From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

Establishing institutional buy-in for GEC/food security research at regional levelResearch partnersIn addition to identifying a number of researchers who need to come together to bring thenecessary range of skills, effective GEC/food security research needs the close involvementof other stakeholders in planning and delivery. While the need for such involvement may befully accepted, it can be hard to identify the right partners and even harder to engage themmeaningfully. One way to help is to try to identify existing institutions which individuallycan fulfil different key roles in the research. These could, for instance, help to providescientific visibility and credibility within the region, or act as ‘boundary organizations’between the main research endeavour and other, more distant stakeholder communities, e.g.individual farmers. Establishing institutional buy-in from a range of stakeholders can add apowerful dimension to the research itself, and can also be very useful in outreach as suchpartners are often well connected to a wide range of beneficiaries. Posing a clear question,and drafted in terms to which potential partners can easily relate (e.g. ‘how can SouthernAfrican food systems be adapted to reduce their vulnerability to GEC?), helps both attractinterest and identify the role each can play. Box 5 shows how a range of stakeholders thus‘bought-in’ to a GEC/food security research question in the region. The signing ofMemoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and/or the formal endorsement of research plans canbe a powerful way of demonstrating this buy-in to other potential stakeholders, includingdonors.DonorsSeveral major organizations are now embracing the food systems concept for advancing foodsecurity research at regional level. Notable examples include the FAO (2008a), UKgovernment (Defra, 2008), European Science Foundation (ESF, 2009), Dutch government(NWO, undated) and the CGIAR’s new initiative ‘Climate Change, Agriculture and FoodSecurity’ (CCAFS, 2009). Despite this, raising funds for GEC/food security research atregional level is not easy. This can be due to a number of factors.First, donors are most often mandated to operate on a bilateral basis at a national level andefforts to ‘regionalize’ projects generally has to involve a synthesis across multiple projectsas they come to an end. Also, regional-level projects, and especially those that try to linkacross spatial and/or temporal levels, can be deemed too unfocussed.Second, research on food security, let alone when coupled with GEC issues, is highlycomplex and full of uncertainties. Research designed to ‘grasp the nettle’ is therefore highlycomplex and involves a large number of parameters and collaborators. While it might addressthe stated aims of development agencies better than research on, say, food production, theinherent complexity means it is hard to fit within funding portfolios (which might bestructured in terms of agriculture development, policy, governance, science, etc.), and is alsodeemed ‘high risk’.101