Research in the CGIAR: An urgent need
for systems analysis and more
integrative research approaches
Anne-Marie Izac
CGIAR Consortium
Livestock and Fish expert workshop on systems analysis for value chain transformation
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Amsterdam, 19 November 2014

Outline
1. Looking back: 5 key lessons
2. Looking ahead: new research approaches
needed - systems analysis and
transdisciplinarity
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1. Looking back: five key lessons
• Generic ToC: providing new scientific evidence & improved practices will
result in policy changes and adoption of innovations
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1. Looking back: five key lessons
• Generic ToC: providing new scientific evidence & improved practices will result in
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policy changes and adoption of innovations
• 1st lesson: ToC: far too simplistic/naive about how science can influence rest of
world

Source: R. Rabbinge, 2009 5

1. Five key lessons
• 2nd lesson: interdisciplinary & multi-institutional
approaches w/ many partners produced
relevant, robust results that mono disciplinary
and mono institutional approaches could not
have produced
• 3rd lesson: governance and mgt structure need
to be aligned with science implemented
(inclusive, transparent, accountable)
• Interdisciplinary work still difficult, particularly
biophysical x social scientists; governance still
issue and partnerships variable
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1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: to generate new knowledge,
IPGs, essential: baseline/benchmark in
multiple sites; understanding of processes
at play in ≠ environments, at ≠ spatial-temporal
scales before can scale up
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1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: to generate new knowledge,
IPGs, essential: baseline/benchmark in
multiple sites; understanding of processes
at play in ≠ environments, at ≠ spatial-temporal
scales before can scale up
• Today, scientists struggle with ’baseline
analysis’, work at multiple scales, credible
scaling up. Realising only now importance
of this for RBM.
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1. Five key lessons
• 4th lesson: to generate new knowledge, IPGs,
essential: baseline/benchmark in multiple sites;
understanding of processes at play in ≠
environments, at ≠ spatial-temporal scales before
can scale up
• Today, scientists struggle with ’baseline analysis’,
work at multiple scales, credible scaling up.
Realising only now importance of this for RBM.
• 5th lesson: flexibility, willingness to learn from
mistakes, asking existential questions, re-inventing
program: essential to evolve realistic
ToC overtime
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2. Looking ahead: main challenge
• Providing more secure, diversified & healthy
food grown in more and more difficult
conditions, whilst decreasing the
environmental footprint of agriculture and
decreasing inequalities
• Complex, interconnections, uncertainties,
beyond any discipline’s reach. Requires
‘transformative’ integration of many sciences
(life, natural, social, human health,
mathematical) and perspective of
stakeholders
• Inter/multidisciplinary approaches insufficient
to promote collaboration and synthesis
needed to produce truly innovative solutions
to large–scale, complex problems.
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2. Complex, multidimensional challenges
Source: IAASTD, 2008
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2. Transdisciplinary approaches to accelerate discovery,
innovation, application of innovations
• Change in scientific culture: reality is
multidimensional, so is knowledge.
• New ways of thinking, new tools &
approaches by working together across
disciplines &with stakeholders. Builds
upon but transcends reductionism,
linear logic.
• Systematic approach, based on overall
coherence rather than unity
• Creative “convergence–divergence”
process that brings areas of knowledge
together into a new system to spin off
applications and elements that can in
turn be recombined and integrated
• Results in new social distribution of
knowledge, understanding processes,
reproducibility of innovations in ≠
locations and reproducibility of policy
influence
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2. More integrative approaches
Source: Izac et al,06
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Source: Izac et al, 06

2. Looking ahead: research areas that lag behind
• Need to strenghten:
– Nutrition, health, food safety
– policy research, so based upon robust biophysical x
socio-economic evidence; science-policy interface
– NRM in commodity improvement research to
decrease environmental footprint of agriculture, role
of ecosystem services in resilience, ‘sustainable
intensification’
– research on LT effects of innovations, predicting and
monitoring impacts, to better understand processes at
play
– research at landscape-regional scales
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In conclusion
• CGIAR’s experience: 5 lessons relevant for
all agri research. On essentiality of
partnerships; alignment of governance &
mgt with research needs; importance of
working at ≠ scales, in ≠ countries and of
learning from mistakes, re-creating
• Comparative advantage of CGIAR today:
capacity to work globally from many sites,
across institutions & disciplines to more
rapidly design robust options. Ability to
take risks, be innovative, as can learn from
our mistakes across all research
programmes
• Given complexity of challenges ahead,
more transformative changes are now
needed, more urgently.
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In conclusion, for a new science
• Complex challenges ahead require more integrative
and collaborative approaches:
– Using transdisciplinary approaches that transcend
disciplinary boundaries, involve stakeholders
– To design truly innovative approaches, better
tuned to complexity, uncertainty, constant
change, understanding processes at play in scaling
up innovations and policy influence
– Re-balancing priorities to squarely address
nutrition, health, policy influence, environmental
footprint
• Huge, exciting challenge for CGIAR scientists: new type
of science needed, new way of conceiving role of
research in society
• Recent recognition of this need (e.g., US Academy of
Sciences, Special Rapporteur to the UN on the right to
food) and of transformative improvements resulting
from such approaches (medicine, engineering)
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