The papers written as outcome of the Researchers Writeshop held in 2009, will be published as a book by Routledge Publishing Company. The book will be published in 2011. Click here for an overview of the book.

The progress report of the first phase of Value chain governance process is available and can be found here.

All researchers involved in the project met in Utrecht on June 18 to discuss the preparations for the writeshop.

The writeshop will be held on 24 and 25 September 2009.

Detailed instructions for presentation and their scheduling will follow in due course, as will the venue. The deadline for sending in draft chapters will be Friday 18th so as to enable discussants to prepare their comments. Each paper to be presented at the writeshop will get an internal and one external discussant, who will send in written comments in advance of the writeshop.

The researchers involved in the project will have a first meeting on March 26, from 16:00-17:30 hours at ISS. A first step in the discussion is a blog, where you can respond to the letter written by Bert Helmsing and Sietze Vellema capturing the key issues brought forward during the diner event on November 25, 2008. You can read the invitation here.

All documents are available after you log in.

A pdf of the rapport is also available.

On Tuesday, November 25th, some 40 representatives from business, NGOs, government and academia gathered for a dinner meeting at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague to have an informed discussion on issues and priorities for dialogue and research. The results of this meeting constitute a guide for the researchers involved in the project for a research write shop to be organized in the first half of 2009 and for bi-lateral dialogue with Business, NGOs and Government scheduled for the second half of 2009.

The project builds on the premise that considerable progress can be made in the promotion of sustainable markets, achieving inclusion, endogenous economic growth and poverty reduction when diverse analytical and intervention frameworks are systematically compared, discussed and integrated.

The program of the dinner meeting included:

How can NGOs, Firms and governments achieve inclusion and poverty reduction?

Value chains receive a lot of attention from various economic actors and for several reasons. In the context of globalizing markets companies want to assure the supply of their key inputs and the quality thereof. Also corporate social responsibility has generated interest in value chain organization and its governance.
Recent research shows that civil society organisations and Dutch co-financing agencies define their interventions in the area of economic development and poverty reduction increasingly in the framework of a value chain approach. With regard to public development policy the value chain is considered an instrument to fill the meso gap between general macro policy and interventions at the micro level.
When several actors, each from their own perspective, adopt a particular approach, it would seem possible to achieve considerable progress in the effectiveness and efficiency of their interventions when these actors exchange their policies and experiences in order to achieve greater mutual fine tuning and alignment.