Partnerships and Approaches Used for Scaling: An Assessment of the Process for Rice Postharvest Technologies in CORIGAP

In agriculture, many technologies are co-produced by research and a variety of other stakeholders, including farmers. Large-scale implementation of such technologies requires not only the distribution of the material components of a technology but also the replication of the social network, typically provided through facilitation of stakeholder involvement. Within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the now common procedure to enable stakeholder involvement is the creation of innovation platforms. The multi-stakeholder engagement initiated by these platforms enables the use of locally adapted technologies. This implies that the introduced technologies are not merely copied but require unpacking and repacking. In other words, a process of re-establishing the interconnectedness of the technology with varied socioeconomic arrangements and policies that enable its use. Understanding the process of scaling technologies thus requires analysis of the network that effectively catalyzes synergistic change and supports the adoption of technologies. However, the nature of the network, the types of partnerships, and the communication processes are situational and dynamic. It can take many years before newly introduced technologies become integrated into the routines of farming and accepted as a ‘normal’ technology. In this chapter, we provide a qualitative assessment of the partnerships and networks initiated by the Closing Rice Yield Gaps project (CORIGAP). Many of the CORIGAP partnerships were initiated during the predecessor project, the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC). CORIGAP facilitated partnerships in different modalities, depending on the context of the countries and partners. This included partnerships with private-sector partners who, for example, provide services or inputs in return for subsidies or other financial arrangements. We reflect on the types of partnerships, how they are conceptualized, and how they created the needed connections and conditions to support the scaling of technologies introduced by CORIGAP. We also present cases of private-sector partnerships as examples of engagements with industries. We then dive into an approach that had been employed in several CORIGAP sites to facilitate the creation of a network for learning, innovation, and scaling of technologies. A case of using this approach in the Lower Ayeyarwady Delta of Myanmar is presented. We close the chapter with insights on the incentives these CORIGAP partnerships have enabled for scaling.