Since 2009, SIANI has collaborated with its expert groups to contribute to a holistic understanding of emerging issues and foster regional action and collaboration. Many of these groups remain connected to the network years later and continue making meaningful change in their regions. SIANI has followed up on some of these impacts below.
A growing network of hundreds of members in ASEAN and beyond
The group “Higher Education for Sustainable Agriculture (HESA)”, part of SIANI’s expert group cohort 2015-2018, has continued its work beyond its initial scope. The group has since then produced several reports and recommendations based on the policy briefs published together with SIANI. For example, the group contributed to new recommendations on university-based rural extension services in Laos, Thailand and the Philippines.
Group members continued to emphasize the role of universities in promoting sustainable agriculture, including via extension services, stakeholder engagement and research beyond the SIANI project. In 2023, ASEAN (The Association of Southeast Asian Nations) adopted regional guidelines for sustainable agriculture. The guidelines referred to work initiated through the SIANI expert group, writing that “Higher Educational Institutions in the region can play a much better part in disseminating the ever-growing information and practices of sustainable agriculture to the participant groups but ‘have still not reformed teaching, research, learning or extension relationships with smallholder farmers to serve rural communities, continuing to favour the dominant (i.e. conventional) model of agriculture, thus preventing a transition to more sustainable food systems’ (HLPF, 2019; Nelles and Ferrand, eds, 2020).”
What began as a pilot initiative with SIANI has now expanded to an informal regional network representing at least 250 people and over 50 partner universities, CSOs and government and international agency officials from at least eight countries.
Expert input to government policies in Nepal
The expert group “Small-scale farmers and biodiversity in Nepal” led by Li-Bird and Oxfam was funded by SIANI 2021-2022. In 2023, the group published a Training Manual on Agrobiodiversity and Farmers’ Rights to increase the capacity and sensitize development practitioners, academics and extension workers on agrobiodiversity and farmers’ rights. The group’s impact extends to national policymaking: four out of seven expert group members are today part of the working group preparing the Agroecology Roadmap of Nepal, contributing to the Nepali Government’s goal to build resilient, equitable and sustainable food systems. Additionally, members are also part of the National Agrobiodiversity Society (NABS) Agrobiodiversity working group, promoting agrobiodiversity and future actions in Nepal.