Highlights
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- Purposeful institutional innovation has been ignored. This article is a major empirical research contribution.
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- Action research can support institutional experiments that create space for innovation.
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- AR4D can move beyond rolling out technologies and engage in ‘scaling up’ to create enabling conditions for innovation.
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- Innovation platforms are not a magic bullet but they can create niches that durably affect institutional regimes
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- Agricultural domains are best seen as arenas for negotiation and concerted action among stakeholders.
Abstract
The
article synthesises the experiences of innovation platforms (IPs) that
engaged in open-ended experimental action to improve the institutional
context for smallholder farm development in West Africa. The IPs sought
change at the level of the institutional regime covering an entire
agricultural domain (such as cocoa, cotton, oil palm or water
management). Their purpose was therefore not to ‘roll out’ farm-level
technologies across rural communities. The IPs's outcomes were
documented and analysed throughout by means of theory-based process
tracing in each of seven of the nine domains in which regime change was
attempted. The evidence shows that by means of exploratory scoping and
diagnosis, socio-technical and institutional experimentation, and guided
facilitation IPs can remove, by-pass, or modify domain-specific
institutional constraints and/or create new institutional conditions
that allow smallholders to capture opportunity. The article describes
the 5-year, €4.5 million research programme in Benin, Ghana and Mali,
covering theory, design, methods and results. It is the sequel to
Hounkonnou et al. in AGSY 108 (2012): 74–83.
Keywords
- Innovation system;
- Enabling conditions;
- Niche/regime/landscape;
- Smallholders;
- Benin;
- Ghana;
- Mali
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
