Innovating in a dynamic technical context - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 115

US$2.5 million. They have published over 1200 papers and reports. 1 There will
be more as completed projects continue publishing results and others finish. We
classify CPWF research into Phase 1 Projects (2004-2008), BFPs (2005-2009)
and Phase 2 projects (2009-2013).
CPWF projects carried out research on a broad range of technical inno-
vations. It was broad because of the numerous high-quality proposals submitted
for funding in its two phases. In assessing them, CPWF: interpreted the
concepts of water scarcity and water productivity broadly, sought innovative
approaches to research on water and food, and included non-traditional
research partners (see Chapter 1).
The following sections give examples of CPWF technical innovations. This
complements Chapter 6, which focuses on institutional innovation. We
describe categories of technical innovation in CPWF projects and give exam-
ples which cover farm to basin scales, and include land and water management
in irrigated and rainfed systems. They also include crop, livestock and fish
management, with attention to water use in intensive and diversified systems.
We provide examples of the range of CPWF research on technical innovation
by summarizing categories of innovation and their distribution across projects
(Figure 5.3). The distribution was based on an analysis of project reports and
only includes projects that focused on technical innovation. Most of them fell
into several categories. Numbers in parentheses in the subsequent text refer to
the number of projects where the particular innovation was the primary focus
of the project. They provide a sense of the relative emphasis given by CPWF
to different technologies.
Diversifying and intensifying agroecosystems
Diversifying (a wider range of enterprises) or intensifying (more enterprises
per year) agroecosystems were common topics. Projects emphasized vegetables
or trees (17), livestock (9), and fisheries or aquaculture (9), seven of which
were on fishing in tropical reservoirs. The driving forces were not technical
changes in land and water management, but opportunities for higher incomes
through market-value chains. The strategies to intensify/diversify drove
modified land and water management. Research was responsible to examine
the consequences of these changes on sustainability, resilience, equity and
ecosystem services at different scales.
We discussed project Limpopo 3 to intensify goat production above. It led
to demand for technology for improved production of dry-season fodder,
which was available, but had never been adopted by farmers. Project Ganges 2
sought to transform the intensity and diversity in coastal polders, described
above. Farmers went from one low-yield monsoon rice crop per year to three
high-yielding rice crops, or two rice crops and one fish crop per year. The
requirement was institutional with technical changes to improve water storage
and control. The MUS project (PN28) showed that single-use water systems
can be managed to produce high-value vegetables in the off season, which