Nearly 600 million poor people work in agriculture, but could be helped by appropriate new technologies. The development of such technologies requires contributions from a variety of actors. The innovation systems framework provides criteria for designing the networks needed to identify and link such actors. It requires further development in order to be applicable to agriculture, where research is often location-specific and involves the adaptation of generic knowledge to local conditions. A key question concerns the encounter between location-specific and generic knowledge. This question is addressed by the present project, which will generate new insights on ways to integrate ‘scientific’ with ‘local’ knowledge.

This project will undertake social scientific research on the network of scientific actors working to protect rice from blast. This case concerns a fungal disease caused by a diverse pathogen population. Since rice possesses a diverse range of resistance genes effective against some forms of the pathogen, genomics-based methods of plant breeding, informed by genomic analysis of the fungal population, are needed to produce resistant crops. Location-specific information about pathogen populations in different regions is also vital for the innovation process.

The project will examine the treatment of generic and ‘local’ knowledge at different points of the network, concentrating on communication across the interfaces between different kinds of actor. It will establish how effectively location-specific information about pathogen populations is communicated and will identify institutional factors that help or impede such communication. It will relate such behaviour to the nature of each network, in particular to the characteristics of its component organisations and the processes that take place on the interfaces between them. It will then propose extensions to the innovation systems framework to take account of such experiences