INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN NATIONAL AGRICULTURAL-RESEARCH - ISSUES FOR IMPACT ASSESSMENT

Institutions are essential for agricultural development, yet confusion is widespread about what institutions are and how to evaluate them. National agricultural research systems embody the lack of clarity. Institutions are stable and valued behaviours to solve collective problems, and can be manifested as both rules and organizations. Institutional development schemes usually concentrate on organizations. Evaluation methods for institutions focus on resource acquisition, internal processes, output and outcomes and the linkages among these activities. All the methods are handicapped by difficult definitional, attribution and temporal problems. To evaluate institutional development requires starting with clear definitions, which admit that institutional development is hard to measure and prove.