The Challenge Program on Water and Food: A new paradigm for research in the CGIAR - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 4

The CPWF emphasized team work in which all participants shared knowledge
and which led to technological innovation.
The GCPs did not exist as independent fiduciary entities, so that the CPWF
operated under the umbrella of the CGIAR International Water Management
Institute (IWMI). This led to administrative anomalies, such as the program
coordinator reporting to the Consortium Steering Committee, while IWMI
management evaluated the coordinator's performance. Similarly, the program
coordinator had little authority over CPWF management staff, who were
employed and evaluated by the different consortium institutions involved.
Incremental funding
The CDMT foresaw that as more GCPs were created, they could together
require as much as 50 percent of the CGIAR's budget. The iSC recognized
early on that this was unlikely and, although not stated, would certainly meet
fierce resistance from the Centers and those donors aligned to particular
Centers. The iSC believed that, “The Centers expect the [Challenge Program]
funding to be new and incremental . . .” 5 and proposed that the GCPs should
seek new funding, which would add to the system's total budget.
The CPWF secured new funding of nearly US$70 million for 2003-2008
from a broad spectrum of donors, which gave it independence from individual
donors. It also managed to compensate partly “for a drastic reduction of a
major donor commitment in the programme inception phase,” 6 US$25 million
to only US$5 million when the government of the Netherlands changed in
May 2003.
Water and food sub-systems
The aim of the CPWF was to increase water productivity through better
management of water for food production. The CPWF identified three levels
of system organization. At the lowest level, the plant-field-farm system, there
are three sub-systems, agroecosystems, upper catchments, and aquatic eco-
systems. The second level is the river basin, where different water users
interact, and where the trade-offs between and among water users are impor-
tant. These determine the interactions between surface water, groundwater,
and precipitation as well as the interactions between upstream and downstream
users. The third level is the national and global water and food systems. The
external environment was considered at all levels, including not only the water
sector, but the macroeconomic factors that impact it, as well as policies and
institutional issues at global and national levels.
Research themes
The three sub-systems of the lowest level plus the basin and global levels
coincide with the five research themes that the CPWF identified (Box 1.2).