Impact Assessment of Policy-Oriented International Agricultural Research: Evidence and Insights from Case Studies

Assessing the impact of policy-oriented research is fraught with methodological difficulties ranging from attributing influence on policy change to constructing an appropriate counterfactual. The six case studies in this special section address these challenges in the context of international agricultural research. Methodological and analytical lessons are drawn about the uptake and influence of policy-oriented research on policy change and about the conduct of cost benefit analysis for such research. The authors of the studies effectively used a key-informant approach to document uptake and influence for policy reforms that were believed to have incorporated well-defined outputs from policy research. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.