Ebook: An Approach to the CGIAR as a Provider of International Public Goods

This report is a revised version of a draft prepared by the authors in March 2008 as
a contribution to the work of the CGIAR Independent Review Panel (IRP). We are
indebted to Elizabeth McAllister, Chairperson, for the opportunity to work on this
subject. We would like to thank IRP members Elizabeth McAllister, Keith
Bezanson, Jeff Waage and John Mugabe, IRP secretaries, Ken Watson and Karin
Perkins, and John Lyman, Selçuk Ozgediz and the participants in an IRP workshop
held in Ottawa in May 2008, for their valuable comments and suggestions. Dana
Dalrymple, who for many years has championed the use of the concept of
international public goods in agricultural research, made extensive comments to
improve the report. We also are grateful to Mario Bazán for his assistance in the
preparation of this report.
We owe special thanks to Jim Ryan, member of the CGIAR Science Council, who
prepared a most useful discussion paper on international public goods and the
research continuum at the CGIAR. Ryan’s paper was presented at a Science
Council workshop held in The Netherlands in 2006 and, although we were unaware
of his paper when preparing the first draft of our report, we found many points in
common and a rather high degree of convergence in our views.
The revisions introduced in this document take into account discussions that took
place in several events and meetings that were part of the CGIAR Change
Management Process, as well as material presented in the final report of the
Independent Review Panel and its supporting documents.1