Retroactively assessing whether the Principles have been applied to your project is possible. If your project has finished, a retroactive application can provide information for improving future projects. However, generally, the Principles should be applied at the beginning stages and throughout the project lifecycle. This is because they are a method for assessing an innovation’s progress towards sustainable agrifood systems, offering opportunities to reflect on that progress and make adaptations and adjustments when necessary. A final assessment, towards the end of the project/innovation cycle, is also recommended.
The Principles are not intended to directly help measure whether an innovation has successfully achieved sustainable agrifood system outcomes (e.g. increases in biodiversity or food security as a result of a project). This is due to the fact that:
Therefore, the Principles hold innovators and investors accountable by tracking intentions and how these are reflected in their innovation processes. It should be noted that indicators and metrics are crucial in innovation processes. The Principles should be complemented by metrics that aim to capture outcomes and impact (see sub-Principle 2.3).
If you do not have the resources to collect evidence to support your score, the highest score attainable is 1. Although resource intensive, collecting evidence is crucial for supporting scores and applying the Principles correctly. This is because evidence supports monitoring, reporting, evaluating, and implementing the required changes to improve sustainable agrifood systems outcomes. Without evidence, there is a risk of greenwashing, and the transparency of the Principles’ application is compromised. Evidence is also helpful for keeping records of projects and the processes used, allowing lessons learned to be applied to future projects. Although it is resource intensive, there are many benefits (outside of Principle application and scoring) to collecting evidence.
Each project, innovation, or cluster of projects will be different, though, typically, they key stages of all three can be considered the design stage, the mid-term review, the final review, and the ex-post evaluation. These stages offer opportunities to either consciously consider the Principles and their
incorporation into the project, reflect on what has happened during the project, make changes to the project based on new or updated information, or all three. However, some projects may have more or fewer key stages. For example, a project may include more regular reviews of the project charter or other project documents, providing a greater number of opportunities to apply the Principles. Conversely, some projects may not have scheduled mid-term reviews, or ex-post evaluations. In these cases, it is preferable to apply the Principles in lieu of these processes.
Innovation in agriculture will always affect target groups and non-target groups in varying ways, which are sometimes unpredictable. Due to this, innovations result in winners and losers, those that benefit from an innovation, and those that feel negative effects due to its presence. For example, an innovation project aiming to reduce poverty by increasing crop yields through new seed varieties may benefit those end users that increase yields and therefore household income, the “winners” of innovation. On the other hand, negative effects may arise from the new variety; its uptake may reduce the availability of staple diet crops on the local market or create localized monocultures. This in turn may negatively affect the food and nutrition security of non-target groups and ecosystem stability, the “losers of innovation”. Although they are not always predictable, aiming to understand and forecast potential winners and losers of innovation is important for reducing these negative “spill-overs”.
The key stages of a project (or cluster of projects) are considered to be, the design stage, mid-term review, final review, and ex-post evaluation. Ideally, the assessment of the Principles should be integrated into regular project planning and review meetings (e.g. annual or mid-term reviews). Each organization will have a different planning and review cycle. If your project does not have these stages, it is recommended that you integrate them into the project lifecycle, utilizing the Principles as a starting point.
The Principles rely on an agri-food system understanding: a perspective that covers the journey of food from farm to table – stages including growing, fishing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, distributing, trading, purchasing, preparing, eating, and disposal. It also encompasses non-food products that contribute to livelihoods and the activities, investments, and choices that play a part in sourcing these food and agricultural products (incl. fisheries, marine products, and forestry products). A food systems perspective focuses on pre-production and production activities, and their relation to other activities such as processing, retail and consumption. These activities are influenced by a wide variety of drivers of the system. These include environmental drivers (e.g. climate change), political drivers (e.g. geopolitics), economic drivers (e.g. level of subsidies), demographic drivers (e.g. age structure), and social drivers (e.g. land access issues). The sustainable agrifood systems perspective also considers all the actors that are associated with or linked to these activities, including potentially affected family members. All of these elements influence food system activities (positively or negatively) and their ability to deliver sustainable agrifood system outcomes.
The Principles use and build on FAO’s definition of agricultural innovation. Agrifood systems innovation is the process whereby individuals or organizations bring new or existing products, processes, or ways of organizing into use for the first time in a specific context. Within the agrifood system, innovation can be understood as the process and a set of measures or actions that either develop or change the intensity and/or direction of a technology, policy, service, or institutional drivers that then lead to changes in the design, production, use, disposal, or recycling of goods and services and/or changes in the institutional environment. Innovation includes changes in practices, norms, markets, and institutional arrangements, which may foster new networks of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption. Innovation also includes “old” methodologies implemented in new places.
Overall, the Principles guide investors and innovators to consider and include sustainable agrifood system objectives in their investment, research, and innovation decisions. Process Principles steer the innovation process more technically. They are focused on improving the processes undertaken during innovation stages to ensure they are robust and lay the foundations for contributing to sustainable agrifood system outcomes. Outcome Principles direct the impact of an innovation by defining the scope of intended outcomes and highlight what should be strived for from the innovation. The process and outcome Principles are complementary and work in tandem.
The Principles are intended to guide investors, innovators, and researchers to consider and include sustainable agri-food system objectives in their innovations. They provide a template for determining how thoroughly these objectives have been considered. They allow investors, innovators, and researchers to clearly demonstrate the inclusion and consideration of these objectives in their work while facilitating accountability, and improving the transparency of the innovation landscape.
In developing the Principles, the following user groups were targeted. Public and private direct investors (funders) in innovations for sustainable agrifood systems Managers and implementers of R4D and innovation programs, both public and private Certification, benchmarking, and watchdog organizations. They are potentially also useful for farmers and farmers’ groups.
The Principles are not intended to directly help measure whether an innovation has successfully achieved sustainable agri-food system outcomes or not. The lack of directly observable causality between innovation and impact, the inability to compare different types of innovation, and the long lag time between scaling and impact prevent the development of a small set of outcome metrics for innovation that are widely applicable and harmonized across all innovation. See p. 42 for more information.
The scoring system looks at the extent to which an innovation project or cluster of projects addresses each of the Principles. The score does not attempt to measure progress of the innovation against outcomes, because this measurement is not simple and will vary for different types of innovations (for example financial or technical), the stages of innovation, and the accountability mechanisms. Instead, the score is intended to assess whether the project or cluster of projects is making a credible attempt to measure progress using appropriate methods and indicators.
Metrics (such as income, food consumption, or soil carbon content) cannot normally be used on their own to measure progress against innovation outcomes due to the problem of causality (i.e. the observed change in the metric may not be wholly due to the innovation). Metrics should therefore be used in combination with, and support, other tools such as evaluations and impact assessments. The use of such tools in projects is measured using the Scoring Template.
The scoring system can be used to assess each sub-Principle individually and each Principle as a whole to indicate what action has been taken by an innovator or an organization to implement it. The scores show how thoroughly the investor or innovator has considered the Principles in their innovation processes and whether needed changes have been implemented based on the Principles’ scores or evaluation findings. The score is not a direct indication of the impact of an innovation.
Yes, each sub-Principle should be scored as they form the basic elements of each Principle and form the overall Principle score. For each Principle, the overall score is the lowest non zero score of each sub-Principle. However, if you score 0 on any relevant sub-Principle, the main principle cannot be scored higher than 1. For example, if you score: 2 for sub-Principle 1.1, 0 for sub-Principle 1.2, and 3 for sub-Principle 1.3, your overall score will be 1.
Build on the existing research or innovation project development systems within your organization (guidelines for innovation inception, planning, development, and implementation). Alongside your existing systems, apply the Principles to improve the innovation. Because the Principles sit alongside existing systems, evidence for supporting Principles’ scores can be generated by already existing reporting mechanisms. You are also able to use the Principles to identify and modify gaps or weaknesses in your existing systems.
The scoring system can easily be applied to individual innovation projects or at a level where similar innovation projects are clustered (note, this does not mean at the program level). For clustering projects, see pp. 14 and 15 of this guide. It can only be applied to an entire organization or program if the scores from each individual project or cluster of projects are aggregated – not averaged. Instructions on how to aggregate scores can be found on page 22 of this guide.
To assess if an innovator/organization overall moves in the direction of the Principles over time, the aggregated scores of projects or clusters of projects should be compared over time periods to observe shifts in aggregated scores.
Yes! While each Principle stands for itself and requires individual scoring, the Principles constitute a complementary set of guidelines, the effectiveness of which suffers if one or more Principles is left out. Principles that are deemed to be less of a priority are particularly relevant when it comes to trade-offs – these trade-offs should be made consciously and be backed by evidence. Prioritization in terms of allocating more or fewer resources to particular principles is possible as long as each one is considered sufficiently. Principles with a lower score should not be neglected but should point users to areas they can improve on.
However, regarding outcome Principles (5-8), it is possible that a sub-Principle is not relevant to a particular innovation (e.g. the animal welfare sub-Principle may be irrelevant to an innovation developing a solar battery for irrigation pumps). In this case, the sub-Principle (not the entire Principle) can be excluded – with justification. This is only true of the outcome Principles; for the process Principles, all sub-Principles must always be scored.
Generally, all Principles must be considered adequately at every stage of the innovation process. However, the process Principles (1-4) may be less relevant during some later stages of the innovation process (i.e. developing a clear theory of change may not be appropriate during evaluation stages). Nonetheless, when applying the Principles at any stage, all Principles can highlight gaps and shortcomings, i.e. in the previous evaluation example, assessing whether a clear theory of change was developed may inform the evaluation and its direction to ensure there are linkages between innovation design, implementation, and evaluation.
Ideally, applying the Principles using the Scoring Template should be done at each key stage of an innovation process, such as idea conception, planning, implementation, evaluation, and scaling/adoption.
Innovators can prioritize any outcome or set of outcomes but they must be aware of trade-offs and make efforts to address these proactively. If an innovation causes a negative outcome or impact (e.g. depletion of water resources) the innovation processes must, at least, offset the negative effects through mitigation measures to cause no harm. Adequately monitoring “lower priority” outcome Principles is important for being able to monitor trade-offs and quickly observe unintended consequences. Using an agrifood systems approach will allow innovators to reduce unintended consequences as they will have more broadly considered the potential impacts of their innovation across all relevant elements and actors within the system. Nonetheless, unintended consequences may emerge later in the process and can be dealt with in the same way as negative trade-offs.
In the understanding of innovation, the Principles build on a framework for scaling agricultural innovation, which presents a route to achieving scale from the very start of the process. As such, the Principles do not include the issue of scaling, but instead emphasize the need to include an intended route to impact (i.e. theory of change) that will facilitate achieving impact at scale.
The resilience of the agrifood system points to the system’s ability to maintain a certain level of performance despite shocks (short-term) and stresses (long-term). It can be understood as a property of the agrifood system, meaning that the activities and actors within the system can withstand or recover from shocks and stresses and that the system as a whole can do the same. As such, resilience is considered a result of the implementation of the Principles – in the same way that applying the Principles increases the sustainability of the system, it also increases the resilience of the system.
Various Principles look at the application of an inclusive and transparent process that consults and works with end-users and builds on various forms of knowledge (e.g. local, scientific, indigenous). This can also include bringing in knowledge from the wider political, cultural, and/or socioeconomic contexts of the innovation. This process, while crucial, can be difficult and can reveal power imbalances within current processes. For your innovation, using an agrifood systems perspective should allow you to identify the relevant types of knowledge, the relevant end-users, and all actors impacted (both targeted and non-targeted) who are sometimes the losers of innovation. Monitoring innovation processes and impacts will also allow you to identify other relevant stakeholders and knowledge sources that need to be drawn upon. As part of innovation processes, you should openly publish which groups have been consulted, and how, and the results of the consultation.
