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Those who study global poverty and ways to reduce it face a perennial set of questions: Do advances in knowledge, research, and technology make a real difference in the lives of poor people? What effect does research have on the poor? Who benefits? The contributors to Agricultural Research, Livelihoods, and Poverty shed light on these questions through a collection of case studies that explore the types of impact that agricultural research has had on livelihoods and poverty in low-income countries.

• "This book is a huge and remarkable achievement. Multidisciplinary, multimethod, detailed, and comparative, these studies and their conclusions are rigorous, nuanced, comprehensive, and authoritative. They reveal as never before how complexities and diversity combine: the many dimensions of poverty, the multifarious livelihood conditions and strategies of poor people, and the many direct and indirect impact pathways of agricultural research. The implications for agricultural research policy and practice are profound: for policy, to act on the insight that reducing poverty is neither linear nor simple; for practice, the challenge to agricultural scientists to keep close to poor farmers and local realities. After this book, things should never be the same again. Its findings imply a need for institutional learning and change in research organizations to make policy and practice more poverty relevant, and a reorientation of agricultural education. Its conclusions should be studied and acted on by all who are serious about agricultural research as a means to reduce poverty."
  —Robert Chambers
  Research Associate, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
• "Assessing impact is never easy, and to do so in a way that combines qualitative and quantitative methods and distinct disciplinary approaches to valid knowledge just makes the task that much more thorny—if also that much more interesting and worthwhile. This is the challenge that was taken on by an international research endeavor whose purpose was nothing less than to assess the impact on poor people’s livelihoods of research conducted within the global system of international agricultural research centers. In this collection, Michelle Adato and Ruth Meinzen-Dick—coordinators of that endeavor—have achieved one of those rare successes: an edited volume that hangs together almost as if it were a monograph. The essays demonstrate the range of ways of thinking about impact, and that strange mix of intention, serendipity, and political-economic constraint that fashions how agricultural technology becomes part of everyday lives and agricultural landscapes."
  —Anthony Bebbington
  Professor of Nature, Society, and Development, Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester
• "This is an excellent book that systematically lays out how the livelihoods framework can be applied to agricultural research related to poverty and then provides a number of examples of this application at both the micro and macro levels in fairly different contexts. The team participating in this project is to be congratulated not only for providing good studies of specific projects, but also for attempting to go beyond these projects to determine the wider lessons."
  —Jere R. Behrman
  W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania

Michelle Adato and Ruth Meinzen-Dick are senior research fellows at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Adato leads IFPRI's global research program on Large-Scale Human Capital Interventions and her research focuses on the social dynamics of programs aimed at improving livelihoods, health, nutrition, and education. A coeditor of Innovation in Natural Resource Management and other books, Meinzen-Dick's research deals with water resource management and she leads the CGIAR's program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi).

The table of contents is available for download in PDF format.

• Table of Contents
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