A growing literature highlights complexity of policy implementation and governance in global health and argues that the processes and outcomes of policies could be improved by explicitly taking this complexity into account. Yet there is a paucity of studies exploring how this can be achieved in everyday practice. This study documents the strategies, tactics, and challenges of boundary‐spanning actors working in 4 Sub‐Saharan Africa countries who supported the implementation of multisectoral nutrition as part of the African Nutrition Security Partnership in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Three action researchers were posted to these countries during the final 2 years of the project to help the government and its partners implement multisectoral nutrition and document the lessons. Prospective data were collected through participant observation, end‐line semistructured interviews, and document analysis. All 4 countries made significant progress despite a wide range of challenges at the individual, organizational, and system levels. The boundary‐spanning actors and their collaborators deployed a wide range of strategies but faced significant challenges in playing these unconventional roles. The study concludes that, under the right conditions, intentional boundary spanning can be a feasible and acceptable practice within a multisectoral, complex adaptive system in low‐ and middle‐income countries.

There is increasing interest in farmers' organizations as an effective approach to farmer participatory research (FPR). Using data from an empirical study of farmers' research groups (FRGs) in Uganda, this paper examines the patterns of participation in groups and answers questions such as: Who participates? What types of participation? How does participation occur? What are the factors determining participation? Results show that there is no single type of participation, but rather that FPR is a dynamic process with types of participation varying at different stages of the process. Farmers' participation does not follow the normal adoption curve. Rather, it is characterized by high participation at the initial stages, followed by dramatic decrease and droppingout, and slow increases toward the end. There is usually significantly higher participation among male farmers at the beginning of the process. However, as FRGs evolve, the proportion of men decreases sharply while the relative proportion of women continues to increase until it dominates the group. The findings do not support the common assumption that groups usually exclude women and the poor. On the contrary, we argue that FRGs are an effective mechanism to provide women and the poor with opportunities to participate in research. However, to be effective, this requires moving beyond head counting to promote more proactive gender and equity perspectives for amplifying the benefits of agricultural research to those who tend to be marginalized or excluded by mainstream development initiatives. This will be critical for making agricultural research more client-oriented and demand-driven.

This chapter introduces the evolution of the study, general introduction and theoretical background to the study, the AID impacts as documented in the literature, problem statement and research questions, conceptual framework, study design and data collection, study area and time frame for the study, description of the methods used, data analysis and outline of the thesis. Evolution of the studyMy interest in the linkages between AIDS, food and nutrition security, and rural development arose in 1998, when I worked as a rural sociologist on the CGIAR system-wide programme on participatory research, gender and stakeholder analysis (PRGA). The International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) Africa and the African Highlands Initiatives World Agro-forestry (ICRAF-AHI) implemented the programme. During this period, I lived in a rural farming community in southwestern Uganda. There, I was often faced with the realities of AIDS-related morbidity and mortality in the communities and I observed that AIDS was a big problem. At the same time, I also realised that there were other problems, such as crop pests and diseases, seasonal droughts and floods, soil degradation, land fragmentation, and many others. All of these had important implications for the welfare and food and nutrition security of households.The problem of AIDS morbidity and mortality in the rural farming communities informed my graduate research work in 2001, which focused on the effects of AIDS on agricultural production and livelihoods (Tumwine, 2004). The major findings of that study suggested that there were growing linkages between poverty, gender inequality, natural resource degradation, and agricultural production, and food, nutrition and livelihood insecurity in the rural farming communities. These constituted a challenge to development policy and practice.As my interest in AIDS and livelihoods developed, I also became increasingly intrigued by the fact that some parts of Uganda faced bigger AIDS-related problems than others. While studies on the impact of AIDS on agriculture and rural livelihoods were accumulating, I felt that such analyses were telling only part of the story, and that the reality was more complex. I felt that the impact of AIDS on rural households, albeit important, needed to be placed in the wider context of the history of the epidemic and the communities it affected. This prompted my interest to look into AIDS more broadly, particularly through exploration of the ecological context. For this thesis, my ambition was to study the complex interactions between historical, political, demographic, socio-economic, cultural and environmental factors in which the AIDS epidemic emerged and spread, and its impacts on household food and

Objectives: Undernutrition has received significant attention at global and national levels in recent years but translating this attention into effective action at the country and district levels poses many challenges. We describe the observed national environments that support and challenge actors in moving national multisectoral nutrition policies and plans forward and how this on-going action research (AR) project seeks to strengthen strategic capacities and leadership in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ethiopia and Uganda. Methods: Participant observation and meetings with stakeholders provide insight into the enabling environment and its challenges. This AR then uses boundary-spanning tools such as shared history, practitioner profiles, PAG workshops among others to engage stakeholders in collaborative learning and to facilitate informal strategic and adaptive management approaches to nutrition policies and program implementation. Results: All four countries have developed multisectoral national nutrition policies and/or plans and created coordinating committees. Further multisectoral progress however faces challenges seen elsewhere, such as the dominance of sectoral goals and incentives, uneven understanding of multisectoral roles, responsibilities and leadership; uneven participation and ownership; uneven human and institutional capacities; lack of effective sub-national multisectoral platforms; and persistence of unaligned donor-and NGO-driven approaches. On-going work focuses on the formation of strategic alliances, leadership development, strengthening of sub-national platforms

Undernutrition has received significant attention at global and national levels in recent years, as evidenced by the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement with 43 participating countries and a G8 commitment of $4.2 billion to the Nutrition for Growth initiative, among others. The translation of this attention into effective action at the country level poses many challenges, as documented previously. Here we describe the results of an on‐going action research effort to address these challenges by strengthening strategic capacity in four Africa countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Ethiopia and Uganda. All four of these countries have developed multisectoral national nutrition policies and/or plans of action, created coordinating committees and identified SUN focal points. Further multisectoral progress faces challenges seen elsewhere, such as the dominance of sectoral goals and incentives, uneven understanding of multisectoral roles, responsibilities and leadership; uneven participation and ownership; weak human and institutional capacities; lack of effective sub‐national multisectoral platforms; and the persistence of unaligned donor‐ and NGO‐driven approaches. Initial efforts to address these challenges by facilitating informal strategic and adaptive management approaches reveals second order constraints such as high turnover of key staff in and out of government, heavy workloads, rigidity and risk avoidance. Ongoing work focuses on formation of strategic alliances, leadership development, the strengthening of sub‐national experiences to inform the design of multisectoral strategies at the national level and strengthening linkages with global initiatives. Grant Funding Source: Supported by UNICEF