Bricolage as innovation: opening the black box of Drip Irrigation Systems

In Morocco, many farmers enthusiastically use drip irrigation. However, few drip irrigation systems conform to engineering standards. In a process they refer to as bricolage, farmers modify and adapt standard designs, thus creating their own technical standards. We document three instances of bricolage and show that it is a useful term to explain irrigation innovation processes. Through bricolage farmers adapt and modify the system to their needs, but also enter a process of gradual learning about what drip irrigation is and what it can achieve. Bricolage has led to the multiplication and diversification of drip systems, with different categories of users co-designing the nature and direction of change it provokes. Through bricolage, local actors effectively share responsibilities of the design process with engineers. The paper concludes that the fact that drip irrigation lends itself to bricolage helps explain its success as an innovatio

Making the user visible: analysing irrigation practices and farmers’ logic to explain actual drip irrigation performance

The actual performance of drip irrigation (irrigation efficiency, distribution uniformity) in the field is often quite different from that obtained in experimental stations. We developed an approach to explain the actual irrigation performance of drip irrigation systems by linking measured performances to farmers' irrigation practices, and these practices to the underlying logic of farmers who operate these systems. This approach was applied to 22 farms in Morocco. Four sets of variables helped explain the gap between the actual irrigation performance and the performance obtained in experimental conditions: (1) farmers have agro-economic motivations or want to improve their social status, and for them, irrigation performance is at best an intermediate objective. (2) Irrigation performance is not a static value, but a rapidly evolving process, related to the (perceived) ability of farmers to change irrigation practices and renew irrigation equipment, but also to farmers' aspirations. (3) The social network of farmers, supporting the introduction and use of drip irrigation, determines how farmers may share experience, information and know-how related to drip irrigation. (4) Today, there is no social pressure to irrigate carefully to save water; only the state explicitly links the use of drip irrigation to saving water. Making the drip user visible in research and policy studies would lead to more realistic assessments of irrigation performance and draw the attention of policy makers to the actual conditions in which drip irrigation is used, and as a consequence help incorporate 'saving water' as an objective for drip irrigation users

Beyond the Promises of Technology: A Review of the Discourses and Actors Who Make Drip Irrigation

Drip irrigation has long been promoted as a promising way to meet today's world water, food and poverty challenges. In most scientific and policy documents, drip irrigation is framed as a technological innovation with definitive intrinsic characteristics—that of efficiency, productivity and modernity. Based on evidence from North and West Africa as well as South Asia, we show that there are multiple actors involved in shaping this imagery, the legitimacy of which largely stems from an engineering perspective that treats technology and potential as ‘truths’ that exist independently of the context of use. Rather than ascribing the advent of drip irrigation as a successful technology to intrinsic technical features, this paper proposes to see it as grounded in the ability drip irrigation has to lend itself to multiple contexts and discourses that articulate desirable futures. We thus adopt a view of technology whereby the ‘real’ (i.e. the drip irrigation hardware) acquires its characteristics only through, and within, the network of institutions, discourses and practices that enact it. Such a perspective sheds light on the iterative alignments that take place between hardware and context and treat these as inherent features, rather than externalities, of the innovation process