Brokering Development: Enabling Factors for Public-Private-Producer Partnerships in Agricultural Value Chains

Markets are central to agriculture and rural development. Making markets, value chains and the systems that support them work better for the poor has therefore become a central aim of many donors, governments and nongovernmental organisations. This research seeks to understand how public-private-producer partnerships (PPPPs) in agricultural value chains can be designed and implemented to achieve more sustained increases in income for smallholder farmers and broader rural development. PPPPs involve cooperation between government and business agents, working together to reach a common goal or carry out a specific task, while jointly assuming risks and responsibilities, and sharing resources and competences.1 They also explicitly involve farmers (or producers), hence the fourth ‘P’ is added to the more familiar designation of ‘public-private partnerships’. The research also considers the role of PPPP brokers as independent facilitators who support the process of exploring, designing and implementing PPPPs. The research is based on four case studies of agricultural value chain PPPPs developed through projects financed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in Ghana, Indonesia, Rwanda and Uganda. In each country, local research teams collected data through a mixture of semi-structured interviews, field visits and focus group discussions (FGDs) with local market chain actors, smallholder farmers and other community members, and relevant experts. These were not impact assessments, and represent instead a snapshot in time. However, the aim was to gain insights into the outcomes of the PPPPs so far, and how these have been influenced by the way the PPPP was designed, implemented and brokered

Inclusive Structural Change: Case Studies on Innovations in Breeding Practices in Kenya and Anti-Retroviral Therapy Service Provision in Mozambique

Innovation, accompanied by structural change, is at the heart of economic growth and development. Yet there is limited evidence to understand interactions between innovation, structural change and inclusion in the context of low-income and emerging countries, or how these processes best support sustainable and inclusive societies. Through case studies of innovation pathways in breeding practices in the Kenyan dairy sector and anti-retroviral therapy service provision in Mozambique, we study how innovations in specific contexts lead to adoption, diffusion and upgrading, and further to structural change and inclusion or exclusion of marginalised groups. The case studies unpack the conditions for these outcomes by identifying key variables, actors and interactions that shape the innovation pathways. We find that capabilities is a key variable. In particular, we find that inclusiveness and structural changes impact successive phases of innovations through ‘reinforcing’ or ‘balancing mechanisms’, operationalised by the impact of innovation on capabilities. Other factors include the presence of interrelated innovations, power relations between actors, and the role of institutions (formal and informal). The Kenyan case suggests parallel non-competing innovation pathways, while for Mozambique, we observe competing pathways that remain to be examined further. Findings from the cases provide the basis of future primary research on inclusive structural change.International Development Research Centr