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166 | Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) Report
may consist of persons (sometimes one but generally two or more) living together and jointly making provision for food or other essential elements of the livelihood. Industrial Agriculture Form of agriculture that is capitalintensive, substituting machinery and purchased inputs for human and animal labor. Infrastructure The facilities, structures, and associated equipment and services that facilitate the flows of goods and services between individuals, firms, and governments. It includes public utilities (electric power, telecommunications, water supply, sanitation and sewerage, and waste disposal); public works (irrigation systems, schools, housing, and hospitals); transport services (roads, railways, ports, waterways, and airports); and R&D facilities. Innovation The use of a new idea, social process or institutional arrangement, material, or technology to change an activity, development, good, or service or the way goods and services are produced, distributed, or disposed of. Innovation system Institutions, enterprises, and individuals that together demand and supply information and technology, and the rules and mechanisms by which these different agents interact. In recent development discourse agricultural innovation is conceptualized as part and parcel of social and ecological organization, drawing on disciplinary evidence and understanding of how knowledge is generated and innovations occur. In situ Conservation The conservation of ecosystems and natural habitats and the maintenance and recovery of viable populations of species in their natural habitats and surroundings and, in the case of domesticated or cultivated species, in the surroundings where they have developed their distinctive properties and were managed by local groups of farmers, fishers or foresters. Institutions The rules, norms and procedures that guide how people within societies live, work, and interact with each other. Formal institutions are written or codified rules, norms and procedures. Examples of formal institutions are the Constitution, the judiciary laws, the organized market, and property rights. Informal institutions are rules governed by social and behavioral norms of the society, family, or community. Cf. Organization. Integrated Approaches Approaches that search for the best use of the functional relations among living organisms in relation to the environment without excluding the use of external inputs. Integrated approaches aim at the achievement of multiple goals (productivity increase, environmental sustainability and social welfare) using a variety of methods. Integrated Assessment A method of analysis that combines results and models from the physical, biological, economic, and social sciences, and the interactions between these components in a consistent framework to evaluate the status and the consequences of environmental change and the policy responses to it. Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM) An approach that integrates research of different types of natural resources into stakeholder-driven processes of adaptive management and innovation to improve livelihoods, agroecosystem resilience, agricultural productivity and environmental services at community, eco-regional |
and global scales of intervention and impact. INRM thus aims to help to solve complex real-world problems affecting natural resources in agroecosystems. Integrated Pest Management The procedure of integrating and applying practical management methods to manage insect populations so as to keep pest species from reaching damaging levels while avoiding or minimizing the potentially harmful effects of pest management measures on humans, non-target species, and the environment. IPM tends to incorporate assessment methods to guide management decisions. Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) Legal rights granted by governmental authorities to control and reward certain products of human intellectual effort and ingenuity. Internal Rate of Return The discount rate that sets the net present value of the stream of the net benefits equal to zero. The internal rate of return may have multiple values when the stream of net benefits alternates from negative to positive more than once. International Dollars Agricultural R&D investments in local currency units have been converted into international dollars by deflating the local currency amounts with each country’s inflation ration (GDP deflator) of base year 2000. Next, they were converted to US dollars with a 2000 purchasing power parity (PPP) index. PPPs are synthetic exchange rates used to reflect the purchasing power of currencies. Knowledge The way people understand the world, the way in which they interpret and apply meaning to their experiences. Knowledge is not about the discovery of some final objective “truth” but about the grasping of subjective culturally conditioned products emerging from complex and ongoing processes involving selection, rejection, creation, development and transformation of information. These processes, and hence knowledge, are inextricably linked to the social, environmental and institutional context within which they are found. Scientific knowledge: Knowledge that has been legitimized and validated by a formalized process of data gathering, analysis and documentation. Explicit knowledge: Information about knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored and exchanged. The most common forms of explicit knowledge are manuals, documents, procedures, cultural artifacts and stories. The information about explicit knowledge also can be audiovisual. Works of art and product design can be seen as other forms of explicit knowledge where human skills, motives and knowledge are externalized. Empirical knowledge: Knowledge derived from and constituted in interaction with a person’s environment. Modern communication and information technologies, and scientific instrumentation, can extend the “empirical environment” in which empirical knowledge is generated. Local knowledge: The knowledge that is constituted in a given culture or society. Traditional (ecological) knowledge: The cumulative body of knowledge, practices, and beliefs evolved by adaptive processes and handed down through generations. It may not be indigenous or local, but it is distinguished by the way in which it is acquired and used, through the social process of learning and sharing knowledge. Knowledge Management A systematic discipline of policies, |
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