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Achieving self-sufficiency in food production is a priority of the Malawi government. To this end, from 2005 the country has implemented a countrywide programme, costing at its peak over US$270 million and 16% of the national budget, to subsidize smallholder farmers' access to high-quality seed and fertilizer. Professor Andrew Dorward's research from 2007 to the present on the implementation and impact of the programme has assisted a range of stakeholders including the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, international funders and national NGOs and Civil Society Organisations in making decisions and changing policies to improve its efficacy and effectiveness.
A theme within Professor David Mosse's anthropological research focuses on the relationship between policy, practice and effects in international development. His field-based ethnographic research challenges assumptions about policy implementation and the nature of success and failure in aid programming. His novel approach to questions of policy analysis and policy change has been widely influential on thinking among policymakers and practitioners across a range of organisations, sectors and countries. It has enhanced the capacity for adaptive self-critical understanding of the aid process among practitioners and aid organisations, while also demonstrating the importance of researcher-practitioner engagement in improving the delivery of aid and development programmes.
The Countryside and Community Research Institute (CCRI) has undertaken research providing a sustained contribution to understanding beneficiary-focused EU and UK rural development (RD) policies. This used novel, context-sensitive and mixed-method evaluation techniques to capture complex, systemic impacts and diagnose causal linkages between design and delivery, and policy performance. In so doing it has generated direct impacts in improved RD policy making and evaluation. The research has influenced restructuring in EU policy frameworks for RD and changed England's upland policy. By increasing policymakers' understanding of farm-level behaviours and responses to agri-environmental policy goals, CCRI's research has stimulated better-communicated and integrated advisory approaches.
Sussex Energy Group (SEG) research on low-carbon technology transfer to developing countries impacted on the policies, negotiating positions and funding strategies of a range of national and international governmental organisations, including DFID, DECC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the OECD Environment Directorate, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank and the Government of Chile. In particular, this led to a shift in emphasis towards building technological capacities in developing countries as a more effective long-term strategy for facilitating technology transfer, and resulted in the adoption, by several of these organisations, of Climate Innovation Centres and collaborative research and development as specific policy mechanisms.
Research needs to engage with global environmental challenges more effectively. How to achieve this has been the focus of studies by academics at Newcastle with their expertise recognised in the appointment in 2003 of Philip Lowe and Jeremy Phillipson to lead the £26million Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (Relu), funded by three Research Councils, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Scottish Government. The Directorship allowed Lowe and Phillipson to experiment with innovative processes for the conduct of research in 94 projects funded under the programme, in particular through instigating ideas of interdisciplinarity and co-production, and to develop techniques for assessing the efficacy of such methods. The insights gained from this effort have had significant and widespread impact on science policy and on organisations responses to environmental challenges such as government departments and agencies (DEFRA, Scottish Office and Food Standards Agency, for example), PLCs (including Wessex Water and M&S), environmental Trusts and more.
The Regional Hunger and Vulnerability Programme (RHVP) sought to achieve research-based change in policy approaches to food insecurity and famine in southern Africa by investigating a range of policy options and generating debate. The programme's success can be identified in evidence of use, as provided by a post-programme independent evaluation of RHVP; policy response, as observed in social protection policy changes in Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana and Mozambique; and policy outcomes, measured by the impact on beneficiaries of social transfer schemes put in place or expanded in scope due to RHVP influence on social protection policy thinking in southern Africa.
In the last decade, sport has earned unprecedented recognition in international policy circles as a tool to support international development. Nonetheless, many have challenged this `new social movement' (Kidd, 2008), concerned by its uncritical application of Global North models of sport to Global South contexts. Addressing these concerns, Brunel researchers and collaborators have drawn on the field of international development studies to investigate how principles of local ownership and partnership can be applied to sport. Since 2010, empirical studies and critical conceptual analyses have contributed to this. Specifically through building organisational capacity at local level, supporting partnership between funders and recipient organisations, and developing national as well as international policy guidance to ensure community level experiences and perspectives are represented in sport for development policy and strategies.
Research conducted at UCL by Professor Orazio Attanasio and his direct engagement with policymakers has been instrumental in the implementation, design and evaluation of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes to stimulate the accumulation of human capital in Mexico and Colombia. The research underpinned the design of an innovative pilot, which he also evaluated, in two major cities, Puebla and Ecatepec, with a combined population of around 4 million. In Colombia, an evaluation led by Professor Attanasio led to improvements in and expansions of the CCT programme, with ongoing benefits to 3 million households. The research team also contributed to a child development programme that launched in Peru in March 2013.
In Bangladesh, 50 million people live in poverty and around 28 million live in extreme poverty. To date, development agencies have focussed almost exclusively on the needs of the poor and ignored those of the extreme poor. Building on years of poverty research in Bangladesh, researchers at the University of Bath have played a key role designing and then developing a £65 million programme, which is the country's first national scale initiative focusing exclusively on extreme poverty. Impacts from the programme include improving the livelihoods of one million extreme poor people; helping NGOs design innovative programmes for the extreme poor; and embedding the discourse around extreme poverty in the polity.
Science has guided national dryland policy in Africa through approaches that have omitted local knowledge, and has informed international policy through implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), previously developed by a Roster of Experts. Our national and district-level research in Botswana has identified routes to increase community involvement in degradation monitoring, and our strategies have been rolled out nationally via agricultural extension workers, allowing knowledge to inform farming practices and land policy. Our analysis of the wider international context has led us to propose new science-to-policy pathways that have allowed the UNCCD to draw more effectively upon both local and scientific evidence.