Service 1: Facilitating a Community of Action & Reflection

Objectives

The Community of Action and Reflection  – CoAR aims to reinforce synergies of actors and impacts between DeSIRA projects in and across geographic clusters. The action-research interventions of DeSIRA projects will be jointly reviewed and backed up by experience sharing, joint learning and critical reflection, at the level of the global community, on how to make research work for open and responsible agricultural innovation. 

This will focus on three main areas:

• Managing for impact, covering all issues related to project design and implementation for which DeSIRA LIFT SA1 has been providing services to reinforce projects in 5 core managerial capacities, and how this support has helped projects overcome their challenges. 
• Innovation domains, covering the core innovation domains targeted by the DeSIRA Initiative and the different projects.;  how their action and management, have allowed them to contribute to these innovations and how they could or should be further addressed. Agroecology is the first and immediately identifiable Innovation Domain. 
• Innovation systems, covering the pathways for innovation followed by the projects at the micro level of the innovation niches and their direct stakeholders, at the meso level of innovation support services including academia and research and the macro level of the broader Agricultural Innovation System, including policymakers, innovation policies and innovation strategies. Multi-stakeholder innovation approaches and typically Living Labs are innovation systems. 

Through this Community of Action and Reflection, DeSIRA-LIFT will offer opportunities for the project teams to meet, share their managerial challenges, and (re)shape their intervention strategies within a set of different innovation domains and follow different innovation strategies toward impacts. 

The CoAR also seeks to document the innovation processes and the impacts of DeSIRA projects and the DeSIRA initiative as a whole. This will be built along a Learning Agenda. Knowledge products of different types will be produced by all DeSIRA-LIFT Services through peer learning, co-construction processes and direct interaction with projects as they progress towards their outcomes.

Typical products will consist of Briefs, Stories of Change, Knowledge reviews as well as projects mapping and information.

Target audience and beneficiaries

• Pillar 1 projects, their leading organizations and boundary partners. 
• Partner XP4 under DeSIRA LIFT SA2 as well as sister regional organisations in Asia -Pacific and Latin America on an ad-hoc basis. 
• The broader community of actors and partners of agricultural innovation.

Project level 

• Projects equipped with a branding protocol (i.e. methodological tools and approaches), to communicate achievements similar to those of other projects and on the DeSIRA initiative. 
• Increased awareness of AIS Stakeholders in countries where DeSIRA projects operate about achievements of DeSIRA projects and the role of Research Action in these achievements.  
• Increased ownership, by those same AIS Stakeholders, of outcomes of DeSIRA projects with the potential to further support them and make them sustainable.

DeSIRA Community Level 

• Skilled Communities of Research-Action-Reflexion on “How to support Agricultural Innovation”, at regional and global levels identified, reinforced and equipped with autonomous learning mechanisms. 
• Increased awareness of the international community and organizations working towards sustainable and responsible Agricultural Innovation about outcomes of Research-led or Research-supported projects targeting climate-relevant, productive and sustainable transformation of agriculture and food systems in low and middle-income countries.