Research on institutions for agricultural water management under the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 137

Knowledge for better understanding must be judged to be credible,
knowledge for decision support must be judged to be both credible and salient,
while knowledge used to support negotiations must be considered to be
credible, salient and legitimate. Credibility, salience and legitimacy are difficult
to achieve for a single community of expertise, and even more difficult to
achieve for multiple sources of expertise. Clark et al. (2011) showed that
successful boundary spanning in all six areas of knowledge-to-action depends
upon effective participation by relevant scientists and decision makers.
Mechanisms of accountability must ensure that both scientists and decision
makers have meaningful input into the research process. Boundary objects are
created jointly to communicate knowledge in ways that can be accurately
understood by relevant scientists and decision makers.
The goal of influencing action on the ground may have implications not
only for what research is done but also for how it is done and what other
activities beyond research a project team undertakes. Therefore, the unit of
analysis in this section is research projects rather than publications. This enables
us to look at what projects did to span boundaries between sources and uses of
knowledge. We do this to increase the likelihood that the results of the research
on institutions for water management will be used.

Projects that seek to influence decisions
Projects that seek to influence decisions must be both credible and salient. The
projects analyzed are:

• Managing water and land resources for sustainable livelihoods at the

interface between fresh and saline water environments in Vietnam and
Bangladesh (PN10).

• Environmental services in rural development (PN22).

• Models for implementing multiple-use water services for enhanced land

and water productivity, rural livelihoods and gender equity (PN28).

For each project we looked at how the research results, the actions taken by the
project members and the characteristics of the projects and project teams
influenced the outcomes achieved by the projects. Since few projects were
subjected to external evaluations, the evidence of outcomes is, for the most
part, reported by the project teams.

Decision-support activities of PN10: Managing water and land resources
for sustainable livelihoods at the interface between fresh and saline water
environments in Vietnam and Bangladesh
This project conducted both institutional research and technology develop-
ment and testing. It sought to develop knowledge and tools to help decision
makers identify optimal water-management strategies to balance trade-offs