On 22 April, Prof. Eike Lüdeling from Bonn University’s Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation (INRES) talked about “A decision focus for impact-oriented agricultural research”. In his presentation, attended by 23 participants, he touched upon key aspects of his own journey into decision research, illustrating these with examples. Decisions are made at multiple levels and points in time: for example, farmers decide on adopting particular crops or practices, policy-makers decide on what support measures to offer and NGOs decide on how best to scale interventions. By supporting such decisions, agricultural research can help bring about positive change. Specific examples, in which Prof Lüdeling and his co-workers of the past 12 years applied decision analysis, included a large-scale water pipeline project in Kenya and decisions about the use of agroforestry in Vietnam. Lastly, in the INTERFACES project, PhD student Dorcas Sanginga Alame and Dr. Peter Asare-Nuamah are applying decision analysis to innovations within the COINS and DecLaRe projects. The colloquium offered a sneak preview on early results, which will be further elaborated during the upcoming Status Seminar in early June in Accra, Ghana.
The as always lively discussion touched upon the implementation and application of decision analysis models in practice, the use of past (literature) data and the willingness of different stakeholders to use decision analysis in their daily activities.
The R-based tool developed by Prof. Lüdeling and his team is available here: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/decisionSupport/
Contact Prof. Eike Lüdeling for more information: luedeling@uni-bonn.de
