System building for better policy alignment in the South: The case of salmon farming industry in Chile

In this global age, issues that developing countries confront are widening and increasingly complex due to intricate ways in which countries are interlinked. Due to such increased interdependency, catching up process of development countries is increasingly becoming susceptible to the external events. This requires the developing countries to have more resilience and flexibility in adapting to the changes that happen beyond their control. To achieve above, the systemic approach is considered beneficial because this provides a holistic view in policy formulation. The use of innovation systems (IS) became increasingly popular among international development community (such as OECD, UNCTAD, UNIDO and World Bank) as well as some bilateral cooperation agencies in this context as a useful ‘focusing device’ to identify and effectively meet the policy needs in the South under such context. The IS is composed of set of interconnected institutions, agents, organizations, and the linkages between them that together and individually contribute to the development and diffusion of new knowledge in the form of process or products. Although the benefit of adapting the IS approach is largely agreed for effective policy formulation, conventional IS approach may require some adjustment to be applied in the Southern context. The purpose of this paper is to explore the new ways in which the IS can be used from the Southern context. The following section briefly reviews recent policy discussions and potential limits when IS concept is applied for developing countries. The paper particularly pays attention to the IS system building and transformation since conventional IS discussion tends to focus on its internal interaction among components but not on transformation process. The paper also tries to apply proposed integrated approach to the actual existing case, Chilean salmon farming, to see whether such perspective can provide the richer picture for policy formulation. The section 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical discussions related to IS approach and propose a integrated framework based on existing frameworks. The section 3 reviews historical evolution of Chilean salmon Industry in relation to integrated framework with the following section 4 to conclude.