A major part of NRI's work has been concerned with poverty reduction by enhancing natural resource productivity and sustainability through improved management of farming systems, the environment, crops, livestock, trees, soils and water resources.

• The understanding of knowledge systems - including local indigenous knowledge of crops, soils, diseases, environmental issues, etc. - has also been a focus of our work (see Warburton and Martin (2000)). We stress the importance of understanding people's practices, experiences, interests and choices from their own perspective. The exploration of these issues requires sensitivity to the specific social, cultural and institutional contexts, and an ability to communicate with stakeholders at different levels.
  
  
• In order to raise the impact of natural resource management innovations, recent work has examined 'scaling-up' strategies to identify sustainable ways to speed up farmers' access to appropriate innovations (see Gündel et al. (2001)). Key findings are that plans for promotion and uptake of technologies should be considered in pre-project and early implementation phases, and integrated into wider pro-poor development initiatives. This helps to identify target groups and to build up the networks and partnerships necessary to enable sharing of results.