A social study of the technologies composing the green revolution

Strictly speaking, the term ‘Green Revolution’ is used to indicate the introduction of improved crop seeds into the agricultural systems of Less Developed Countries (ldcs), starting after wwii and still going on today, but with its major breakthrough during the sixties. It was believed that modern science and technologies —improved crop seeds in particular— would be able to eradicate famine. In this article the metaphor of script, taken from Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, is used to analyse the relation between designers (plant researchers) and users (ldc-farmers) in the Green Revolution. First, it is shown that the new Green Revolution seeds contained a script that drastically reconfigured the farmers’ relation with each other, with their seeds, with their government and with the West. Next, the author analyses how the script was embedded into the seeds. Finally, the ideologies that underpinned the script are briefly discussed

Tracing the emergence and deployment of the 'integrated water resources management' paradigm

The unequal distribution of water quantity and quality in space and time severely burdens the livelihoods of billions of people on this planet, the vast majority living in developing countries. ‘Integrated Water Resources Management’ (IWRM) is a normative policy paradigm that holds the promise of a holistic management of this unfair distribution. In two decades time the paradigm has gained an apparently hegemonic status in the network of water development actors worldwide. The article traces the emergence of the IWRM paradigm in the network of development actors and describes its deployment in Mali. Both the governmental and non-governmental pathway of deployment in Mali are accounted for. Harnessing Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as descriptive tool, the article describes how actors create alliances in support of the paradigm, including academics, multi-lateral agencies, non-governmental organizations, and actors in Mali’s water sector. ANT is helpful in showing that the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the development paradigm depends on the strength of the alliance, not the strength of the paradigm. It shows how policy making and practice are actively geared one to the other

A genealogy of epistemic and technological determinism in development aid discourses

In the last decade or so, the major development agencies have explicitly turned the spotlights on ‘knowledge for development’, ‘ICT for development’, or the ‘knowledge economy’ as new panacea to prompt development. This article argues, first, that knowledge and technology have always been integrally part of the very idea of ‘development’ since its emergence during Enlightenment. Recent appeals to knowledge or technology for development should be placed in an age-long genealogy of similar rationales. Second, the article elucidates that discourses about the roles of knowledge and technology in development have always varied widely, with deterministic and less deterministic interpretations often existing along each other. In this article, the many different interpretations are unravelled. Even today, very opposing roles are ascribed to knowledge and technology in development. Whereas strong versions of technological and epistemic determinism still reverberate in some present-day development discourses, they are simultaneously countered by discourses focusing on ‘capacity building’

Data Model and Analysis for Spatial Assessment of Environmental Impact and Targeting of Agri-Environmental Schemes at Regional Scales

The report introduces the concepts and strategies for implementing spatial based methods for the assessment of actual environmental impact of Rural Development agri-environmental measures. The objective is to set directions for research work proposing an array of possibilities to identify, assess and to map the impact of the Rural Development schemes related to the Community environmental priorities in contribution to the EC defined evaluation indicators. Specific research results will be reported separately.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

Methodologies to assess human-induced land change processes relevant to land degradation under different scenarios of climate change and socio-economic conditions

Land degradation is a complex concept encompassing a variety of processes, natural or human induced, that affect the functioning of the land and the providing of ecosystem services. We propose a methodology to evaluate the impacts of future scenarios of socio-economic pathways and representative forcing pathways on land degradation. We selected a limited set of human induced land change processes that could potentially lead to land degradation and combined them spatially for each scenario. We compared the concurring variables between scenarios and over time to assess the sensitivity of the scenarios to the land change processes relevant for land degradation. With the processes or potential issues and the scenarios used in this study on Latin America end the Caribbean, we found (1) that the differences over time were much larger than those between scenarios and (2) that the effect of climate change was negligible compared to the socio-economic effect. Further investigation with more variables dependent on the climate scenarios is needed to confirm the results.JRC.D.6-Knowledge for Sustainable Development and Food Securit