GRiSP Partnership in Motion

The CGIAR Research Program for Rice, known as the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), is a partnership coordinated by six research-for-development organizations that bring together over 900 partners from the academic, public, private, and civil society sectors with a stake in the rice development sector. It is noteworthy that the “P” in the GRiSP acronym stands for “partnership” and not for “program.” Embedded within GRiSP are many “subpartnerships,” such as consortia, networks, platforms, and time-bound projects. Some partnerships are decades old and now aligned with GRiSP’s mission and objectives, while other partnerships have just recently been established to serve a specific purpose along GRiSP’s impact pathway toward development. All partners are, in one way or another, bound together by a common mission of poverty alleviation, rice food securi-ty, and environmental sustainability and protection. Some partners work on a global scale, while others work in particular watersheds, villages, or small communities. Some partners work at the grass-roots level, trying to improve the livelihoods of smallholder rice farm-ers through hands-on participatory action, while others work with rice genes in advanced laboratories in countries where no rice is even produced or very little is eaten. How does one bring together over 900 partners from such a wide background in a globally coordinated approach to rice research for development? What are the partner-ship mechanisms and structures that operate under GRiSP? How do the GRiSP coordinating partners align GRiSP’s strategy and activities with those of rice-growing nations and with regional multinational development bodies? This document attempts to give some answers to these questions and to shed light on the functioning of the many partnership arrangements under GRiSP. It serves as a stock-taking exercise from which lessons can be drawn to improve GRiSP as a global partnership mechanism in the years to come. This document also serves as an input to the GCARD Road Map,1 and the GRiSP partnerships described herein follow up on the commitments made at the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2), Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 2012.