Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
R4D practitioners must be aware of the potential for the elite to capture
innovation platforms and engagement processes, and work to prevent it. They
must also be accountable to stakeholders and partners, encouraging active
feedback and transparency.
Looking inwards
In the above sections, we discussed power, partnerships and platforms in the
context of the CPWF experience in R4D in basins. In this section, we discuss
these issues in the context of the CPWF as a reform program within the
CGIAR.
As the preceding chapters make clear, the CPWF only gradually came to
portray its work in terms of R4D. R4D became a tool for doing research and
a narrative for explaining success as basin teams turned more toward this new
way of doing business. Ironically, there were no well-established pathways for
delivering these lessons to the emerging CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs)
within the CGIAR Centers engaged in reform.
Among the chapters of this topic only Chapter 4, the institutional history,
acknowledges the struggle to convince stakeholders within the CGIAR system
that the CPWF R4D approach merited serious consideration. Clearly, the
CPWF did not reach its goal of contributing to larger CGIAR-wide reform.
To understand better the demands R4D will put on institutions, their
individuals, partnerships and networks, we must look inward.
The CGIAR launched the CPWF as an experimental program with a new
governance structure and business plan and with a “new quality of partner-
ships” so as to “[change] the way [it did] business.” Within the CPWF, the
implicit assumption was that the CGIAR would learn from the results of the
CPWF experiment and mainstream its more successful elements. In retrospect
the assumption was naïve.
Within every organization there is tension between conservatism and change.
Conservatism preserves the status quo and is based on the usually good evidence
that “business as usual has worked for us so far.” Adapting to change is always a
risk and more often ends in failure than success (Ormerod, 2005). Moreover,
there are real limits to organization or institutional change without an overhaul
of mandates, personnel and incentive structures.
The CGIAR is not the only organization with a history of initiating reform
processes then abandoning them for the next reform. The Challenge Programs
were one of several such waves of reform in the CGIAR, each accompanied by
remarkably similar discourses (Box 7.1).
Before the Challenge programs were the Ecoregional Programs initiated by
a Technical Advisory Committee Working Group in the early 1990s (TAC
Secretariat, 1993). This is shown as the Expansion period in Figure 7.2 and
the short-lived integrated natural resource management initiative (CGIAR,
2000) in Figure 7.3. A decade after the Challenge Programs a new reform
initiative was launched: the CRPs.
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