Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture : Participatory Learning and Adaptive Management in Times of Environmental Uncertainty

Rating:
Summary: A much welcomed volume on sustainable agriculture
Review: This much welcomed volume begins with the disquieting fact that high-energy, chemical-input and intensive farming continues as the dominant model for agricultural development, with all its increasingly unacceptable hazards to human health, ecosystems and the landscape. As an alternative, the book looks to the development of more sustainable, productive and less destructive forms of resource use. However, this depends not only on the redesigning of the agronomic and technical make-up of farming but also on the development of organisational and human capacities aimed at maintaining and enhancing the natural resource base. Essential to this task is building of improved institutional frameworks for facilitating learning about the potentialities and difficulties of sustainalbe agricultural and environmental practice, as well as new methodologies geared towards understanding and improving forms of collective action. The various chapters - some build upon case studies, other addressing policy intervention and outcomes, and yet others exploring underlying theoretical issues - tothether add up to a formidable collection that explores the many analytical and practical problems entailed. Although the authors differ somewhat in their treatment of the notion of 'sustainability' - a slippery concept in the best of writings - one finishes reading the book convinced that here we have a work that makes a valuable contribution to the general debates on sustainable resource use by its emphasis on the emergent properties of collective decision-making. Many of the contributors have longstanding experience of participatory types of interventions and research at the level of farming populations: they now turn their experience and expertise to deal with more complex issues associated with the roles of 'local' and 'external' actors in the management of larger scale agro-ecological systems. The book identifies social constructivism as the epistemological basis for addressing social learning processes and organisational practices central to managing sustainability, since actors often disagree over the definition of the problems for solution and the means to be used. In other words we are confronted by 'multiple realities' which militate against concerted action aimed at specific objectieves. The building of bridges between these differing social worlds rests then on an awareness of how social coalitions and common points of view are and can be constructed socially. While participatory approaches recognise the necessity of such 'social' work, it has only recently that the theoretical potential of social constructivism has been taken up systematically in applied fields such as agricultural extension. The present volume represents a clear affirmation of the usefulness of this approach. The chapters of the volume are grouped into five parts. Part I consists of an introductory chapter which provides a general theroretical and thematic overview of the book. This is followed by two other contributions - one which identifies and criticizes policy options for supporting sustainalbe agriculture, and the other which offers a stimulating elucidation of the underlying philosophical and theoretical foundations of a new social-learning approach that addresses the issues of 'facilitating learning through making things visible, helping people to reconstruct realities through experimentation, discourse, observation and meaningful experience' (Woodhill and Röling, p. 68), and it points to the importance of creating 'new platforms' of understanding between the various (potential conflicting) actors necessary for the successful management of ecosystems. Part II explores the dynamics of environmental policy implementation and farmer responses in three contrasting European cases: Switzerland, Greece and the Netherlands. The examples differ in the extent ot which farmers were involved or involved themselves in the development of these policy frameworks. Part III concentrates on issues relating to how farmers learn about and implement measures towards sustainalbe agriculture. Here the examples and issues are taken up range widely: from Europe (four Dutch experimental projects dealing with sustainable arable agriculture, and eco-farming in Germany), Asia (problems of integrated pest mananagement in Indonesia, and lessons learnt from Asian user-responsive, participatory agricultural research) and Australia (a government initiated participatory learning and research programme aimed at improved fallow management). Part IV moves the discussion to consider the processes involved in 'platform' building at rural and larger agro-ecological systems or water catchment levels. The chapters focus on the building of learning 'communities' concerned with sustainable agricultural practice. Contributing chapters are from the USA (methods and experiences of THe W.K. Kellogg Foundations's integrated farming systems programme), Australia (Landcare movement) and the Netherlands ('nature' policy). The concluding chapter (part V) offers a useful analytical overview of hte many interrelated arguments presented earlier. It underlines that the main contirbution of the book lies in its empahsis on 'what ecologically sound practice implies for the human actors involved'', - not only farmers but land users and other stakeholders interested in the countryside, and its analyses how conditions for generating favourable change might be created. Yet as the authors persuasively argue, the critical conditions are not, as economists are prone to suggest, primarily related to pricing and fiscal inducements; but rather they result from the complex social interplay of 'policy, institutional and behavioural change'. This book, then, deserves to be read and its arguments assessed not only by practising communication, participatory research and agro-ecological specialists, but also by all those interested in rural change and development. Scholars and students of sociology, anthropology and political economy would, I believe, particularly benefit from plunging somewhat more into the 'worlds of practice'.