| The issue
of “scaling up” and “out” agricultural technologies
and other innovations has received a lot of attention in recent
years from the CGIAR centers and other R&D organizations.
One event dealing with this challenge, held in 1999, focused
on innovations emerging from agroforestry research. Two others,
organized in 1999 and 2000 by the CG’s NGO committee, drew
on case studies to identify key principles involved in the spread
of technical and social innovations in rural areas.
Profiting from the outcomes of those and other consultations,
we decided last year to make scaling up the theme of our internal
annual review. We’ll soon publish a volume containing
most of the papers given in the review. The article featured
in this issue of Growing Affinities summarizes the main messages
of those papers.
In another day scaling up was not a major research issue
for the centers. But by broadening our development mission,
we’ve changed that. Reducing poverty and improving natural
resource management requires the centers to develop knowledge-rich
solutions that can be adapted to diverse circumstances. But
delivering those solutions on a large scale is obviously not
an easy job.
What role must the centers play then? In my view it’s
to accompany partner organizations in their scaling-up initiatives
and to conduct research aimed at finding out what works and
what doesn’t. In this way we can build a knowledge base
for scaling up that helps our partners identify the best bets—principles,
approaches, and tools—for different situations. If we
can do that successfully—and I think we’ve made
a good start—the centers will have an extremely valuable
new international public good to offer our partners in developing
countries.
Joachim Voss
Director General, CIAT
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