Transcript Public-private partnerships - Future Agricultures Consortium

Farmer First Revisited
12 – 14 December 2007
at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK
Presentation, Theme 2a, Public–private linkages
Discussant: Ian Scoones (IDS and STEPS)
[standing in for Rasheed Sulaiman (CRISP)]
Public-private
partnerships
Discussant overview: Session 2a
Opportunities and challenges
PPPs can help overcome many of the impediments
posed by market failure, institutional constraints, and
systemic weaknesses in agricultural research and
technology delivery by building on complementarities,
exploiting synergies, and distributing costs and risk
between the public and private sectors (Gospel
Omanya)
But what are the challenges?
Partnerships are constrained by conflicting incentive
structures, high transaction and opportunity costs,
competition and risk associated with proprietary
assets, and mutually negative misperceptions.
(Gospel Omanya)
But what actually are PPPs?
 Resourcing partnerships
 Contracting partnerships
 Commercialising partnerships
 Frontier research partnerships
 Sector/value chain development partnerships
(Spielman et al)
Papers
Glover – Monsanto smallholder programme in
India
Teme – Syngenta Foundation and IER in Mali
Omanya – African Agricultural Technology
Foundation
Peters – The Global Alliance for Livestock
Veterinary Medicines - GALVMed
Speilman – PPPs and the CGIAR
Agreement that…
 The private sector has long been involved in
innovation – often in joined up, integrated ways that
have often been ignored by the public sector
(innovation systems ideas came from private sector –
inc. long established debates in industrial and
business development)
 User engagement (as future customers) by the
private sector is standard practice – e.g. notions of
distributed innovation etc.
 PPPs offer important potentials for new innovation
pathways – new capacity, new skills, new markets,
new hardware and software.
 Links with the private sector often missed in early
FPR, but cannot be today. Changing patterns of R
and D capacity, global markets etc, mean that FF
approaches cannot be a public sector/NGO affair.
But, we must ask…
 What justifies public expenditure in PPPs?
Investment in new R and D trajectories, ensuring
access to privately held proprietary technologies,
leveraging private sector skills and reach in delivery,
reducing costs etc…But how focused on poverty
reduction (public good aims) are these?
 What is the business argument for PPPs? Public
relations, extending market reach, philanthropic
concern, or what? What are the values and
objectives that define the ‘partnership’?
…. and….
 Are PPPs about getting farmers involved
setting R and D priorities and directions… or
are they seen more as passive recipients of
new/existing pipeline products?
 What risks arise from the (power and funding)
imbalances of PPPs? Focus on existing onthe-shelf technologies, distortions in markets
and delivery systems, diversion of
resources/skills/efforts in public sector…
Some lessons (from nascent
experiences)…
 Poor mapping of impact pathways – cannot really say
they are pro poor or not…
 Exclusive licensing arrangements emerge –
excluding opportunities not expanding them –
negatively affecting market structure
 Publicly funded CG centre facilities, staff, funds
allocated to high value cash crops – diverting
capacity and resources
 Market segregation (subsidies for the poor)
approaches with unknown, potentially negative
impacts
In sum: lack of risk management of PPPs, and poor
poverty targeting and analysis (from Spielman)
What needs to be done…
 Develop partnerships around real demands for new
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technologies, not supply of old (but
expensive/unavailable ones)
Involve farmers upstream in technology development,
as well as downstream in technology transfer.
Link R and D and technology transfer with learning by
doing (participatory monitoring and evaluation by
multiple stakeholders)
Build platforms for partnership development (avoid ad
hoc supply driven responses) – a genuine demand
led approach.
Address power imbalances in partnerships explicitly,
negotiating objectives and claims
Develop strategies to manage and mitigate the range
of potential risks (inc around regulatory, IP issues)
Analyse impact pathways - and base pro-poor claims
And, finally, a worry…
Are we stuck in a supply-driven, product-oriented,
technology-led, pipeline model in PPP initiatives for
development?
Have debates about innovation and PPPs elsewhere
moved on….?
Are there some lessons to be learned?
[E.g. NESTA Innovation Gap report, 2006]