Editorial Introduction to Volume IV 5sustainability, must start with learning. What do we think we mean when we use
terms like development and sustainability? We have made the world as it is, and so
it is up to us collectively to make meaning through our learning. In a state of
denial, about how bad circumstances are, we are going to need to devise different
ways to think, interact and act very quickly. An important contrast centres on how
we conceptualize systems ideas, and thus bring some cognitive coherence to bear
on a complex world. Earlier pioneers of systems thinking focused on cybernetic
regulative processes that maintained steady states, and many ideas about resilience
and adaptation have since been developed. But strangely, systems ideas in the social
sciences have seen declining support in recent decades. Another conceptualization,
however, centres less on systems in the world, and more on systems of cognition,
in which inquiry about the world is the soft system that can be both revealing and
transformative. In this way, learning becomes less about the acquisition of knowl-
edge, and more about the transformation of experience, whereby knowledge is
fluid, being created, recreated and used by individuals as they seek to make sense
of the world. The quest for sustainability focuses on new types of engagement
between people with their different worldviews and paradigms, and the world
about us.
In the fourth chapter, philosopher Paul Thompson explores the nature of agri-
cultural sustainability. Philosophers spend a large part of their time scrutinizing
words and concepts, attempting to get clear on what they mean, and on the impli-
cations of their meaning for human endeavours. Philosophy can help clarify hid-
den assumptions in alternative definitions and approaches to sustainability. Current
usage reveals two main substantive approaches, resource sufficiency and functional
integrity, as well as widespread non-substantive usage intended to promote social
action. Although accounting-based resource sufficiency approaches have been the
main focus in technical approaches, functional integrity approaches may be more
transparent with respect to value judgements that inform the notion of sustainable
systems. The ‘paradox of sustainability’ arises because substantive, research-based
approaches to sustainability may be too complex to effectively motivate appropri-
ate social responses. Nevertheless, debate over the meaning of sustainability can
stimulate a fuller appreciation of the complex empirical processes and potentially
contestable values that are implicated in any attempt to accomplish sustainability
in agriculture.
Robert Chambers’ Managing Canal Irrigation was published in the 1980s at a
time when agricultural practices in many parts of the world were seeking to develop
methods to offset the inherent personal and institutional biases that prevented
clear understanding of conditions as poor people experienced them. Canal irriga-
tion systems represent a particular type of system in which the poor and the
tailenders are often forgotten. This chapter focuses on learning and mislearning,
which at that point of time had not been the subject of much research. Yet it is how
beliefs are formed and sustained that influences what professionals see. Irrigation
systems in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are analysed, and these reveal the need for
open learning systems. One problem is that trial areas receive special treatment at