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Setting Agricultural Research Priorities: Lessons from the CGIAR Study
Author(s) -
McCalla Alex F.,
Ryan James G.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
american journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.949
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1467-8276
pISSN - 0002-9092
DOI - 10.2307/1242763
Subject(s) - library science , agriculture , session (web analytics) , citation , political science , operations research , computer science , geography , engineering , world wide web , archaeology
The Consultative Group on International Agfi-cultural Research (CGIAR) is .1 loose BSSOCtft' lion of 40 donor agencies who provide about 250 million dollars annually to support international agricultural research on developing country problems in 18 institutes. The CGIAR is a relatively small actor on the global scene, representing less than 5% of agricultural research expenditures in developing countries and less than 2% of global public seclor expenditure on agricultural research (Gryseels and Anderson). Therefore, it has always had to be selective in choosing the nature and focus of the research it supports. Priority setting and advice on resource allocation is provided by an independent Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). In this paper we provide a brief review of TAC's approaches to priority setting before focusing on their most recent exercise completed in 1992. This effort was by far the most comprehensive attempt io use quantitative analysis to identify priorities and link them to resource allocation. The approach described in TAC/CGIAR (1992) is best characterized as a modified congruence approach or scoring model, using a spreadsheet The paper concludes with a critical appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the TAC approach relative lo other approaches