A new tool to promote the potential for local innovation and support sustainable rural development.

Local communities have an endogenous potential for innovation that allows them to adapt to changing socio-cultural, political, economic and environmental conditions and to improve their livelihoods, develop their own visions, and negotiate their own priorities.
The significance of local innovation potential for sustainable development is increasingly acknowledged, but projects and development plans rarely attempt to develop this potential, nor do they try to disseminate local innovations within and among communities.
Instruments that encourage a participative and interactive support of local innovation potential are therefore invaluable for sustainable local development.

CDE has developed a conceptual framework and guidelines for workshops to promote local innovation potential, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the participation of Intercooperation, LBL, Helvetas and the Fachhochschule für Landwirtschaft Zollikofen.

The PLI instrument is based on social learning processes involving different stakeholder groups in local contexts. Among the stakeholders addressed are community representatives, peasants, small enterprises, craftspeople, local, regional and national administrations, NGOs, universities and research centres.

The instrument was successfully tested in 2004 in two pilot workshops in the Andean region of Peru. Since this date, a total of six additional workshops were carried out together with several local partner organizations in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, in the Andean highlands and the Amazon basin. Since 2007, the PLI tool has been included as a training module of the Master Course on “Agro-ecology, Culture, and Endogenous Development in Latin America”, at the Universidad Mayor San Simón de Cochabamba, Bolivia. For workshop reports have a look at publications / media.

Various organisations in India, Mozambique and Central America have expressed their interest in using PLI.