Looking back to the beginning: initial ASB objectives and 5 lessons Looking ahead: ASB and future lessons for the evolving set of CRPs

1. Alternatives to Slash and Burn
Programme: what have we learned,
where to next?
Anne-Marie Izac
2nd Chair, GSG of ASB
(Consortium Chief Officer, Chief Science Officer,
Senior Science Advisor)

2. Outline
1. Looking back to the beginning:
initial ASB objectives and 5 lessons
2. Looking ahead: ASB and future
lessons for the evolving set of CRPs

3. 1. Initial ASB objective: 1st lesson
• Reduce deforestation by S/B agriculture. By
providing ecologically and economically
sustainable options for farmers + scientific
evidence to policy-makers
• ToC: providing new scientific evidence &
improved practices would trigger  in
deforestation
• 1st lesson: ToC: far too simplistic/naive
about how science can influence rest of
world

4. 1. What ASB did differently on partnerships and research
approaches
• For 1st time in CGIAR: teams of
biophysical x social scientists,
from ≠ institutions, within-outside
CGIAR, national,
international, some
stakeholders
• Interdisciplinary, multi
institutional teams
• Spent 2-3 years on team
building + ‘characterisation’,
priority-setting across research
sites
• Worked at different spatial
scales

5. 1. Second and third lessons
• 2nd lesson: interdisciplinary & multiinstitutional
approaches thus developed (e.g., ASB matrix)
produced relevant, useful results that uni
disciplinary and uni institutional approaches
could not have produced
• 3rd lesson: governance and mgt structure needs
to be aligned with science implemented
(inclusive, transparent, accountable)
• both lessons used in criteria, principles for
current CRPs: new, wider partnerships required,
CRP governance to be inclusive
• Interdisciplinary work still difficult in CRPs,
particularly biophysical x social scientists;
governance still an issue in various CRPs

6. 1. 4th lesson
• Lesson 4: to generate new knowledge, IPGs,
essential: baseline/benchmark in multiple sites;
understanding of processes at play in ≠
environments, at ≠ spatial-temporal scales
before can scale up
• Today, CRPs struggling with ’baseline analysis’,
work at multiple scales, credible scaling up.
Realising only now importance of this for RBM.

7. 1. 5th lesson
• Initial ToC too simplistic, subsequently
disproved by empirical evidence. Today’s
ToC less naive about influence of science.
• 5th lesson: flexibility, willingness to learn
from mistakes, asking existential
questions, re-inventing program: essential
to evolve realistic ToC overtime

8. 1. To summarise, External Review of ASB, 2005
… ‘ASB has created the world’s
pre-eminent system for use-driven,
comparative scientific
investigation of human-environment
interactions at the
forest margin across the pan
tropic domain…. ASB has
developed an effective and
efficient governing structure that
successfully integrates
capabilities and concerns across
CGIAR Centers, tropical regions,
scales and disciplines’.

9. 2. Looking ahead
• ASB should keep breaking new ground for
CGIAR. Show how transdisciplinary
approaches accelerate discovery and
innovation and the application of innovations
for complex problems
• Contribute new perspective to debates on
reproducibility of:
– Achievements (innovations) in a specific
geographical location to other places
– Successes in influencing policy-making

10. 2. Looking ahead: main challenge
• Providing more secure, diversified & healthy
food grown in more and more difficult
conditions, whilst decreasing the
environmental footprint of agriculture and
decreasing inequalities
• Complex, interconnections, uncertainties,
beyond any discipline’s reach. Requires
‘transformative’ integration of many sciences
(life, natural, social, human health,
mathematical) and perspective of
stakeholders
• Inter/multidisciplinary approaches insufficient
to promote collaboration and synthesis
needed to produce truly innovative solutions
to large–scale, complex problems.

11. Complex, multidimensional challenges
Source: IAASTD, 2008

12. 2. Transdisciplinary approaches
• Change in scientific culture: reality is
multidimensional, so is knowledge.
• New ways of thinking, new tools &
approaches by working together across
disciplines &with stakeholders. Builds upon
but transcends reductionism, linear logic.
• Systematic approach, based on overall
coherence rather than unity
• Creative “convergence–divergence” process
that brings areas of knowledge together into
a new system to spin off applications and
elements that can in turn be recombined and
integrated
• Results in new social distribution of
knowledge
• ASB has more experience than most in
working toward this, including in having
governance & mgt structure aligned,
facilitating open scientific culture

13. More integrative approaches
Source: Izac et al,06

14. In conclusion
• ASB’s experience: 5 lessons relevant for
all CRPs today. On essentiality of
partnerships; alignment of governance &
mgt with research needs; importance of
working at ≠ scales, in ≠ countries and of
learning from mistakes, re-creating
• Comparative advantage of CGIAR today:
capacity to work globally from many sites,
across institutions & disciplines to more
rapidly design robust options. ASB has
significantly contributed
• Given complexity of challenges ahead,
more transformative changes are now
needed, more urgently. ASB is more nimble
than CRPs; can continue to break new
ground for CGIAR

15. In conclusion, for a new science
• Complex challenges ahead require more integrative
and collaborative approaches:
– Using transdisciplinary approaches that transcend
disciplinary boundaries , involving stakeholders
– To design truly innovative approaches, better
tuned to complexity, uncertainty, constant change
• Huge, exciting challenge for ASB scientists: new type of
science needed, new way of conceiving role of
research in society
• Recent recognition of this need (e.g., US Academy of
Sciences, Special Rapporteur to the UN on the right to
food) and of transformative improvements resulting
from such approaches (medicine, engineering)