The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
This study explores heterogeneity in farmers’ value network embeddedness as one of the possible reasons why multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) - contrary to their mission - may fail to be inclusive in triggering farmer innovation in rural development contexts. Farmers traditionally face several infrastructural issues when seeking to innovate and create value for their family, communities and/or customers (World Bank 2013). One of them is the limited access to knowledge flows on technology, markets, agricultural and post-harvest practices (Hounkonnou et al. 2012). To address this long-standing issue and complement the declining role of publicly funded agricultural extension, MSPs have emerged since early 2000s as institutions that convey multiple actors in and around food value chains, including farmers, with the mission of stimulating widespread farmer innovation. Because of their mission, they have been also defined Innovation Platforms (IPs). Despite a widespread enthusiasm across policy and academic arenas, though, there is little empirical evidence of MSPs having enhanced innovation of a large majority of farmers besides few that had already established knowledge flows with other food value chain actors (Bitzer 2012). This contrast calls for a deeper exploration on whether MSPs are indeed inclusive as they claim to be or not, to what extent, and how they could be more inclusive.
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Purpose and background of the consultancy