Issue #41, December 2021
Dear PIM Friends,
This is a bittersweet moment for me as I am writing this final message as Director of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The exciting decade of the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) is coming to an end in December 2021, while CGIAR is entering a new phase designed to bring the global CGIAR community closer together towards even more impactful research. As other CRPs, PIM has facilitated strong collaborations among CGIAR centers and partners to produce excellent cross-cutting research, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way are being taken up by several of the future One CGIAR Initiatives.
In 2021 as in 2020, the pandemic created challenges for everyone, but the PIM teams continued to produce highly relevant research outputs and to contribute to development outcomes at local, national, and global levels. Our annual report will be completed in May 2022, so in the meantime I would like to highlight below a few 2021 publications and events synthesizing some of the program’s key achievements and findings.
At the start of the Phase 2 of PIM in 2017, as well as during a priority-setting exercise in 2019, the teams working under each of PIM’s six research areas (‘flagships’) formulated the key questions they aimed to answer and identified theories of change and pathways to achieve impact. In early 2021, the flagship teams undertook an assessment of how well they addressed those questions. The PIM Flagship Insights series summarizes flagship achievements and suggests areas to be explored in the future.
The PIM Synthesis Briefs series, launched in 2020, covers specific areas of focus studied under one or several of PIM’s research flagships. We invite you to check out the ten briefs released to date:
You can all PIM Flagship Insights and Synthesis Briefs under the Knowledge Center tab on the PIM website.
In 2020, a group of CGIAR researchers set out to position seed systems development at the core of the unfolding One CGIAR strategy. The resulting Community of Excellence for Seed Systems Development generated a series of collaborative outputs to identify research priorities for seed systems in One CGIAR. The community of excellence’s resource hub is housed on the PIM website, and you can find more information here.
PIM’s Governance of Natural Resources flagship completed a large set of retrospective syntheses (covering tenure security, governance, gender, and power) and forward-looking briefs (aligned to the One CGIAR impact areas). You can find those published to date here (more to be added in January) and a related webinar here.
Finally, much of CGIAR’s recent research on gender, including that supported by PIM, is captured in the book Advancing Gender Equality Through Agricultural and Environmental Research, which aims to understand how research in CGIAR-mandated areas can advance (or not) gender equality and identifies key gender research topics for CGIAR and beyond.
You can find many more PIM publications in IFPRI’s and other CGIAR repositories, and of course on the PIM website, which will remain online in its current form throughout 2022: www.pim.cgiar.org.
We held 17 PIM webinars in 2021 -- and 49 in total since we launched the series in 2017. Most of the 2021 webinars were dedicated to synthesizing PIM findings across the past years.
All recordings and presentations are available on the Webinars page on the PIM website.
We published 94 blogs and other news items in 2021 sharing findings from the projects supported by PIM in the past few years. The full archive is available on our News page or you can browse posts by flagship (visit flagship pages for a link to flagship-specific news and updates).
I would also like to mention here the EnGendering Data blog started by PIM colleagues back in 2014. It has served as a great hub for exchanging ideas and collaborative learning on gender research methods and collecting sex-disaggregated data, and each blog is an exciting read. The 2014-2021 archive is available on the PIM website. Starting in 2022, the blog will have a new home under the CGIAR GENDER Platform’s Methods Module. Many thanks to our contributors, editors, and readers, and please subscribe to the GENDER Platform newsletter to get updates.
Let me close this newsletter by extending thanks to the many people who made PIM a success. First and foremost, I thank the researchers for producing high quality research and working closely with partners to ensure that their results were relevant and useful addressing important development challenges. Many thanks as well to the group who helped manage PIM over the years: the Independent Steering Committee, the Management Committee, Flagship and Cluster Leaders, Flagship Managers, Center Representatives from all 15 CGIAR Centers, and PIM’s small but dynamic Program Management Unit. I am also grateful to the “behind-the-scenes people”, including finance officers from all 15 Centers and IFPRI’s Finance and Administration, Director General Office, and Communications and Public Affairs. Last but not least, many thanks to all the funders who supported PIM and CGIAR.
Below you will find a short retrospective video we created for our final virtual PIM extended team event in December. Great memories!
Feel free to contact me if you have more memories to share or have any questions about PIM.
Happy New Year!
Best regards, Frank Place PIM Director
PIM in Retrospect from IFPRI on Vimeo.
