Abstract
Multi-stakeholder platforms have become mainstream in projects, programmes and policy interventions aiming to improve innovation and livelihoods systems, i.e. research for development interventions in low- and middle-income contexts. However, the evidence for multi-stakeholder platforms’ contribution to the performance of research for development interventions and their added value is not compelling. This paper focuses on stakeholder participation as one of the channels for multi-stakeholder platforms’ contribution to the performance of research for development interventions, i.e. stakeholder participation. It uses a quantitative approach and utilizes descriptive statistics and ARIMA models. It shows that, in three Ugandan multi-stakeholder platform cases studied, participation increased both in nominal and in unique terms. Moreover, participation was rather cyclical and fluctuated during the implementation of the research for development interventions. The study also shows that, in addition to locational and intervention factors such as type of the area along a rural–urban gradient targeted by the intervention and human resources provided for multi-stakeholder platform implementation, temporal elements such as phases of research for development intervention objectives and the innovation development process play significant roles in influencing participation. The study concludes that contribution of multi-stakeholder platforms to the performance of research for development projects, programs, policies and other initiatives is constrained by locational and temporal context and conditional on the participation requirements of the objectives pursued by research for development intervention.
Highlights
Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have been attracting increasing attention from different agencies aiming to improve innovation and livelihood systems
Raford [102] added that local actors’ deeper local expertise can increase the relevance of local actors for the R4Ds, and their participation. These arguments propose that stakeholder participation in R4Ds is higher at local level. We investigate whether this proposition is valid in our cases to better understand the nature of participation and articulate the implications of using an MSP approach in R4Ds
Our study showed that human resource allocation to manage and implement the MSP was significantly correlated to participation [Table 4]
Summary
Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) have been attracting increasing attention from different agencies aiming to improve innovation and livelihood systems (hereafter systems). R4Ds aim to improve complex systems and require approaches and tools that enable holistic identification and analyses of both constraints and opportunities [12,13] This implies that R4Ds need to respond to the needs and challenges faced by different stakeholder groups [14,15,16], making collective action and multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder partnerships between research and development actors key for their performance [7,13,17]. MSPs have gained momentum in the R4D world, notably because of their ability to foster collective action across multi-disciplinary actors [6,7,18] Their popularity is especially high in low- and middleincome countries where partially or non-participatory approaches have frequently been reported as insufficient to improve systems [17]
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