Approximately 30% of the cultivated rice area in India is prone to crop damage from prolonged flooding. We use a randomized field experiment in 128 villages of Orissa India to show that Swarna-Sub1, a recently released submergence-tolerant rice variety, has significant positive impacts on rice yield when fields are submerged for 7 to 14 days with no yield penalty without flooding. We estimate that Swarna-Sub1 offers an approximate 45% increase in yields over the current popular variety when fields are submerged for 10 days. We show additionally that low-lying areas prone to flooding tend to be more heavily occupied by people belonging to lower caste social groups. Thus, a policy relevant implication of our findings is that flood-tolerant rice can deliver both efficiency gains, through reduced yield variability and higher expected yield, and equity gains in disproportionately benefiting the most marginal group of farmers.

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Participatory impact pathways analysis (PIPA) is an evolving tool that offers project managers a deeper understanding of the results that projects might attain with specific partners so as to help set priorities and support funding proposals. In a participatory manner, two groups of information are generated for each project. First, a problem tree is developed to represent the pathways by which research outputs are linked with outcomes and impacts. Second, network maps identify the key players and the roles they must play during and after each project to ensure its success. These two views of a project's impact pathways (IPs) are integrated in an outcomes logic model that describes what strategies the project will use to bring about the necessary changes, or outcomes, in project stakeholders to achieve the project vision. PIPA complements existing project management tools, such as the logical framework, by describing project strategies to bring about change, whereas traditional project planning instruments focus more on the activities required to produce the research outputs. Only when research outputs are used do they contribute to change. Hence, together with traditional project planning, PIPA provides information to allow priority assessment on the basis of scrutiny of the plausibility and the size of the envisaged change. PIPA can help to design projects to achieve overall programmatic goals and can help select between competing strategies within a single project. In the latter case, by mapping out potential IPs with a range of stakeholders, all partners are informed about the potential options considered. This common understanding is informative even if the final decisions on what the project will actually do are made by the project staff/leader.

Policy-oriented research (POR) represents an increasing share of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s (CGIAR’s) portfolio. A literature inventory finds 24 studies of the diffusion, influence or impact of this research, of which only three assess impact. There are many influences behind policy formulation, through which research insights permeate, if influential. Hence, attribution and counterfactual difficulties have led many assessments to focus only on analysis of the processes of creating policy influence, rather than also assessing impacts from resulting policy changes. To satisfy CGIAR investor expectations for documented impacts, approaches are proposed for ‘demand-led’ and ‘supply-led’ POR case studies.