CPWF Working Paper No. 2. Stories from the Field: A Most Significant Change Synthesis

Abstract

In January of 2007, a number of people working with the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) were invited to tell stories about the ‘most significant change’ (innovations or partnerships) they had observed as a result of CPWF activity. This paper aims to pull together some of the threads emerging from these stories. Two categories of stories were requested – one on “the most significant technical development/ advance” and the other on “the most significant partnership change”. Within the former, there are stories on technical innovations, institutional and policy innovations, and information and knowledge management. Within the latter, stories were submitted on field-level partnerships, basin-level partnerships, and capacity-building. Apart from the above categories, more than half of the stories are also linked to a specific production environment, e.g., dryland, irrigated or rice-based, salt-affected, or aquatic. These are predominantly stories about technical innovations, and the institutional innovations and partnerships contributing to their success. The remaining stories are consolidated into a cross-environment group. These tend to focus on conceptual frameworks, information and knowledge management, and institutional and policy innovations not closely tied to any particular technology. This Paper gives an overview of the changes submitted, and the role of the CPWF