The DDPA approach differs in important, fundamental ways from past attempts to combat desertification:

Multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-sectoral: Historically, most institutions primarily relied on their own areas of competence, resulting in narrow disciplinary or sectoral solutions. The holism of the integrated ecosystem approach requires a wide range of complementary skills.

Partnership-based: The DDPA has established broad global partnerships, beginning with its close alliance with the UNCCD and its national and regional implementation framework, the Global Mechanism, NEPAD, IUCN, and with government, non-governmental and private sector entities. Research linkages with national, regional and international partners provide both breadth and depth of scientific competence.

Participatory involvement at all levels: Past efforts often created solutions without the participation of intended users, resulting in uptake failures due to insufficient understanding of local knowledge and perspectives, lack of buy-in, and inappropriate designs.

Attention to policy and institutional dimensions: Past innovations, even when promising, often failed to be implemented because they were created in isolation from the policy environment needed to motivate their adoption. The DDPA integrates the policy and institutional environment into the research agenda.

Addressing inputs and markets: past approaches usually took input supplies and output markets for granted. An integrated ecosystem approach considers the entire production and marketing chain that, taken together, will have enormous influence on what farmers grow, how they grow it and how to optimize benefits from the non-agricultural components of ecosystems.

Returns to investment in combating desertification and drought, along with the costs of inaction will be assessed so that governments and stakeholders will have a clearer understanding of the consequences of policy, economic, and development decisions.

Leading-edge science: The pace of global scientific innovation has accelerated substantially in recent years, particularly in genomics/biotechnology, information technology, modeling, and satellite remote sensing, and the DDPA will capitalize on these new opportunities.

Attention to interdependencies of agricultural and natural components of ecosystems: By alleviating poverty through investments in sustainable agriculture, and conscious attention to sustaining valued ecological goods and services, DDPA research will help governments and land-users find ways to protect their ecosystems while improving livelihoods.

Pursuit of diversified livelihood opportunities: Most past initiatives attempted to improve a small number well-established agricultural commodity operations. The integrated ecosystems approach opens the door for strikingly new options, such as the protection and fuller use of natural biodiversity, the integration of crops, trees, and livestock, the possibility of compensation to farmers for ecological services, and adding value through small-scale agro-enterprises.

A custom-fit, scalable development model rather than one-size-fits-all: Simple solutions tried in the past have rarely succeeded because they could not take into account the complexity and distinctiveness of one environment versus another. Instead, the DDPA develops prototypes, processes and methods that are customized to different environments through the participation of local communities. Through this development model, the impact that research institutions can achieve is greatly magnified. Communities adapt and apply these prototypes, processes and methods to fit their own needs and possibilities. As additional communities devise their variations of the same prototypes, impact spreads in a ripple effect.

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