6 Agriculture and Food Systems
challenge is best met by actively engaging rice farmers and trainers, from the out-
set, in improving the production process.
In the final paper of this section, Thomas Dietz, Elinor Ostrom and Paul Stern
provide a 2003 update on the Hardin thesis in a paper entitled The Struggle to
Govern the Commons. As they indicate, Hardin’s oversimplification in this tragedy
of the commons was twofold: he claimed that only the state could establish insti-
tutional arrangements that could sustain the commons in the long-run, and pre-
sumed that resource users were trapped in a commons dilemma, and so therefore
unable to create new solutions. The authors indicate that there is, of course, an enor-
mous threat to ecosystems from inadequate governance, and state that ‘developing
effective governance systems is akin to a co-evolutionary race ... successful commons
governance requires that rules evolve’. Effective commons governance is easier to
achieve when the resources can be monitored, when the rates of change in resources
and technologies are moderate, when communities maintain frequent face-to-face
communication, when outsiders can be excluded at relatively low cost and when
users support effective monitoring and rule enforcement. The authors then set out
the requirements for adaptive governance in complex systems, and these centre on (i)
providing information, (ii) dealing with conflict, (iii) inducing rule compliance, (iv)
providing infrastructure, (v) being prepared for change, (vi) ensuring analytical delib-
eration, (vii) nesting of institutional arrangements, and (viii) institutional variety. The
paper shows that as the footprint of humanity on the earth enlarges, so ‘humanity is
challenged to develop and deploy understanding of broad-scale commons governance
quickly enough to avoid the broad-scale tragedies that will otherwise ensue’.
Part 2: Poverty and Hunger
Robert Chambers is one of the world’s foremost writers and innovative practition-
ers on approaches to agricultural development that build first on the knowledge
and skills of the poorest. Their continuing exclusion from the economic and social
benefits of rural development remains a scandal. In his 2005 book, Ideas for Devel-
opment (Earthscan) Chambers draws together his experiences over four decades to
indicate how we need to think differently as well as act differently if any lasting and
significant contribution to poverty reduction is to be made. In this opening chap-
ter, he reflects on settlement schemes in tropical Africa from the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Here the emphasis is on our need to learn from experience. The sec-
ond part of the chapter reviews subsequent developments with settlement schemes
and then explores wider contemporary meanings, relevance and applications for
these three key words: commitment, continuity and irreversibility. Throughout,
the effects of biases and neglect in recent patterns of agricultural development are
exposed and lessons suggested for the future.
One of the problems with trying to identify both priorities and action in agri-
cultural development centres on our understanding of what ‘improvement’ means.