Erschienen in:Market, Chains and Sustainable Development, Strategy and Policy Paper ; No. 3
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource (18 p)
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.2139/ssrn.1609665
Identifikator:
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments January 17, 2007 erstellt
Beschreibung:
The changing institutional architecture of R&D systems introduces the question of how to govern innovation and service provision. One of the options is concluding contractual arrangements between users, i.e. farmers’ organisations, and these demand-led R&D services. Contracts can include detailed conditions about services to be rendered, by whom and at what costs. They can be complemented by a legal system that enables parties to force compliance with these contracts. Such a contract-based system will only work in competitive market situations where parties have the possibility to choose other providers of technologies and services on basis of their performance. This requires that farmer organisations dispose of the capacity to formulate proposals for services and to monitor and evaluate the effi ciency and quality of the services rendered. To facilitate this monitoring role of R&D by farmers’ organisations, both the designers of R&D systems and the farmers’ federations need to build knowledge and experience on possible and effective ways of arranging R&D. Therefore, it is important to open up effective channels of communication and learning between the designers of R&D systems and the farmers’ federations in a country. For understanding the capacities of different types of farmers’ organisations to play an effective role in governing R&D systems, the paper sketches the strengths and weaknesses of grassroots organisations, commodity based organisation, and sector-wide or area–based federations. A coordinated involvement of these different types of organisations in the national R&D system may prevent frustrations. Often too high expectations are placed on either grassroots organisations or on the national federations. Where grassroots organisations and commodity federations are especially knowledgeable on R&D demands for chain development, their second level organisations tend to be more knowledgeable on issues around contracts, processes and governance of R&D systems. There seem to be typical strengths and weaknesses of the different types offarmers’ organisations in R&D systems