Innovating in a dynamic technical context - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 112

We emphasize a further example. Partnered with the Ministry of Environment
of Peru, CPWF projects, in particular Andes 2, defined priority areas and
designed a BSM for the Cañete River basin. The Ministry is using the Cañete
case study as a pilot project. The Cañete BSM is establishing a trust fund to
finance its activities (Quintero, 2012). CIAT and the CPWF partner,
CONDESAN, worked with the Ministry and with public and private
companies and NGOs. The objective was a BSM that provided equitable
benefits from the use of ecosystems and provided direct benefits to rural
communities. The findings are being scaled-out to over 30 river basins in Peru
through a Remuneration Mechanism for Ecosystem Services hosted by the
Ministry with CONDESAN's support.
CIAT and CPWF helped draft national legislation for ecosystem services
valuation. It requires valuation of water uses to be included in all environ-
mental impact studies for new public and private development projects.
Summary
A scan of the 120 CPWF projects listed in the Appendix indicates that the
majority of CPWF projects discussed the importance of links between
technical innovation and institutional change.
Assessing the consequences of innovation
We earlier defined three functions for technical research in the context of R4D.
One of these was to generate knowledge (ex ante and ex post) on the broader
consequences of new practices. We discuss this further.
An R4D project should anticipate ex ante and assess ex post the conse-
quences that it will bring about. Only then can we tell if potential outcomes
are harmful or helpful, for whom, and in what ways. It is important to know
what the consequences of innovation are if it is to be used to guide decision-
makers, inform negotiators or otherwise in autonomous social processes.
Innovation and change can have many subtle and unexpected consequences.
The challenge for research is to choose which of them are important to
anticipate ex ante and which to assess ex post . Many consequences are difficult
to measure and are therefore often not monitored. They are better addressed
through periodic selective impact assessment/evaluation. A major challenge is
the choice of parameters to check and when and how often to review them.
The list of performance indicators (Box 5.6) is intimidating and some
variables are more readily measured than others. We are not surprised that no
CPWF projects assessed the complete list of variables, although we find some
examples for most categories. Box 5.6 lists a few of them.
Human health
Several projects explored the consequences of innovation for human health.
In project PN19 in Ethiopia, researchers determined how different scenarios in