasing yields, and the contribution of social scientists to ongoing research might have appeared superfluous. Now that IRRI is pursuing more complex goals, social scientists’ contributions are more crucial than ever.

The quality of social science work in IRRI can be rated as fairly high, but with some heterogeneity. In coming to this judgement, the Panel considered not only the output from Programme 4 (both in terms of published work, and in their interactions with NARS’ researchers), but also the Division’s contributions to other Programmes. The Panel also heard the expressed need from the production Programme leaders for more social scientists’ input into their Programmes’ work.

Social scientists can contribute to the work of the Institute at three stages. The first stage is during the formulation of a project or subprojects. At that point they need to work with Project Leaders, use their own analytical tools to estimate the benefits and costs of the project or task, the probability of its successful fruition as a scientific project and the probability of its product being adopted. This will also help the management’s prioritization task.

The second stage is during the project or task implementation. At this point, social scientists provide a feasibility check while the project is going on, to see what constrains the farmers from adopting the evolving technologies. At the same time, where the task involves working with farmers or their communities in participatory research, social scientists’ contribution is also needed to map out the interaction process, to design the methods of collaboration, and then to define the characteristics of the interventions. Equally importantly, at any time during this stage, it may be the case that the task is no longer worth accomplishing, either because the research is going nowhere, which is what the scientists themselves could realize, or - and this is where social scientists are needed - because external developments in the rice market or the input markets may drastically reduce the benefits of the project.

The final stage, once the task is completed and assuming it to be successful, is for the social scientists to evaluate the impact of the technology generated in increasing the well-being of people affected.

Social sciences’ work would more effectively improve the Institute’s output if it is drawn upon to participate from the very beginning of the project and continues until after the project is completed. This does not imply that the same scientist be assigned to a given task throughout its life, rather the opposite. Organizationally, the Social Sciences Division will implement the first and third stages of the task cycle. At the same time, it will supply social scientists to work in the two production Programmes during the second stage.

In terms of the current Projects, Project 11 will then become part of the two production Programmes. As for Project 10, the Panel has already suggested that the rice sector analysis component be de-emphasized (except for the statistical database). The constraints component would be in the second stage of the task cycle and therefore should be housed in the two production Programmes, while the impact component would be the third stage of the task cycle, and would therefore remain in the Social Sciences Division. This would leave the extremely useful rural livelihoods Project unaccounted for. The Social Sciences Division should still conduct this last component because, after all, it provides valuable data resources for both the first and the third stages of the task cycle. In this picture, the Social Sciences Division will still be conducting substantive research (although whether all this research should be placed together into something called a Project or Programme is just a matter of nomenclature).

But what the Panel is proposing is more than mere adjustments to Project 10, where the constraints and impact work applies to a small subset of projects and activities carried out in the Institute. What is being proposed here is a more integral role by social scientists to help in prioritizing the projects so as to maximize adoption and people’s welfare. The Panel recognizes that the current level of resources available for social sciences work is inadequate, but leaves it to IRRI to work out how much of the greater scope of that work will be met by additional resources, and how much by a realignment of the personnel within the Social Sciences Division.

5.4 Training and Country Offices

According to the Project title and goal, Project 12 facilitates rice research for impact by building national research and delivery capacities and validating the products of research with target group farmers.

The purpose of Project 12 is to bridge the gap between technological production and technological use. Dissemination of improved technologies that will reduce drudgery, raise incomes and protect the environment across hundreds of millions of rice farmers in Asia is an immense task requiring the cooperation of many NARS partners, advanced institutions, and non-government organizations. IRRI sees its role in this process as threefold:

• to improve national capacities in problem identification and knowledge transfer;

• to improve farming systems through participatory approaches to validate and adopt knowledge-intensive farming systems; and

• to assist NARS in developing better focussed, high quality national research.

Project 12 operates across all other Projects in IRRI, providing the framework to deliver knowledge and technologies generated elsewhere into national and provincial research and extension agencies. To be effective, the Project personnel must collaborate closely with those in all other IRRI Projects that have deliverable outputs, and particularly through the Consortia, as well as establishing and maintaining strong ties with IRRI’s representatives and immediate institutional collaborators in each partner country. Internal and external institutional relationships are currently being evaluated and redirected to enhance delivery efficiency. This has required a review of the existing operations in training and capacity building, and a review of IRRI’s interactions with different rice producing countries around the world. Consideration is given to present research capacity, level of activity with IRRI (including whether IRRI maintains an office or staff with them, or collaborative arrangements), and the level of support that IRRI can be reasonably expected to provide to requests for assistance^[40].

IRRI’s headquarters’ location within the University of the Philippines Los Baños, in which many IRS staff are affiliated Faculty members, has always provided the ideal opportunity for the teaching and supervision of graduates drawn from many nationalities. Short courses have also been a long-standing feature at IRRI, carried out in its own Training Centre. Some of these training activities are now changing as the result of changes in the external environments of partner countries.

IRRI has always committed itself to training up a cadre of rice researchers since its inception, which now form a strong network of alumni, who amplify the work of germplasm and information dissemination to a far greater extent than would otherwise be possible, given the relatively small number of staff available in IRRI itself at any one time. Over the past forty years IRRI has trained more than 14,000 rice scientists through this process. During the 1991-2002 decade 403 people received post graduate degrees (MSc and PhDs) and 493 came as on-the-job trainees for further skills development. An additional 1,631 participated in short courses of a week to a month’s duration on specific topics. Over 90% came from Asia, and more than a quarter were women.

In addition, many thousands of farmers and hundreds of extension workers are involved in participatory learning processes in their own countries through IRRI’s work in special projects on capacity building, the activities of the Consortia, and a range of information-dissemination initiatives. The pro-active encouragement of women includes offering a special training course for women in leadership, drawing women from a wide range of national institutions. The Panel commends this initiative, especially important for a crop in which so much of the labour force is female and research objectives are gender applicable. Many of the senior research staff in national research institutions, such as Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute and the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, received their graduate training through this route.

While scholars enrolled for higher degrees with universities with which IRRI has formal agreements have continued to come to IRRI to conduct their research, intake is currently 50% less than at the beginning of the last decade. The number of on-the-job trainees has also fallen but to a lesser extent, whereas participants in regularly offered short-term group courses have risen recently. This reflects the pressures now being placed on national staff to be away only for short periods, at lesser overall cost to their agencies. On the other hand, there are many other increased opportunities for training, knowledge and capacity building that are replacing this form of training.

Many externally funded projects have specific capacity building components built into them, such as the major investment by the Swiss Development Commission in Laos, where, over three five-year phases, a complete research capacity in rice production has been developed, including training of national research and extension staff, as well as the establishment of national germplasm, varietal evaluation and production systems testing. In the PETTRA project a total of 27,000 training days were conducted in 2003. Such capacity building projects draw resource material from IRRI, and may support graduate students to work at IRRI, but are less financially dependent on the resources available through IRRI in-house training than those projects supported through core and restricted core funding. IRS IRRI staff took part in 8,000 training days across the region and 12,000 training days at IRRI. Taken together, these statistics represent a very large investment in time and effort on the part of all those committed to improving rice productivity and this is impressive.

The massive revolution in information exchange and knowledge systems that has accompanied the development of the Internet and telecommunications in the past five years has provided new opportunities for IRRI to achieve its training and information dissemination objectives, and perhaps to overcome some of these restrictions. At the same time, some of IRRI’s traditional national partners are maturing to become such significant research collaborators in their own right, and no longer require the same level of capacity building assistance, with the result that more resources can be channelled into countries that have less capacity.

In 1999, IRRI hosted a meeting to consider the potential for Information Computing Technologies (ICT)^[41] in extending new knowledge systems for rice faster to a much wider audience, assess the value of distance education and assist in direct ICT training. IRRI’s vision translated into developing a ‘rice-knowledge centre without walls’, using a high speed, high bandwidth node on late generation internet. This has required substantial investment to support the new technologies and a dedicated group of professionals committed to maintaining and constantly upgrading the service. However, compilation of resource material and delivery of specialist subject matter still rely on the continued contribution of IRRI scientists from across the whole organization. This ensures that there is continuously relevant material and close quality assurance of information that is packaged into easy-to-use ‘tools’ for practitioners. Two decision support tools have already been developed - ‘Rice Doctor’ and ‘TropRice’. These have been highly popular, providing practitioners with immediate sources of information via the net, and a back-up set of hard-copy pamphlets, further sources of information and other linkages.

The Rice Knowledge Bank has been a major product from this initiative, with both CD and on-line products, much of it being regularly upgraded, and with translations into all major Asian languages. Co-development with NARS users and a wide range of strategic partner organizations ensures that information is tailored to local conditions and needs, using a wide range of technology options to ensure that less advantaged clients can access the new products. This is a major achievement of enormous consequences, and the Panel was enthusiastic about its potential for speeding up the acquisition of improved farming systems, more in-depth knowledge and greater food security in rice everywhere.

Future developments already in the pipeline or planned for this concept include collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) providing their information sources on health and disease in rice growing areas through this portal, and collaboration with the World Fish Centre and other institutions on Rice-Fish systems. Experience at IRRI has shown that eLearning (distance education by web processes) is not the way to go at present. Courses that have been conducted by internet and course materials alone are not so successful, and have less participant satisfaction than courses that blend person-to-person contact with small packages of well targeted knowledge on client specific topics. IRRI has a head start in this area and its experience should be drawn upon in developing models for future IT-learning developments across the CGIAR as a whole. The CGIAR Learning Resources Centre developed by ICRAF and IRRI is a case in point, where IRRI’s role in providing lessons learnt, input on technical issues and optimization of the system of delivery has been very useful.

It is hard to overstress the importance of this development, and IRRI’s commitment to free and open distribution of rice knowledge through a wide variety of distribution channels. The Panel sees this as an area of expanding need in the future, as the pace of biotechnology information speeds up and the increasing complexities of rice system management places increasing knowledge demands on research and extension personnel as well as on farmers everywhere. Without the adequate capture, interpretation and translation of this knowledge into locale specific and relevant forms of communication, much of the value of the advanced science in rice that is currently blossoming around the world will not have benefit in the rice farming communities.

The Panel considers that Project 12 falls into a special category that should justify the creation of a separate cross-cutting service unit, rather than being considered as a part of Programme where the majority of other work concerns socio-economic issues, including economic evaluations, ecosystem characterization and impact studies. In the future, if IRRI increasingly adopts the role of information and technology facilitator between the advanced research institutes and clients in rice-growing regions, the task for this Project will expand greatly and resources will need to be diverted from conventional areas of scientific research in IRRI to support its expanded role.

Already, the Training Centre is one area that has strong links with countries in Africa (particularly Madagascar and Tanzania), and in the future demand for rice knowledge systems from African countries may increase. Similarly, there are rice producing countries in the first world with which IRRI maintains a range of linkages in research collaboration. With the current very high level of research activity that is being devoted to rice biotechnology in some of these countries, it is probable that the volume of information that will need to be analysed and ‘repackaged’ for client users in Asia and Africa will also increase rapidly in the next five years, requiring expansion in the Training Centre to accommodate this. The Panel suggests that budget allocations within all Projects more clearly specify their needs for training in the future, so that their responsibilities and roles in capacity building can be more clearly identified internally and by IRRI’s clients.

5.5 Conclusions

This Chapter examines the work carried out by the Social Sciences Division and the IPMO. The Panel considers that relevant and high quality work is being done in each of the three Projects. The main thrust of the Panel comments concerns the role that these two Units play in the Institute, and the dissatisfaction that the Panel feels in seeing their work placed alongside all the research Projects.

The Panel would like to see the work of social scientists at IRRI being expanded into an involvement with every major task at its beginning to examine whether its benefits exceed its cost, and also to weigh the probabilities of its success and its adoption. During its execution, social scientists are needed to consider the constraints limiting farmers’ adoption, and also whether the task should be terminated or redirected. Should the project or task be carried on through to its completion, and assuming it to be successful, social scientists are needed to evaluate its impact on the well-being of affected households. Such an expansion in the role would imply that IRRI expands the role of social science substantially.

Similarly, training in IRRI should not be treated just as another project. Its activities already spread across the full extent of the research Projects, which have constant interaction with its functions in providing information to the Rice Knowledge Bank and its contributions to training modules. The Panel envisages an increase in the prominence of the whole of the knowledge delivery activities in IRRI in the future. IRRI’s experience and lead in packaging knowledge and delivering it through the Rice Knowledge Bank, for example, can provide a model for other initiatives in the CGIAR. The ‘Training’ centre will be better viewed as a cross-institute programme that contributes to the delivery of the research output.

Both of the observations pertaining to social science work and to training imply that Programme 4 as it stands should cease to exist.

The Panel recommends that activities on ‘Constraints to adoption of improved rice technologies assessed’ in Project 10 and the entire Project 11 be transferred to Programmes 2 and 3, while the rest of the activities in Project 10 be done in a new stand-alone Project, with Programme 4 being dissolved.