interest in funding agricultural R&D and in institutional re­form in agricultural R&D will lead to greater effectiveness of knowledge to achieve the MDGs. The lessons from ex­periments on new models or approaches to funding research organizations and corresponding changes in their institu­tions/rules will be applied increasingly in the ESAP region (World Bank, 2006b).
     It is only in the late 1990s that the distinction between the agricultural research organizations themselves and the institutions or rules/norms that govern these organizations, was made in the social science literature on agricultural re­search in the ESAP region (Biggs and Smith, 1998; Raina, 1999, 2003ab; Biggs and Matsaert, 2004; Hall et al., 2004). In the ESAP countries, the linear compartmentalized (into research, extension and adoption) organization of knowl­edge in AKST will continue for some time because it is deeply entrenched in existing formal agricultural research organizations and policy making organizations (Hall et al., 2004; World Bank, 2006c; Biggs, 2007; Raina and Sulaiman, 2007b). But recent trends show increasing donor interest in non-linear systems of knowledge generation and utilization, as well as the institutions or rules/norms that will promote new non-linear ways of working in R&D organizations and extension organizations (IDRC, 2006; World Bank, 2006c). These will increasingly be applied to the agricultural sci­ences and existing formal R&D organizations.
     The CGIAR organizations in the ESAP region are ex­perimenting with institutional reforms, partly in response to the pressure to prove their efficacy in reducing poverty and the rapidly declining rate of donor support to the CGIAR system (Lele, 2004; CGIAR Science Council, 2005). Recent experiments that will give important insights and incentives to initiate institutional reform include increasing pressure for agricultural diversification, the private-plant breeders consortium in ICRISAT, regionally differentiated research strategies in AVRDC, the natural-resource based no-tillage technology systems in the CIMMYT-IRRI sponsored Rice-Wheat Consortium in South Asia, the internal processes to set research priorities that suit the spatial dimensions of poverty in CIMMYT and innovation systems research to enable pro-poor livestock and fodder innovation systems in ILRI (Joshi et al., 2003; Hall et al., 2004; Erenstein et al., 2006; Raina and Sulaiman, 2007a). Different theoreti­cal frameworks and approaches like the Sustainable Liveli­hoods Framework, the Innovation Systems approach, the Network models, etc., will increasingly be tried by different CGIAR organizations in the ESAP region to enable changes in ways of working in science and among its partners to achieve goals of sustainable development. The Asian Veg­etable Research and Development Centre (AVRDC), for in­stance, has a regionally differentiated strategy for vegetable research and development that emphasizes research on more nutritious vegetables in the East Asia region through a net­work approach (the AVRDC-ASEAN Regional Network on Vegetable Research and Development), and enhancement of vegetable cultivation area (by over 9 million hectares) in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia by 2010 (AVRDC, 2002). The organizations involved in these emerging net­works and new research strategies may continue to be governed by linear knowledge flows and will not be in a po­sition to influence or change policy decisions and practices

to enable innovation unless proactive investments are made to enable learning and change within these organizations.
     Pressure  for institutional reform and reorganization is now increasing within the university system in Asia— especially India, Thailand, China (much experimentation and change) and Sri Lanka. Universities are being forced to reconsider their traditional roles (as sources of ideas, basic scientific knowledge and teaching resources) and em­brace new ones like making contributions to regional de­velopment through innovation. They are being asked to transform themselves from "knowledge containers" to "en­trepreneurial universities" (EDB, 1995; Government of Ja­pan, 2002; National Knowledge Commission, 2006). These new functions of the University evolve as they interact and learn from/with several key development partners. Univer­sities evolve with the demands that society places on them (David, 2004). If the agricultural growth drivers and social and economic drivers of change place sufficient pressure on the university system, the decline of university research in Asia (Byerlee and Echeverria, 2002) may be avoided. It is unlikely that the universities will invest in research that is less visible and pro-poor—they are more likely to address areas like IT, textiles, architecture, biopharmaceuticals and other more visible areas with an articulate demand.
     In ESAP the response to new institutions and policies like the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) under the WTO regime and the relative reluctance of countries to buy into the intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes will be conditioned by the major fear of negative impacts (of these institutions as curbs on technology/knowledge) on millions of lives and livelihoods. Many address the issue of IPRs as a knowledge generation incentive. Little is asked about how future institutional reform must address issues of knowledge utilization in the field, given that public agricultural research has generated vast amounts of technologies that find no ap­plication at all. Notwithstanding the overstated generaliza­tion that patent regimes and intellectual property rights will enhance commercialization of technology and knowledge in agriculture, the ESAP region will face continuing opposition to IPRs in agriculture or any form of private appropriation of biological material, technology or knowledge for com­mercialization (Shiva, 2000). There is also some question­ing of how the TRIPS agreement may or may not detract R&D from addressing relevant knowledge generation and use questions in the Third World, especially the ESAP region (Connett-Porceddu, 2006; Musunga, 2006).
     ESAP is also home to the "open source biological in­formation sources" that are available (over a million life science patents and appropriate software make it transpar­ent and accessible to users) and growing rapidly to meet the needs of ESAP's scientific community and industry (Herrera, 2005). The problem is that even in the medium term, there will only be a few groups (limited often to closely networked actors) that have the capacity to share or utilize this open source data base (Herrera, 2005; Connett-Porceddu, 2006; BioForge website). The developed countries have led the evolution of a policy framework for exclusionary patent rights; the evolution of norms/institutional arrangements for sharing an open and inclusionary source will now be taken up by several networks and technical cooperation programs in the ESAP region. In terms of ideal institutional arrange-