CGIAR

Performance evidence

Overview

MOPAN released its most recent assessment of CGIAR in 2020.

CGIAR was originally established as a global research partnership in 1971. It is a global network of 15 Research Centers, each independent and autonomous, guided by the policies and research directions set by the System Management Board and approved by the System Council. CGIAR science is dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services. CGIAR works to advance agricultural science and innovation to enable poor people, especially women, to better nourish their families. It also helps them improve productivity and resilience so they can share in economic growth and manage natural resources in the face of climate change and other challenges.

CGIAR has shown a clear understanding of future needs and demands for agricultural science and innovation, laid out in the Strategy and Results Framework (SRF) and in the CGIAR Research Programs and Platforms (CRPs). The changes in CGIAR, with the formation of the CGIAR System, and with the ongoing reform process outlined in the first of a cycle of four business plans, provide a solid and agreed foundation for ensuring that what is described as the global research partnership is fit to deliver against the SRF. In doing this, CGIAR faces the challenge of taking all parts of the partnership forward together in what is an ambitious continued reform process. Some tensions already exist in different views on the need for further, more radical reforms, for example on the governance model, on the need for a rationalisation of the current Research Centers, on different designs for programmes and on longer-term, flexible and more consistent financial resources. The immediate challenge for CGIAR is in delivering and stabilising the current round of reform in a timely and effective manner.

Performance rating summary

CGIAR organisational performance wheel — Organisational performance

Key findings

The diversity and flexibility of the CGIAR System enables it to respond effectively to donor priorities, rapidly changing contexts and emerging development challenges.
The Strategy and Results Framework, business plan and financial plan have buy-in and provide stability, offering the potential to bring processes and systems together across CGIAR.
The leadership in CGIAR’s System Management Office and the instruments and systems that have been put in place reflect a shift towards professionalisation and provide the basis for a more transparent and responsive decision-making culture.
The performance and results process and systems, because they have been built up and tailored to varying needs across CGIAR, enjoy both buy-in and acceptance and have been used as designed across the system for the first year of reporting and have delivered a strong performance product.
The CRPs have proved to be a strong concept, both the programmes and platforms, and provide the basis for significant coverage and delivery from a results perspective.
CGIAR’s open intellectual assets and genetic material are a significant global resource, although there is a question of whether the System is making enough of it.

The diversity and flexibility of the CGIAR System is also a weakness, making decision-making and institutional change processes slow and difficult to achieve.
CGIAR’s complex governance and organisational architecture compound the weaknesses of the System, making even gradual or small-scale change unwieldy and costly to manage and the pace of change uncertain.
CGIAR and its Funders have yet to develop a consensus on how the System, the reforms envisaged and the CRPs should best be supported. Particular issues exist around necessary financial support to align vision and operational realities.
There is a lack of consistency in focus and capacities across the CGIAR System and the Research Centers with regard to key capacities and services, such as human and financial resource management, accountability and audit, and monitoring, reporting and evaluation, with the noted difficulties in agreeing and implementing common standards and improvement processes.
The reformed evaluation function poses a risk to the effective implementation of both corporate and decentralised evaluations to promote performance improvement. It potentially reduces structural independence and limits the ability to provide leadership across the system to support effective decentralised evaluations to inform evidence-based design of interventions.
CGIAR’s lack of a strategic position on partnerships and capacities means that approaches used are either narrowly focused or ad hoc, often preventing or limiting the spread of innovative approaches.
CGIAR’s efforts on gender equality and women’s empowerment represent isolated pockets of good practice, meaning that CGIAR may be mainstreaming a superficial “gender fix”. This risk needs to be actively managed in the current System-wide efforts to integrate an evidence-informed gender analytical lens across CGIAR’s research and workplaces.