The concept of launching "Global Partnership Programmes" (GPPs) resulted from the acknowledgement that although the world is faced with an increasingly complex challenge of feeding its growing population, scientific and technological progress is generating the knowledge to make it possible to meet this challenge while assuring an equitable and sustainable development.

The capacity to respond successfully to this situation will have an impact on the well being of all societies, making it a global issue. Progress made in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT) has increased opportunities for communication and interaction among stakeholders and researchers located in different places. In this context of improving communication and information technology and with the world facing a new scale of challenge, GFAR has launched a new genre of collaboration on agricultural research for development: the Global Partnership Programme (GPP).

What is a GPP?

GPPs are a mode of collaborative programme that are based on shared research efforts aimed at addressing challenges of global interest and on close interaction among all the ARD stakeholders, and are closely related to the regional priority setting processes that are being carried out by the Regional/Sub-Regional Fora.

A GPP has the five following characteristics:

• Addresses agricultural products, production factors or strategic issues that are relevant to the mission of GFAR,
• Promotes the development of action oriented R&D networks allowing synergism, economies of scale and learning processes through the interaction among all the stakeholders of rural development,
• Builds on on-going activities carried out on different levels, from the local to the global, following the principle of subsidiarity,
• Facilitates the gathering of a critical mass of researchers and of research capacities,
• Promotes an innovative mode of collaborative research allowing partners to join the process in any time.

The main purposes of GPPs are to promote collaboration among stakeholders of ARD, to facilitate exchange of information and experiences among them, and to empower people by integrating them into knowledge networks. The structure of a GPP may vary from a structured programme, to a loose Framework for Action within which stakeholders simply agree to collaborate and to exchange information, research results and experiences.

The funding strategy of GPPs is based on cost sharing (stakeholders "buying into" collaborative endeavors), and on the mobilization of additional financial resources such as those related to the regional financial institutions and other non-conventional sources.

The role of Stakeholders

GPPs are stakeholder-led initiatives in which NARS, ARIs, IARCs, NGOs and farmers' organizations play a direct role in all phases of the program, from their conception to their design and development. Effective involvement by as many stakeholders as possible is of great importance in order to ensure a close link between the social and technological innovations that are required for research to achieve its development objectives. As such, the number, type and roles of partners should be dynamic throughout a research partnership programme. As well, capacity building and knowledge sharing are vital for the motivation, empowerment and sustainability of the partnerships. Such collaboration between all stakeholders can promote synergies between technological and social innovations. Given the clear bottom-up approach that GPPs bring and in seeking to build on what stakeholders are already doing through their separate and decentralised activities or initiatives, this mode of collaboration may help to mobilise and commit more explicitly all stakeholders, particularly the "other 96%" of Agricultural Research for development.

The Role of the GFAR

The primary role of the GFAR is to facilitate the creation of fora involving multiple stakeholders at different levels and to facilitate the creation of effective local, subregional, regional and global partnerships. GFAR is therefore an added value "service" encouraging and testing innovative approaches, methodologies and spaces in which to build research partnerships.

For this purpose GFAR Secretariat works in close collaboration with different Facilitating Units. A Facilitating Unit is a co-operative platform allowing stakeholders to facilitate and improve the emergence of GPPs that are considered of high priority and of high potential impact.
An example of such units is the IPGRI-INIBAP/CIRAD one established in Montpellier, France, to deal with the international market/cash crops commodity chains.

The Formulation, Management and Evaluation of GPPs

GPPs are built on decentralised initiatives, but they are more than a mere aggregation of such initiatives as they facilitate interregional linkages, cross-fertilisation of experiences and more rapid spread of research results, as well as avoiding unnecessary duplications and overlaps in research agendas. The formulation of the research agenda should look to link "the local to the global", seeking to involve different stakeholders and to strengthen the sub-regional and regional mechanisms that have been established in the last years. The agenda should be influenced by community problems as well as by researchers' suggestions and should address the social, institutional and political dimensions of the themes they cover while paying particular attention to the social utilisation of the knowledge they generate. The responsibilities, management and governance of the GPPs should be fairly shared among the partners and thus no single stakeholder should claim ownership.

The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of research partnership programmes should involve both qualitative and quantitative criteria going beyond biophysical aspects, to include social, economic and political dimensions of development and should involve all stakeholders concerned.

It is important to seek close co-ordination with other regional/global initiatives that are currently developing in international agricultural research, such as the emergence of a European Research Area in Agricultural Research for Development (ERA-ARD), and the CGIAR Challenge Programmes. GPPs are complementary to these initiatives.

The GFAR portfolio of GPPs

Following the last Technical Workshop on Methodologies, Organisation and Management of Global Partnership Programmes (IFAD, Rome, 9-10 October 2001), eight GPPs about to be launched:

1. Direct sowing, Mulch-based systems and Conservation Agriculture (DMC)
2. Appropriate Technologies for Tropical Ecosystems
3. Promotion of Local Innovation (PROLINNOVA)
4. Major Commodities Programmes (Cocoa and Coconut) and Under-utilised and Orphan Species and Commodities initiative
5. EGFAR as a communications platform among stakeholders of ARD in close collaboration with the Regional Agricultural Information Systems (RAIS) of Regional/Sub-regional Fora
6. Agrobiodiversity and research issues related to conservation and sustainable utilisation of plant genetic resources
7. Animal health and production for human food security and food safety
8. Linking Farmers to Markets: post-harvest, rural innovation systems and rural SMEs.

Future Actions

Much has already been done in identifying, defining and proposing GPPs. There are several ongoing processes that should be worked upon, however. These include continuing and deepening the learning process of how to build stakeholder-led GPPs; further developing and launching the concrete GPPs; and strengthening the collaboration between the GPPs and other global initiatives.