1. Relevance of the Study to Sustainable Livelihoods

Agricultural Services and Improved Livelihoods and Poverty Reduction
Effective agricultural services (agricultural research, technology development and dissemination, etc) are vitally important to rural development and change. Without appropriate and improved agricultural technologies and practices, and wider sharing of agricultural knowledge improvements in living standards and reductions in poverty will be hard to achieve in countries still heavily dependent on agriculture such as Nepal. However, it remains difficult for agricultural research providers to take on the multidisciplinary poverty reduction agenda as they feel a need to focus on working with farmers that both have the capacity and resources to engage with them effectively. Such farmers are rarely among the poorest.

Policy, Institutions and Processes
Gaining access to the assets needed to create a sustainable livelihood depends on policy measures (at the local and national level), institutions (formal and informal organisations, customary rules such as resource tenure and legislation) and processes (the dynamic relations between these) (see SL Guidance Sheets 2.4). These operate at all levels, from the household to the international, and in public and private spheres. They determine:

• access (to social, physical, financial, natural and human capital, to livelihood strategies and to decision-making bodies and sources of influence) (see SL Guidance Sheets 2.3);
• the terms of exchange between different types of capital; and
• the returns to a given livelihood strategy.

Policy, institutions and processes are key determinants of livelihood outcomes. The work presented here illuminates and unpacks some aspects of the "black box" of policy, institutions and processes in the livelihoods framework, providing concrete examples of how these operate to help or hinder the improvement of rural livelihoods, particularly with regard to agricultural production.

Relevance of this study to the policy, institutions and processes aspects of the SL approach
The study sought to understand:

• the aims of the Hill Agriculture Research Project;
• the means by which these aims are being pursued;
• the specific institutional and organisational change processes that the project seeks to foster in collaboration with its partners;
• internal and external evidence as to strengths and weaknesses of this change process so far.

Particular attention was paid to the Hill Research Programme - the competitive research funding instrument of HARP - and the changes that this has brought in its short period of existence. Specifically, the study focused on how HARP-supported interventions affect key policies and institutions that shape people's livelihood options and also how the policy context and institutional environment shape the achievements of the project. In this as in many other cases, it is clear that the policy and institutional context present very real constraints on HARP contributing to improving livelihoods for the poor.