Responding to the Challenges of Impact Assessment of Participatory Research and Gender Analysis

SUMMARY Since the Green Revolution, the public-sector's agricultural research strategy for increasing food crop productivity has been explicitly based on the premise that technology can cross political and agro-climatic boundaries, primarily through the ‘training and visit’ system of extension (also known as ‘transfer of technology’ and the ‘pipeline’ model). Today, a different strategy is emerging. Efforts to develop the necessary institutional capacity for more client-oriented participatory research, particularly in plant breeding, are now a central part of the public-sector agricultural research strategy. Greater use of participatory and gender-analysis approaches in agricultural research has significant conceptual and methodological implications for impact assessment and institutional learning.