Project A1a: On designing and implementing benefit-sharing mechanisms :

This is about identifying which benefit-sharing and coordination mechanisms work best under which circumstances for basins anywhere in the Andes and the reasons underpinning failure or success in specific basin instances. It is about providing a common platform - a negotiation support system - as a means of informing the BSM negotiation process with the best available knowledge. The project will seek to identify the variables that need to be taken into account when BSM are designed and proposed as ways to curb rural poverty and environmental degradation. The possible effects of global change on these variables will be analyzed, along with the likelihood that changes in these variables will impact the viability of BSM. Adaptations to BSM that may help them accommodate global change will be explored

Participatory impact pathways analysis : A practical application of program theory in research-for-development

The Challenge Program on Water and Food pursues food security and poverty alleviation through the efforts of some 50 research-for-development projects. These involve almost 200 organizations working in nine river basins around the world. An approach was developed to enhance the developmental impact of the program through better impact assessment, to provide a framework for monitoring and evaluation, to permit stakeholders to derive strategic and programmatic lessons for future initiatives, and to provide information that can be used to inform public awareness efforts. The approach makes explicit a project's program theory by describing its impact pathways in terms of a logic model and network maps. A narrative combines the logic model and the network maps into a single explanatory account and adds to overall plausibility by explaining the steps in the logic model and the key risks and assumptions. Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis is based on concepts related to program theory drawn from the fields of evaluation, organizational learning, and social network analysis