Background history

PROLINNOVA is the only GPP initiated and led by an NGO and was conceived in December 1999, when Southern and Northern NGOs - with support from GFAR, the Non-Governmental Organisations Committee (NGOC) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs - met in Rambouillet, France, to consider how existing approaches to participatory R&D in agriculture and NRM could be scaled up.
At this meeting, ETC Ecoculture, a Netherlands-based NGO, was asked to facilitate the launching of a PROLINNOVA programme built from the bottom up. PROLINNOVA is also the result of the call for proposals for GPPs that were made in the occasion of the 2000 GFAR Conference in Dresden, Germany
 

Goals, objectives, purpose

PROLINNOVA 's main focus is on recognising the dynamics of indigenous knowledge (IK) and learning how to strengthen the capacities of farmers (including peasant/family farmers, forest dwellers, pastoralists and artisanal fisherfolk) to adjust to changing conditions - to develop and adapt their own site-appropriate systems and institutions of resource management in order to gain food security, sustain their livelihoods and safeguard the environment. The long-term aim is to institutionalise PROLINNOVA approaches within national programmes of research, development and education.

More specific objectives over the next five years include:

• to establish effective PROLINNOVA R&D partner-ship programmes in several countries/sub-regions
• to synthesise lessons from these new initiatives, as well as from past and existing experiences with PROLINNOVA approaches, and to document and spread the lessons
• to establish mechanisms for sustained linkages between these initiatives for continued analysis of and learning from PROLINNOVA experiences and for mutual support
• to encourage the wider application and institutionalisation of PROLINNOVA approaches.