How to strengthen the link between advisors and research in a privatized advisory system? - The case of Brandenburg, Germany

Publikations-Art

Kongressbeitrag

Autoren

Knuth, Ulrike; Knierim, Andrea

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Seite (von - bis)

835-843

Tagungsname

11th European IFSA Symposium

Tagungsort

Berlin

Tagungsdatum

1-4.04.2014

Agricultural advisory systems are mentioned as one important partner in the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) ‘Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability’ and therefore new funding opportunities for private advisory firms become available. Consequently this requires from advisors to adopt new roles such as intermediaries, (knowledge) brokers, (process) facilita-tors or change agents, e.g. in research – practice networks. Studies of the last decades in Bran-denburg observed fragmentation within the AKIS, especially among advisors, but also discon-nected linkages with research. Privatization and commercialization of advisory services to the full amount and shortening of budgets for regional agricultural research are main reasons. These observations motivated the authors to start an action research process together with advi-sors working in Brandenburg, which aims at searching for new ways to intensify the collabora-tion between scientific organizations and advisory services in Brandenburg. The action research process will include the phases of problem analysis, planning, implementation and evaluation closely related to the management cycle, but they are to be adjusted as the process continues. So far, the kick-off meeting with interested advisors has been realized and delivered insights on how advisors view the regional research system and its interaction with practice. In general, the advisors assess the situation as “research in Brandenburg is almost invisible”. In particular, they noticed, that linkages among actors from the organic farming context are more intensively com-pared to conventional farming “actors”. The implementation of EIP has not (yet) been received as a chance for future activities and has been viewed quite skeptically, especially concerning the advisors’ role within operational groups. The participating advisors concluded a strong need for more networking activities within the group of advisors (self-organization) and defined it as a topic to tackle in following meetings of this action research process.