Evaluating research institutions: Lessons from the CGIAR

Investing in research is a long-term, risky proposition. In agriculture, it could take fifteen years or more for a research finding to show an improvement in a farmer’s field. Yet, research institutions, like other organizations it needs to be evaluated. For more than twenty years, independent panels of outside experts have evaluated each of the international research centers that the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) supports. This paper examines the evolution of this review system, outlines the key methodological challenges faced, and draws lessons for others engaged in evaluating research institutions. It notes that the scope of the CGIAR reviews have been broadened over time in response to users’ concerns. Reviews now cover four dimensions of performance: research results, quality and relevance of research, vision and strategic directions, and management efficiency. The methodological challenges faced in measurement, valuation, and attribution are reviewed, along with practices found to be helpful in addressing these concerns. The paper concludes that the panel approach to institutional evaluation has served CGIAR’s needs well, and recommends it as an evaluation technique for integrating quantitative and qualitative dimensions of institutional performance. His recent work has concentrated on the governance and management of the CGIAR and the individual research centers it supports, including questions of evaluating management effectiveness. Prior to joining the World Bank in 1979, he was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bogazici University (Istanbul) and Senior Research Director of Systems Research Incorporated (Lansing, Michigan).     

Evaluations and grassroots politics: The case of Switzerland

The Swiss political system is unique in Europe, both as regards the widely developed rights of its citizens to take a direct hand in the political process and as regards the strong tradition of federalism and the broad-based powers of the Cantons, despite their smallness. Seen in this way, Switzerland, therefore, offers interesting illustrative material for investigating the “strain” placed by “grassroots politics” on the institutional design of evaluations. Werner Bussmann, Ph.D, is director of the “Effectiveness of Public Policies” (NFP 27) research program funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in Bern, Switzerland. He also holds a post at the Federal Office of Justice. His research interests include intergovernmental relations, evaluation and organizational learning.     

Agricultural research networks in sub-Saharan Africa: An analysis of the situation and its consequences

The purpose of this article is to compare the theory and reality of agricultural research networks in sub-Saharan Africa. Networking is a mode of organization that generally suits the new environmental conditions. The analysis of the agricultural research network environment in sub-Saharan Africa shows that when institutional networks started to proliferate, human and institutional conditions were not yet ripe. This explained some of the problems. Nowadays, conditions have improved. Despite all difficulties, networks have contributed to creating a scientific community, have participated in apportioning and even harmonizing research activities, and have made it possible to maintain research activities in countries going through a crisis. Marie de Lattre-Gasquet is a researcher from the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), in France. Within the external relations directorate of CIRAD, she has been responsible for the relationships between CIRAD and international organizations. She has also actively participated in the preparation of CIRAD’s long-term strategy. She worked for the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) in The Netherlands from 1983 to 1985. She holds a Master in International Management (AGSIM, Thunderbird Campus) and a Doctorate in Economy (Université de Paris X). He is mostly working on the agricultural research networks in sub-Saharan Africa. He holds a diploma from the Institut National d’Agronomie—Paris Grignon.     

Evaluation from the inside: Participatory evaluation of agricultural research in the Philippines

This paper discusses the experience of a Philippines-based agricultural research program, where participatory evaluation is embedded in a broader, user-centered participatory research approach. Three case projects illustrate and analyze participatory evaluation of agricultural research in a developing country context. Different evaluation types are identified and their use in different phases of the research process is discussed. These field experiences show how “evaluation from the inside” can contribute to effective research planning and implementation, particularly in enhancing sensitivity to user needs and situations. network for user participatory rootcrop R&D sponsored by the International Potato Center in Asia. Under his leadership, UPWARD has increasingly sought to build participatory monitoring and evaluation into the network’s research and development activities. He has a Ph.D. in communication and innovation studies from Wageningen Agricultural University in The Netherlands. Prior joining UPWARD, Campilan worked with the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction and the Philippine Root Crop Research and Training Center. His research interests include communication of innovations, institutional linkage development, participatory research methods and tools, and strengthening local knowledge systems. From 1991 until 1997 he was coordinator of Users’ Perspectives With Agricultural Research and Development (UPWARD) network. He was previously based in Latin America. His main research interests include the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of crop genetic diversity conservation and utilization involving ethnobotanical studies, on-farm conservation, and work on seed systems. He is also interested in research on rural enterprise development. He has been actively involved in capacity building initiatives among national agricultural researchers, especially in participatory research methods and planning techniques. He can be contacted CIP-ESEAP, Kebun Percobaan Muara, Jalan Raya Ciapus, Bogor 16610, Indonesia, fax (62 251) 316 264, e-mail: G.Prain@cgiar.org. Her major responsibilities include facilitating the network’s activities on sustainable crop management R&D and on capacity building in participatory approaches and methods. At the UPWARD coordinating office, she is in charge of training, publications, and information management. She has extensive training and hands on experience in the use of participatory methods and tools, particularly through a Philippines project on soil resource management for sweetpotato production. She has an MSc in family resource management and development communication from the University of the Philippines at Los Ba?os. Her research interests include sustainable crop management, strengthening local R&D capacity, and field testing participatory methods and tools.     

The Political Egalitarian’s Dilemma

Political egalitarianism is at the core of most normative conceptions of democratic legitimacy. It finds its minimal expression in the “one person one vote” formula. In the literature on deliberative democracy, political equality is typically interpreted in a more demanding sense, but different interpretations of what political equality requires can be identified. In this paper I shall argue that the attempt to specify political equality in deliberative democracy is affected by a dilemma. I shall illustrate the political egalitarian’s dilemma by a hypothetical choice between two informational bases for political equality: Rawlsian primary goods and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The political egalitarian’s dilemma reveals a clash between the requirement of ensuring equal possibilities to participate in the democratic process and the requirement of subjecting substantive judgments to deliberative evaluation. As such, the dilemma is a variant of the procedure vs. substance dilemma that is well-known in democratic theory. While it has sometimes been argued that deliberative democracy solves the tension between procedure and substance, the political egalitarian’s dilemma shows that this tension continues within deliberative democracy.

Diffusion of e-commerce in Denmark: An analysis of institutional intervention

This article analyzes the way a series of recent policy statements have been used to promote and shape the take-up of e-commerce in Denmark. Issuing periodic policy statements, with a combination of direct and indirect modes of intervention, is one of the roads governments are taking to influence the evolutions of ICT. The policy statements present the goals, launch initiatives, and assess achievements. Complementing a co-or self-regulation strategy, the policy statement approach has become particularly important in areas where governments seek to influence the take-up of a technology without appearing to tip the scales. She did her Ph.D. at the Center for Electronic Commerce, at Department of Informatics, Copenhagen Business School. Helle Zinner Henriksen has a degree in Law (University of Copenhagen, 1995). Her research interests include: Adoption and diffusion of Interorganizational Information Systems, e-government, and institutional regulation of electronic commerce and e-government. Kim Viborg Andersen is a researcher in organizational and policy aspects of IT. Andersen’s research encompasses various applications: economic models, EIS/BIS, health data network, EDI, e-commerce, and mobile applications primarily within the public sector domain. He is co-founder of the AIS SIG on e-government, vice-chair of the IFIP WG 8.4 on interdisciplinary e-business and on various editorial boards for journals. He is head of the Center for Research on Information Technology in Policy Settings (CIPS) at the Copenhagen Business School.     

Politics on the move: The democratic control of the design of sustainable technologies

This article examines how “design rationality” could help remediate the controversy over environmental degradation. Drawing on the case of designing sustainable forms of traffic management, it argues that this will only be effective to a limited degree. “Policy conversation” does indeed take place but within a coalition of actions that pushes a particular set of solutions. This facilitates due procedure but erodes political legitimacy, thus potentially reproducing an intractable controversy. The article suggests a five-phase model of democratic control as an alternative. He primarily works in the field of sociology of technology and environment. He is presently involved in a research project on the social redefinition of mobility, analyzing the translation of sustainable development into new institutional arrangements.     

Sectors and strategies of global communications regulation

As the global communication network matures, the systems and procedures for regulating the growing network and its use are being challenged. The general proliferation of services or the specific demand for electronic transactions require guidance and control which the market alone cannot supply. Meanwhile, traditional regulatory regimes remain far from global or coherent. This article distinguishes between coordination and regulation to clarify areas where government intervention is unnecessary and where indispensable. It explores the current patchwork of regulatory approaches, reviews different regulatory areas and strategies, identifies trends, and highlights problem areas particular to electronic commerce and third party protection. His research covers areas such as Access Problems in the Multimedia Age, Legal Framework of Data Protection and Data Security, and Regulation of “Old” and “New” Media. His current research is focused on the interaction of technical and institutional innovations and on the evolution, development, and governance of the Internet. An earlier version of this article first appeared in Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie Bd.23/H1 July 2002.     

Standards and standards organizations in the international free trade regime

With the evolution of an international free trade regime in telecommunications the economic significance of technical standards has been broadly acknowledged. But their evaluation has remained somewhat diffuse due to the ambivalent nature of standards that can facilitate as well as impede international trade. Focussing on the World Trade Organization (WTO) this article examines the role of technical standards and the principles according to which standards and standardization organizations are assessed. The WTO’s view is extremely formal and restricted and remarkably mismatched with the contemporary hybrid international standards regime. He is co-author with Susanne Schmidt of Coordinating Technology: Studies in the International Standardization of Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998. His research is focused on the institutional conditions and the structural consequences of technological and scientific innovations, in particular in the information and telecommunications technology industry: this includes the development and standardization of telecommunications and data networks, the Internet in particular, and the structural and social consequences of the developments in those areas.     

Strategic types in institution building: A fit perspective

It is generally accepted that the institutionalization of new knowledge is the final stage in the process of knowledge diffusion and utilization, suggesting the need for conceptual models of institution building strategy. We describe four strategic types of institution building, which involve a transfer of knowledge and programs from a home setting to a host setting: consulting, management, adaptation, and entrepreneurial. The strategic types are conceptually derived in terms of the fit between the institutional components—content, context, and environment—in both home and host settings. Daniel S. Fogel received his B.S. and M.A. from the Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is currently Associate Dean and Director, Center for International Enterprise Development, and professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. His two recent books areManaging in Emerging Market Economies: Volumes I and II. His current research focuses on strategic flexibility and innovation in interorganizational networks.     

Religions and States. A New Typology and a Plea for Non-Constitutional Pluralism

Political philosophy has difficulties to cope with the complexity and variety of state-religions relations. Strict separationism is still the preferred option amongst liberals, deliberative and republican democrats, socialist and feminists. In this article, I develop a complex typology based on comparative history and sociology of religions. I summarize my reasons why institutional pluralist models like plural establishment or non-constitutional pluralism are attractive not only for religious minorities but for religiously deeply diverse societies in general. Most attention is paid defending associative democracy, the most flexible and open variety of institutional pluralism, against realist objections that group representation is incompatible with liberal democracy, that it leads to stigmatization and bureaucratization, that it strengthens undemocratic leaders, that it leads to an ossification of the status quo, and, most importantly, that it is inherently divisive undermining social cohesion and political unity. In my refutation of these objections I try to show that it helps to integrate minority religions into liberal democratic policies compatible with reasonable pluralism and to prevent religious and political fundamentalism.     

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.     

Humanizing education: Dewey's concepts of a democratic society and purpose in education revisited

Humanizing education in a democratic society requires an adequate conception of democratic life. Dewey's ideal of a society with free interaction among groups and extensive sharing of interests provides such a vision. His idea of purposing, as a key ingredient in meaningful learning, thought and action, also gives depth to the concept of education in democracy.     

Overcoming the Institutional Deficit of Agonistic Democracy

Agonistic democrats have enriched debates on the political challenge of pluralism by raising awareness for the depth of disagreements and the political potentials of conflict. However, they have so far failed to explore the shape of institutional settings that are conducive to agonism and show how the agonistic stance may, in a very practical sense, strengthen democracies’ capacity to deal with pluralism and conflict. This article argues that this ‘institutional deficit’ of agonistic democracy can be overcome. It develops an approach that reads theories of agonistic democracy as accounts of conflict regulation and uses principles of agonistic politics as measures for a critical assessment of institutional design. A discussion of a test case that is prominent in the recent literature on democratic innovations for pluralist societies—mini-publics—demonstrates that the principles of agonistic conflict regulation as developed by Mouffe, Connolly and Tully provide the basis for both a critique of certain institutions and a development of alternative designs.

     

Direct Democracy and Institutional Trust: Relationships and Differences Across Personality Traits

Direct democracy plays a prominent role in the explanation of institutional trust. To date, however, empirical findings on the effects of direct democracy remain inconclusive. In this article, we argue that this inconclusiveness can be partly ascribed to the diverse effects direct democracy has on individuals. In other words, direct democracy influences institutional trust, but how and to what degree depends on individuals’ personality traits. Running hierarchical analyses of unique survey data from a random sample of eligible Swiss voters, we document three findings: First, we show that the number of ballot measures is not directly associated with institutional trust. Second, we demonstrate that the Big Five personality traits affect the propensity to trust. Third, some of these traits also alter the relationship between direct democracy and institutional trust, suggesting that certain personality types are more likely to be sensitive to popular votes than others and that not everyone is equally likely to respond to political stimuli, even in highly democratic environments.     

Reciprocity and Reasonable Disagreement: From Liberal to Democratic Legitimacy

At the center of Rawls’s work post-1980 is the question of how legitimate coercive state action is possible in a liberal democracy under conditions of reasonable disagreement. And at the heart of Rawls’s answer to this question is his liberal principle of legitimacy. In this paper I argue that once we attend carefully to the depth and range of reasonable disagreement, Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy turns out to be either wildly utopian or simply toothless, depending on how one reads the ideal of reciprocity it is meant to embody. To remedy this defect in Rawls’s theory, I␣undertake to develop the outlines of a democratic conception of legitimacy, drawing first on Rawls’s generic conception of legitimacy in The Law of Peoples and second on a revised understanding of reciprocity between free and equal citizens. On this revised understanding, what free and equal citizens owe one another is not reciprocity in judgment, but reciprocity of interests. David A. Reidy, J.D. (Indiana University-Bloomington), Ph.D. (Philosophy, University of Kansas) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He works in political philosophy and philosophy of law. He has published essays in journals such as Political Theory, Journal of Social Philosophy, Res Publica, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Polis, Journal of Value Inquiry, Kantian Review, Economics and Philosophy, Legal Studies Forum, as well as in various anthologies. He is the co-editor (with Mortimer Sellers) of Universal Human Rights: Moral Order in a Divided World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005) and (with Rex Martin) of A Realistic Utopia: Essays on Rawls’s ‘The Law of Peoples’ (Blackwell, forthcoming 2005).     

Liberalism and Democracy

ABSTRACT Political liberalism and the democratic ideal together supply the foundation of almost all contemporary political thinking. This essay explores the relation between them. It argues that, despite common parlance, there is an inevitable tension between the two. Furthermore, attempts to resolve this tension by showing that democracy is a good thing in its own right, or that it is the inevitable development of liberal aspirations, or that it is conceptually connected to fundamental liberal ideas, all fail. The conclusion to be drawn is that liberalism requires a pragmatic rather than a principled approach to democratic aspirations.     

The market logic of information

Futurists have imagined the Internet as a separate “cyberspace” and as a force for an idealized marketplace. Business practice and economic theory, however, lead to a different picture. (1) “Always-on” connections bring new interface problems and social skills. (2) Reduced transaction costs and increased economies of scale bring outsourcing, concentration, and globalized economy of focused monopolies. (3) The economies of scope inherent in modular computing systems bring “shallow diversity”: processes and products generated by a common underlying framework. This new picture omits many countervailing factors. Even so, the very existence of alternative scenarios should sharpen questions for research. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1989, having conducted dissertation research in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on computational models of improvised activities. Before arriving at UCLA he taught at the University of Sussex and UC San Diego, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Paris. He is the author of Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the coeditor of Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape (with Marc Rotenberg, MIT Press, 1997), Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies in Computing as a Social Practice (with Douglas Schuler and Ablex, 1997), and Computational Theories of Internation and Agency (with Stanley J. Rosenschein, MIT Press, 1996). His current research concerns the role of emerging information technologies in institutional change; including privacy policy and the networked university. He edits an Internet mailing list called the Red Rock Eater News Service that distributes useful information on the social and political aspects of networking and computing to 5, 000 people in 60 countries.     

Modernization,Rights, and Democratic Society: The Limits of Habermas’s Democratic Theory

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the normative foundations of democracy assumes the formal separation of democratic political practice from the economic system. Democratic autonomy presupposes a vital public sphere protected by a complex schedule of individual rights. These rights are supposed to secure the formal and material conditions for democratic freedom. However, because Habermas argues that the economy must be left to function according to endogenous market dynamics, he accepts as a condition of democracy (the formal separation of spheres) a social structure that is in fact anti-democratic. The value of self-determination that Habermas’s theory of democracy presupposes is contradicted by the actual operations of capitalist markets. Further democratic development demands that the steering mechanisms of the capitalist market be challenged by self-organizing civic movements.     

Technological semantics and technological practice: Lessons from an enigmatic episode in twentieth-century technology studies

This paper is a review of words and their meanings in the field of technology studies, and an analysis the semantics of an idealistic international technology-related social movement that flourished briefly during the second half of the twentieth century. Sloppy nomenclature employed by proponents and observers of the movement led to people with opposite views appearing to agree (and vice versa), with the consequence that the movement’s valuable policy insights exerted only marginal influence on mainstream technology policy. I conclude that poor technological semantics may undermine effective technological practice. Suggestions for a constructive technological nomenclature are presented. His research, teaching, and consulting concentrate on strategic technology management, intellectual property management, technology-based entrepreneurship, technology-based industry development, and regional economic development planning. He holds doctoral degrees in both technology studies and strategic management. Kelvin has conducted research or directed programs in technology management at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Utah, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is also an active participant in the Entrepreneurial Technology Apprenticeship Program of the U.S. Minority Business Development Administration and the National Technology Transfer Center.