Successfully achieving the sustainable development goals requires addressing complex, interrelated, wicked problems across multiple scales and contexts and decision-making that tackles nested layers of goals and targets across the interrelated social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The Stakeholder Approach to Risk-informed and Evidence-based Decision-making (SHARED) bridges processes, tools and accessible evidence to support inter-sectoral and multi-stakeholder decision-making and implementation aimed at achieving resilience aspirations and associated investments. Adaptive collaborative management and multiple-loop learning serve as a basis for the systematic approach to institutional learning that supports shifts in underlying institutional understanding and values leading to actionable organisational change. This paper describes a contextual application of tailored technical assistance and institutional support to the Turkana County Government in Kenya, a newly devolved governance structure, under conditions of complexity. The SHARED Turkana County decision case demonstrates how the approach responded to a policy aspiration, resulting in greater and more intentional use of evidence in planning and budget allocations, cross-sectoral and multi-stakeholder partnerships, inclusive and transformative projects and a consultative and evidence-based five-year County Integrated Development Plan.

We investigated the variation between participatory and traditional agricultural advisory models in training farmers on Conservation Agriculture in Kenya in order to understand how these models inf...

Sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) has the potential to increase food security without detrimental effects on ecosystem services. However, adoption of SAI practices across sub-Saharan Africa has not reached transformational numbers to date. It is often hampered by lack of context-specific practices, sub-optimal understanding of tradeoffs and synergies among stakeholders, and lack of approaches that bring diverse evidence sources together with stakeholders to collectively tackle complex problems. In this study, we asked three interconnected questions: (i) What is the accessibility and use of evidence for SAI decision making; (ii) What tools could enhance access and interaction with evidence for tradeoff analysis; and (iii) Which stakeholders must be included? This study employed a range of research and engagement methods including surveys, stakeholder analysis, participatory trade-off assessments and co-design of decision dashboards to better support evidence-based decision making in Zambia, Tanzania and Ethiopia. At the inception, SAI evidence was accessible and used by less than half of the decision makers across the three countries and online dashboards hold promise to enhance access. Many of the stakeholders working on SAI were not collaborating and tradeoff analysis was an under-utilized tool. Structured engagement across multiple stakeholder groups with evidence is critical.

This dataset was moved to: https://doi.org/10.34725/DVN/27888Strong and vibrant smallholder groups provide opportunities to the community to play a role in rural development and benefit from it. However, most of those groups do not have the capacity to individually influence rural development. Bringing groups together facilitates access to combined knowledge and leverages complementary assets. This study identifies factors influencing the success of two smallholder innovation platforms in Embu and Kapchorwa. A five-level likert scale survey questionnaire was administered to 68 groups from the two platforms that had experienced significant development in their group's capacity as a result of these platforms. Principal component analysis was used to extract indicators defining dimensions used to measure the success of these platforms. Multiple regression analysis was used to fit the model of successful linkages. The results indicate that ownership, motivation and leaders commitment skills and motives play critical roles in the success and sustainability of smallholder innovation platforms