Operational challenges

The way Bioversity operates contributes challenges for impact assessment, particularly in terms of accountability and attribution.

The impacts generated by the organization’s work are often indirect and sometimes intangible which makes attribution difficult or even impossible.

Bioversity does not have laboratories or field stations, but works through partnerships with other institutions that range from large international organizations to small community-based organizations (CBOs), and a host of others in between such as national institutions, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), universities, and private entrepreneurs.

Bioversity’s impact assessment studies therefore start with the assumption that impact is achieved by many partners working together. Any accomplishment, in fact, has almost certainly been the result of the contributions of many different partners, creating links between actors via formal structures such as networks and less formal such as research partnerships.

When several partners are involved in achieving outputs, it becomes extremely difficult to quantify contributions toward, or even apportion credit for, impact among the partners. Although some methodologies attempt to distribute attribution by dividing up total impacts amongst the parties, this is not accurate in cases where the total impact is the result of a synergistic effect of the parties working together, such that attribution is an artificial construct.