Endogenizing governance within IFPRI research provides us the opportunity to expand the range of methodological approaches and conceptual issues embraced by IFPRI. In political science and political sociology, there are useful research strategies generally not used by IFPRI. Experience with interdisciplinary collaboration has shown that it is a good approach to use empirical policy problems of common interest to demonstrate how various disciplines approach such concrete problems: which methods are applied; how are results obtained and interpreted; what significance is accorded them.

This problem-oriented technique will be used for the Workshop. In the morning session, four leading scholars will present analytical approaches from political science and political sociology which are of interest to IFPRI and which can be applied to poverty reduction, growth, food policy, and agriculture and natural resource management. The speakers are Merilee Grindle, David Laitin, Jos Mooij and Paul Sabatier (see more information below). Focusing on a case from their own work, they will give a presentation followed by discussion about the details and utility of their approach to research.

In the afternoon session of the workshop four IFPRI research projects from different Divisions, which are in the planning or early implementation stage, have been selected to serve as examples for discussing how IFPRI can make use of new research methods for its governance research. The projects will be briefly presented and then discussed, partly within sub-groups led by one of our invited speakers. Depending on time and interest, you are invited to attend the entire seminar or, if that is not possible, those sessions of special interest.

As a follow-up to the workshop, a training module will be prepared that covers the analytical approaches discussed during the workshop. In collaboration with IFPRI researchers, the module will use some of the IFPRI case studies presented in the afternoon to illustrate how to incorporate governance issues into food policy research. This module will be a resource for the food policy researcher community, collaborating partners, and university professors who are incorporating governance into their research or postgraduate teaching.