Learning our way ahead: navigating institutional change and agricultural decentralisation

This paper describes experiences from East Africa and elsewhere where coalitions of different agriculture-related organisations at different levels have been using a learning process for collective planning and innovation. The learning process follows five phases:
À Defining future agroecosystems
À Matching farmer demands with the services needed to create those agrosystems
À Negotiating new partnerships
À Taking action and assessing the actions taken
À Assessing the performance of the new partnerships
These are all part of a continuous cycle, with all stakeholders constantly monitoring agroecosystem and partnership performance, identifying weaknesses and taking new action to improve performance further. The emphasis of the approach is on joint learning, since no single organisation can come up with all the solutions required and everyone stands to gain from improved co-ordination. After an introduction the paper asks what is the learning process, then goes on to describe how to develop one, and lastly looks at initiating and sustaining such an approach. Finally, the paper presents the conclusions.