IRRI Pioneer Potpourri: George Rothschild on the ongoing change in the CGIAR
Channel: International Rice Research Institute
Date: 2010-09-20

George Rothschild (IRRI director general, 1995-97) on the ongoing change in the CGIAR

 It'll be learning by doing because obviously a [CGIAR; http://www.cgiar.org ] Consortium Board making decisions on the technicalities, for example, of the programs of 15 centers working in different continents on different subjects is totally beyond them. So, the role of existing boards, the role of host country agreements, and all those things have still got be resolved. I don't think issues of governance have been looked at—some of which have major implications. 

For example, clearly, IRRI will continue to need the inputs that it can get from a technical point of view of its board members with a good spread of people who have skills in those areas. We probably won't have to worry so much about basic accounting and those kinds of things because, supposedly now, there is a sort of centralized legal system with, presumably, checks and balances for monitoring that. So, some of those headaches, the whole business of getting every piece of paper back to the CG Secretariat for all sorts of reasons—statistics, numbers of women scientists, etc., will go [away] now. I'm not saying those things are not important, but there'll be greater priorities on actually delivering outcomes, which is what donors want, rather than lots of statistics that nobody ever uses, which have been frustrating for quite some time.

So, I think there will be a lot of learning by doing because this is a change and donors, in particular, can be perverse in terms of the way they change, not least if there is a recession back home and they suddenly decide to cut their support. Research is usually seen as a soft touch. Actually, there is good news for the CGIAR from the UK, which, although it has decided to make a 25% cut across all government departments, it has ring-fenced international development and it won't be touched. 

Although there will probably be some internal adjustments as to what goes to research, what goes to development, what goes to health as opposed to agriculture, what goes to water, and what is cross- cutting. So, there'll be some dialogs.

I would imagine that, in the long run, it will provide greater stability. We won't have 64 donors all doing their own things—to some extent, that is what happened before. This included centers having to genuflect in front of donors in order to get support and be competing against their fellow DGs [CG directors general] and others in ways that were not always collegial.