Innovation systems, Douglas, Douglass and beyond : using cultural theory to understand approaches to smallholder development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Innovation systems (IS) are taken to be coherent and consistent narratives or discourses. This chapter uses the Group/Grid or Cultural Theory (CT) to distinguish four competing IS narratives, each with their own theory of change, criterion variables, strategies, pathways of innovation and designs for innovation platforms (IP):1. The business model of agronomy (BMA), based on the methodological individualism of the diffusion of innovations and ‘agricultural treadmill’ paradigms and focusing on technology development to raise yields.2. Package and value chain approaches that seek to enable individual entrepreneurship through access to services, inputs, credit and markets and other institutions that reduce transaction costs.3. Promotion of rules and regulations (hierarchical institutions) to constrain the pursuit of individual interests for some public goods (governance, control of corruption, sustainable use of natural resources).4. Egalitarian approaches that seek to empower, emancipate, strengthen civil society and enhance social capital.This framework proves useful for analysing the history of agricultural development in Industrial countries and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to point to ways forward for inclusive approaches to mobilize the vast productive resources under smallholder management in Africa

Voorlichtingskundig in Anatolia : openbare les, waarin, aan de hand van reiservaringen, getracht wordt plezier in voorlichtingskunde over te dragen

Inaugurele rede Wageningen, 27 september 198

From causes to reasons: the human dimension of agricultural sustainability

The point of departure of this paper is the familiar instrumental perspective that focuses on causes and effects and on actions to do something about them. This perspective is appealing and familiar and exemplified here by the Pressure, State, Response (PSR) Model used by the OECD to analyse environmental issues. After presenting the details of this approach, the paper then presents the other side of the coin: an approach based not on causes but on human reasons. In trying to explain sustainability, it does not look for causes and effects in the physical world, but for human reasons in terms of people's 'gets', 'wants', 'knowing' and 'doing'. This translates as an exercise in interpreting the perfectly valid instrumental discourse about agricultural sustainability into a totally different discourse based on cognition and learning. This translation seems to add something that is worth taking into account. The 'pressure' in OECD's PSR model takes on a new appearance. After providing examples on how the new perspective can be applied, the paper draws implications for the combination of the domains of knowledge we need to look at agricultural sustainability. It concludes with an example based on research of a social learning approach in a Dutch water catchment