Seminar series - Impact Assessment and Monitoring and Evaluation

The ENVS8018 - Partnership Research for Agricultural & Natural Resource-Based Development seminar series will showcase a range of speakers over semester 1, 2022 to explore the challenges and opportunities in the global food system.

Achieving food and nutrition security, poverty reduction, improved wellbeing and greater equity, while conserving and enhancing natural capital, and delivering climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes, are amongst the greatest and most demanding challenges of this century. The UN Sustainable Development Goals articulate ambitions for each of these elements, and progressing towards those ambitions requires that we also address the synergies and tensions between the SDGs.

Over the past 50 years, a global network of institutions and initiatives has emerged to catalyse and communicate research, enable and link researchers, in support of agriculture and natural resources-based development to address these global challenges. Australian researchers, policy makers and practitioners have contributed to this network and activities in a variety of ways; the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) has played a central role in many of these. ACIAR’s partnership mode of research for development is acknowledged globally as an exemplar that other seek to emulate.
 

Please email Peter Kanowski for the zoom link if you wish to attend online.

 

About the seminar

Understanding the effectiveness of research is not a simple task. Research processes, especially in agricultural research for development contexts, are complex. There are many pathways from research to outcomes, and they can be difficult to identify. A range of new approaches to understanding, monitoring and evaluating research impact, are being developed and applied in agricultural research for development contexts.
 

About the speaker

Ms Bethany Davies manages ACIAR’s Portfolio Planning and Impact Evaluation program. Bethany has extensive experience of practical and applied approaches to project planning, participatory program design and theory of change, monitoring and evaluation framework development and implementation, evaluation training and capacity building. For the five years prior to joining ACIAR, she worked specifically in research for development programs, including as the Research to Impact Team Leader for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and as the Forest Trees and Agroforestry monitoring evaluation, learning and impact-assessment coordinator. Bethany holds a Bachelor of International Relations and a Masters in International Development from RMIT.