Cop Webinar 4: Managing innovation agendas: how DeSIRA projects balance national and global priorities – English

Date: Monday 9th October 2023  

10:00-12:00 CEST English session for DeSIRA Projects in Asia, East and English-speaking Africa

Registration link (The meeting will be held via Zoom )

For more detailed information click here

Objectives of the webinar:

The aim of the webinar is to review how the agricultural innovations promoted by DeSIRA projects simultaneously relate to national and international agendas, and to the needs of those to which those innovations are directed. How this creates tensions between projects implementation and expectations, and how projects themselves and some of the mechanisms they entail can help (re) connect needs and interests, across the various levels of innovation niches, innovation support services, the national and international agricultural innovation system, and generate impact owned and acknowledged by all. 

The webinar will help identify trade-off areas in innovation agendas and mechanisms for alignement between local and global initiatives.

Background and questions

The EU-funded DeSIRA initiative (Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture, in short DeSIRA) was launched in 2018 with the aim of strengthening Research and Innovation, within an AIS perspective, in order to support the sustainable transformation of agri-food systems.

Research and innovation projects are implemented against the backdrop of broader international and regional agendas such as UN SDGs, the UN Sustainable Food Systems, the EU Green Deal, or the One Health approach, all calling for changes and innovations in Agriculture and Food.

These agendas themselves result from vast consultation processes, within countries, regional and international arenas, in which civil society, research organizations, and government organizations take part.

International partners such as the FAO, the European Union, or IFAD and donors then translate these agendas into funding opportunities for research organizations, in partnership with other organizations, to design and implement projects meant to meet the objectives of this international agenda.

Translating and meeting these objectives through project activities remains challenging due to dynamics and contingencies of context, particularly when it comes to partners’ interests and beneficiaries’ needs.

Projects however intend to ensure uptake and wherever possible scaling of their results, by their direct stakeholders and at the level of the Agricultural Innovation System into which they are set. As such they loop back into local, national and broader agendas to which they bring a contribution.

By doing so, they contribute to further setting innovation agendas.

The two questions underlying this webinar are:

• When and how do tensions between projects’ innovation agendas and broader innovation agendas occur?
• Should projects plan and develop strategies to help synchronize agendas, using their activities as drivers for collective action?