For more about IFPRI’s work on governance, see the governance research area page

The governance program conducts research on:

1. Governance of agricultural sector institutions and services, such as ministries of agriculture and regulatory agencies, working to understand how to make ministries of agriculture more effective, how to combat corruption in agriculture and rural development, and how to improve agricultural regulation.

Research highlights:

• An Institutional Review of the Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture
  Ministries of agriculture have an important role to play promoting a Green Revolution in Africa. This paper develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the capacity and effectiveness of agricultural ministries and applies the framework for an institutional assessment of the Ghanaian Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The paper identifies opportunities and challenges in the areas of institutional set-up, strategic planning, human resource and financial management, and mission orientation and accountability.
• Regional Biotechnology Regulations - Design Options and Implications for Good Governance
  Various regions of the developing world are seeking to establish regional systems of biotechnology regulation. Using West Africa as a case, this paper discusses options for the design of these regional systems, and highlights the issues that matter for good governance in regional biotechnology regulation.

2. Local governance and rural service provision, particularly in the context of decentralization of government services, to understand how to improve agricultural and rural service provision for the poor and for women.

Research highlights:

• Local Politics, Political Institutions, and Public Resource Allocation in India
  Decentralization can help adjust public spending to better fit rural people’s priorities, but it can also lead to targeting failure and elite capture. Using data from 80 village councils and 225 villages in the Indian state of Karnataka, this paper shows that villages represented by politicians belonging to disadvantaged castes get fewer resources if intra-village resource allocation is entirely left to a bargaining process in local councils. The findings have important implications for the design of decentralized rural development programs.
• How to make agricultural extension demand-driven? The case of India’s agricultural extension policy
  Agricultural extension or advisory services can play an important role in improving agricultural productivity, ensuring food security, and linking farmers to markets. Many countries are in the process of reforming their agricultural extension systems to overcome the governance challenges involved in this service, such as low outreach and limited responsiveness to farmers needs. This paper uses the case of India’s agricultural extension policy as an example to analyze the different strategies that reformers can apply to make their agricultural extension systems more demand-driven.

3. Political decisionmaking processes, especially in the formulation of agricultural policies and development strategies, looking at how continent-wide initiatives influence agricultural policies, and the political economy of donor support to agriculture.

Research highlights:

• Agricultural strategy development in West Africa : The false promise of participation?
  Participatory approaches are increasingly used for designing agricultural development strategies. By analyzing the role of stakeholder participation in the formulation of agricultural and rural development strategies in West Africa, this paper finds that the real challenge does not lie in achieving broad-based participation in strategy formulation, but rather in transforming the outcomes of participatory processes into policies that can be feasibly implemented. The paper highlights why an emphasis on participatory processes can sometimes result in disappointment among stakeholders and discusses a range of measures to help overcome this dilemma.

• Conference Proceedings, “The Political Economy of Policies for Smallholder Agriculture”
  This paper compares the experience of Asian countries that were able to launch a smallholder-based Green Revolution with the experience of African countries that are still struggling to meet this goal. The paper shows that high political stakes in the results of agricultural policies, especially in terms of food security, were key for overcoming the governance challenges inherent in agricultural development, thus making a Green Revolution possible.