Louise Buck, Cornell University Sara Scherr, Ecoagriculture Partners

1. Innovation Systems to Support Sustainable Landscape Management:From Technology Transfer to Knowledge Systems Louise Buck, Cornell University Sara Scherr, Ecoagriculture Partners Devona Bell, Winrock International

2. Approach to the Chapter • Explore characteristics and qualities of the agroecological landscape as a complex adaptive system (CAS) • Examine associated requirements & characteristics of innovation support systems for managing landscape level CAS • including technology transfer (networks of research/extension and implementation) • Contrast the complex innovation system needed to support landscape level CAS with linear technology transfer approaches • Examine landscape as a soft system • derives its purpose, boundaries and components from the actors who comprise the human activity sub-system of the landscape

3. Approach to the Chapter • To identify knowledge systems, innovations, technology adoption and adaptations that facilitate appropriate management practices for adaptive resource management • Practical experience: examples to illustrate the capacity of the landscape construct to focus diverse interests, perceptions and activity toward common goals, at multiple levels (household, ‘community’, national, global) to induce social learning. • helps illustrate the characteristics of learning networks that enable models/conceptions of landscape to emerge • Highlight monitoring and evaluation as a tool for organizing social learning around the development of criteria and indicators for evaluating progress toward common goals for landscape performance.

4. Beyond TT: extension "world views" and changing theoretical orientations in the last 50 years

5. Practices ofLandscape as a Complex Adaptive System • Role of technology transfer — what technology transfer has been traditionally to present technology transfer adaptations • Innovations • multi-stakeholder participatory innovations • growing role of private sector • private-sector extension • outgrower schemes • examine if this leads to indebtedness?

6. Practices ofLandscape as a Complex Adaptive System • Certain smallholder farming practices conducive to generating rates of adoption that can have landscape-wide impact. • Conservation agriculture and agroforestry, exhibit characteristics which can be adapted to suit heterogeneous agroecological conditions, household needs and management capacities; that save costs to farmers, and that deliver multiple ecological conservation benefits

7. Practices ofLandscape as a Complex Adaptive System • Entrepreneurial strategies that retain locally, higher proportions of the value of production, can be linked with SA and NRM technologies and practices to amplify the impacts on livelihood security, rural community vitality and agroecosystem sustainability

8. Institutions & Policies • “Getting the institutions right” matters in design, adaptation and adoption of innovations in CAS. • Institutions enable or constrain the capacity of individuals and organizations to allocate resources (knowledge, $, labor, etc) to the development of SA and NRM practices and linked entrepreneurial strategies. • Macro policy establishes an overall framework of economic (dis)incentives. • Policies at all levels influence the development and adoption of sustainable agriculture systems.

9. Innovation Support System • Knowledge management needed that links the experience and capacities of multiple institutional actors. • Information and communication are crucial assets in the management of agroecological landscapes. • Innovations emerge from interaction among actors (researchers, educators, technical service providers, input suppliers, buyers and producers). • How these relationships are configured and coordinated to induce learning and create new competencies has important effects on the value of the innovations to local producers and entrepreneurs.

10. Innovation Support System • Collaboration and partnership building needed to sustain progress in managing agroecological landscapes depends on capacities to reinvent and innovate. • Frameworks and tools needed to facilitate the social learning processes that can sustain innovation and focus the perspectives, objectives, and knowledge resources of multiple actors and stakeholders toward common goals for the landscape.

11. Sustainable (multifunctional) Landscape Systems • Definitions/concepts • Components and characteristics • Landscape construct as an element of an innovation system

12. Sustainable (multifunctional) Landscape Practices • Adoptable farming methods • Characteristics of conservation agriculture, agroforestry, and natural resource management practices • Issues affecting empirically-documented adoption trends • Significant local knowledge and management capacity required to adapt practices to local landscape conditions. • Need to develop these competencies helps drive the innovation system.

13. Sustainable (multifunctional) Landscape Practices • Promising marketing strategies • Characteristics and examples of enterprise based innovations for adding and retaining value locally (highlighting selected practical/project innovations) • Issues affecting initiation, coordination, stability of relationships • Competencies needed for successful ‘ecological entrepreneurship’ • Need to develop these competencies, another driver of the innovation system.

14. Sustainable (multifunctional) Landscape Practices • Enabling Institutions • Characteristics that help create a stable landscape governance system include • diversity, • collaboration and partnership building, • hybridization. • The management competencies needed become another driver of the innovation system. • Highlight institutional innovations • international networks of local organizations (Landcare); • regionally coordinated networks (African Highlands Initiative); • hybridization of local organizations (Kolorenas, Madagascar)

15. Supportive Innovation System • Define/characterize innovation system as a human activity system (comprised of purveyors and users of knowledge, information, technology and communication) to support the management of sustainable landscape systems. • Identify alternative models/configurations of innovation management, from linear to networked. • Critique of conventional linear model of innovation and associated technology transfer approach, and its evolution into knowledge systems thinking, social learning, multiple stakeholder processes • Identify linkage and facilitation processes crucial in establishing communication and information flow.

16. Supportive Innovation System • Landscape as a soft system (initially introduced in sustainable landscape systems section) • Framework in which to conceptualize and contextualize relationships with others to address joint goals • Heuristic device for coordinating experiential learning (learning by doing) and social learning (different groups, community-based, business and/or government, learning and working together to improve the environment, the economy and the community) to support adaptive management of the landscape and components.

17. Ecoagriculture Case Study in Innovation Management • The ecoagriculture landscape construct – seeking synergies between biodiversity conservation/ecological service provision, livelihood viability and food and fiber production. • Ecoagriculture (nested) innovation systems at local landscape level, and at international level – characterize networks of learners; patterns of communication, knowledge generation, and information flow; and emergent innovations. • Examine capacity of the ecoagriculture landscape construct to focus diverse interests, perceptions and activity toward common goals, at multiple levels (household, `community’, national, global) to induce social learning to support adaptive management. • Highlight monitoring and evaluation as a tool for organizing social learning activity around the development of criteria and indicators for evaluating progress toward common goals for landscape performance (Ecoagriculture Outcome Measures initiative) • Highlight roles, competencies and outputs of actors in innovation system (research, extension, marketing/promotion, facilitation etc.)

18. Summary & Conclusions • An effective landscape innovation system depends on consistency and coherence between and among the elements of the system, which include: • innovative SA and NRM practice, • supportive institutions, • conducive policy environment and • joint learning about the landscape through: • communication, • information exchange, and • knowledge generation networks that emphasize lateral (horizontal) linkages, and are strategically facilitated.

19. Summary & Conclusions • Variety of approaches and tools are available to help manage the social learning processes that can build coherence within the landscape innovation system. • Monitoring and evaluation systems that are linked with adaptive, collaborative planning and management, • Anticipatory, reflective, experiential and joint learning processes used to trace spatial and temporal relationships among performance variables of interest.

20. Summary & Conclusions • The emergent property of an effectively managed landscape innovation system is the capacity of local actors in the landscape to adapt to changing risks and opportunities by developing management practices which enhance their livelihoods and also sustain the ecological performance of the landscape.

21. Comments/Input Requested! Devona Bell Program Officer NRM/Sustainable Agriculture Winrock International dbell@winrock.org 703-525-9430 x669