The Fallacy of Universal Solutions in Extension

The universal application of the T&V model of agricultural extension in more than 50 countries is one of agricultural development’s best known failures. The approach worked well in places where it was originally developed, but proved inappropriate almost everywhere else. In the September edition of the LINK News Bulletin, Rasheed Sulaiman V. and Andy Hall worry that an apparently successful extension innovation piloted in India is set to suffer a similar fate.

Developed in India, ATMA — Agricultural Technology Management Agency — was part of a large World Bank-supported project aimed at strengthening and reforming the agricultural research and extension system. The central idea of the ATMA model was that it would act as a mechanism to bring together the different agencies involved in extension in a district.

However, ATMA is currently facing numerous implementation challenges, including:

• Insufficient support
• Mismatch with diversity of application contexts
• Lack of local ownership
• Capacity and institutional constraints

ATMA seems to be going the T&V way and it is only a matter of time before we will hear people talking about it as yet another model that failed due its universal promotion. Is there an alternative to promoting turnkey, “one-size fits all” approaches in countries as vast as India — where agriculture-related poverty needs urgent solutions? Is extension still a relevant concept? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

Four Horsemen of the Global Economic System

Agriculture in South Asia faces the spectre of the four modern day apocalyptic horsemen of the global economic system — hunger, climate change, trade competition and knowledge exclusion. In July’s LINK LOOK Andy Hall and Rasheed Sulaiman V. argued that South Asia — a region that is home to half the world’s poor — is vulnerable to these challenges because of weaknesses in current patterns of agricultural innovation capacity. They also, however, argued that many of the capacity building blocks are already in place and that a few relatively simple institutional changes could unleash powerful creative forces capable of converting these harbingers of doom — Hunger, Climate Change, Trade Competition and Knowledge Exclusion — into poverty-reducing opportunities.

How well placed is agricultural research to tackle the looming crisis in South Asia? Not very well, according to Andy and Rasheed. And this is not necessarily because South Asian countries lack scientific capacity; in fact, it’s quite the opposite in India with its highly-developed agricultural science tradition. Numerous examples point to the fact that the problem lies in — among other things — the low priority given to research on sustainable agriculture; the lack of scientific validation and support of farmers’ own innovations; and the moribund and outdated agricultural extension services.
The great paradox of South Asia is not so much that it has scientific capabilities and cannot make science count for development, but rather that it has such a rich experience of innovations in research and technology practice that its public research organisations could learn from, but don’t. Andy and Rasheed discuss what they think needs to be undertaken to tackle the looming crisis (see http://www.innovationstudies.org/linklook/200807.html). What do you think? Please comment below.

Tourist Guide to Rural Innovation

The debates about science, technology and innovation (ST&I) in rural development have seen something of a renaissance in recent years, with a number of new and existing organisations in the field of agriculture looking at the adoption of innovation as an organising principle for both policy and action. However, due to the ever-changing nature of the field, the process of navigating through the various emergent and existing schools of thought that produce its vast and complex literature can be a bit of a challenge.

LINK has just released a new document, titled the “Tourist Guide to Systems Studies of Rural Innovation” — the first in a series of policy resources on rural innovation, which we hope makes this process just a little bit easier. The ‘Tourist Guide’ is a resource document charting the emerging landscape of systems studies on rural innovation and is available for download on the LINK website at www.innovationstudies.org (http://www.innovationstudies.org/docs/TouristGuide.pdf).

At the very outset, we feel obliged to warn readers that the comprehensive guide to rural innovation systems is anything, but. Since we hope that this is a pilot rather than a definitive guide we felt it useful to point out its limitations (and our own) in the hope others can take up where we left off.

(i) Out-of-date/ limited
By the time this report goes to print, it will already seem very out-of-date because it will be. The last few years have been witness to the rapid emergence of the field of rural innovation studies in agricultural research. Almost every day there appear to be new organisations working on issues dealing with rural innovation and researchers bringing out new reports. We are aware that the report may have missed publications or different research groups working in this field. Exclusions are not by design but the result of our limited ability to keep pace with rapid changes. If you feel we have missed your work please do let us know.

(ii) Artificial categorisation
The categories into which we have lumped the various organisations in the field — and the bibliography they have produced — are ones that we have created based on our take on the issues and themes we deem significant as well as our understanding of research of others in the field. Researchers and organisations may find themselves categorised in a way they disagree with and we apologise for that.

These are just two of the problems with the report that we identified on introspection; the rest can be found in the full version of the Tourist Guide. Readers, no doubt, will find quite a few more and are welcome to point them out to us as a comment below or by emailing us at info@innovationstudies.org.

New Global Alliances: The End of Development Assistance

To coincide with the high level forum on aid effectiveness in Accra in the first week of September, the August issue of the LINK News Bulletin focused on science and technology and development assistance. LINK co-ordinators Andy Hall and Jeroen Dijkman reflected on the implication of a global knowledge economy and the way it calls into question the notion of donor and recipient countries. With knowledge emerging as the currency of an innovation-driven global economy, new patterns of international interdependencies are starting to emerge that make terms such as ‘developed’ and ‘developing country’ and ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ look increasingly irrelevant. Does this mean it is time to radically rethink development assistance and the way it deals with agricultural science and technology? Can these emerging global knowledge alliances be harnessed for poverty reduction? Can national self interests replace the altruism of development assistance? Or do we risk even further dividing a world of haves and have nots into a world of knows and know nots?

Andy and Jeroen argue that the nature of modern innovation — with its emphasis on co-creation of ideas, products and services — means that global strategies to acquire knowledge need to be collaborative rather than extractive. Bilateral development assistance would be a much more powerful tool if it were more closely aligned with the development objectives of the donor country. This would allow relationships to move from patronage to partnership and thus take advantage of the incentives inherent to the emerging regime of global interdependencies. Development assistance should focus on helping developing countries make the transition to a global knowledge pool, and, in the process, ease them into new forms of global knowledge alliances.

The effectiveness of development assistance is an issue of much debate and disagreement. However, most would agree that, at best, it has had mixed results. LINK would love to get your take on what needs to be done to change the status quo. Please do leave your comments below.

Anatomy of the Debate

The recently-concluded International Food Policy Research Institute conference, “Advancing Agriculture in Developing Countries through Knowledge and Innovation”, was one more signal that the idea of an innovation system is now an integral part of the new international vision for agricultural development. In the April edition of the LINK News Bulletin (subscribe to it by emailing info@innovationstudies.org) Andy Hall says the conference also revealed this ambition is yet to be translated into action. More worrying is that critical sticking points — such as questions about how innovation should be evaluated — arise from the closely-guarded disciplinary perspectives of a small but powerful group of stakeholders in the international agricultural research community that has recently and reluctantly hitched itself to the agricultural innovation systems bandwagon. Andy concludes that unless the international agricultural research community legitimises a much broader suite of evaluation , the expansion of the agricultural innovation repertoire is going to be , and that will harm us all. Can a new innovation evaluation gold standard be arrived at? What would it look like and how can agreement on this be achieved? What do you think? We would love to know, so please do comment!

LINK Launches Blog

We at LINK are keen on facilitating a debate on the issues that concern agriculture, its research and development. Hence, this blog, where we hope to post our views with a little bit of news.We invite and appreciate comments on our posts and hope for involved, informed and opinionated debates to follow.