Institution: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

E-mail: afajardo@usaid.gov

Biosummary:

Adrian Fajardo-Christen is Senior Economist in the U.S. Agency for International Development Mission to Peru. He holds a Faculty Courtesy Appointment from the Food and Resource Economics Department at the University of Florida. Dr. Fajardo-Christen is a former member and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Potato Center (CIP). Through an UNDP special project he served as Executive Director of the Social Investment Technical Team in charge of the development of Peru’s Focalized Strategy to Combat Extreme Poverty and of the implementation design for its local and regional components.

Title: "Are international agricultural research and the poor well connected?: An institutional cognitive pattern approach."

Theme: 4B

Abstract:

The multidimensional character of overcoming poverty presents a formidable challenge to the scientific community engaged in international agricultural research. To fathom the holistic nature of this challenge an Institutional Cognitive Pattern (ICP) is delineated in this paper as a feedback neural network mathematical algorithm. Following T. Veblen’s institutional analysis tradition, the ICP models a possible primal institutional framework derived from prevalent habits of thought and perceptions with respect to poverty alleviation and reduction, and to current agreements on how to better address them. The elicited ICP becomes a mathematical representation of the way in which researchers perceive and think through the poverty problem and the opportunity domain for its alleviation and reduction, and allows exploring the dynamics of the proposed institutional framework through the activation of its causal concept relationships.