Recommendations arising from an analysis of changes to the Australian agricultural research, development and extension system

Warren Hunt, Colin Birch, Frank Vanclay and Jeff Coutts

Food Policy, 2014, vol. 44, issue C, 129-141

Abstract: The business of agricultural research, development and extension (RD&E) has undergone considerable change in Australia since the late 1980s, moving from a domain largely dominated by government departments to a situation of multiple actors, and where rural industries now directly contribute funds towards RD&E efforts. However, the transition has not been without impacts on the overall agricultural RD&E agri-food capacity of the nation, and there are now indications of reduced capacity and slowing productivity gains in certain sectors. If not addressed, there is the risk that the future resilience of industries could be threatened, affecting parts of the Australian economy and compromising Australian contributions to global food supply on export markets and a slowing of agricultural innovation. There are also comparable divestment trends and the loss of capacity and risks to future resilience of agricultural systems in other developed nations. Importantly, research and extension are discussed as interdependent partner disciplines, and that the separation of the two has deleterious effects on capacity and resilience building. The authors investigate, through six case study institutions, organisational innovations that may provide direction towards the future restructuring of agricultural RD&E effort in Australia. These insights have application to both the Australian and the international reader, warning about the consequences of reduced investment in agricultural RD&E, and learning about how research and extension can transition from traditional public sector models to systems that have greater flexibility and, importantly, ownership by the industries themselves.

Keywords: Agriculture; Extension; Agricultural policy; Capacity; Resilience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919213001784
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfpoli:v:44:y:2014:i:c:p:129-141

DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2013.11.007

Access Statistics for this article

Food Policy is currently edited by J. Kydd

More articles in Food Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().