dr.ir. JM (Annemarie) van Paassen

After a decade of work in development practice, responsible for communication and facilitation of community development, gender, agricultural advisory services & communal natural resource management, I returned to the WUR. My  research domain concerns the context & design-dependent functioning of interactive innovation and transformation processes. On the one hand I study the network and organisational structure, social learning & negotiation processes and outcome of multi-actor development, Innovation Platforms (IPs), and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in natural resource management and agricultural food systems in Africa. On the other hand, I am engaged in action research to gain more understanding of methodologies and outcomes of transdisciplinary collaboration; the role of participatory modelling and serious games for dialogue and collective action;  and Transformative Citizen Science.

In my research work I am highly interested in the political-institutional structure and cultures, and how to attain inclusive innovation and transformation. Previous work focussed on the role and strategic action of IPs in local and vertical brokerage for technical, organisational & institutional change. Recent work uses the institutional logics perspective to see whether and how PPPs and IPs in Global Value Chains and Regional Food chains manage to create a hybrid structure between conventional agriculture and market logics, accommodating smallholder logics e.g. based on peasant farming and solidarity. My actual research focuses on the multi-actor promotion and actual place of agro-ecology in West Africa; whether and how it is linked to farmers’ practices and aspirations.