6
Reversals, Institutions and Change
Robert Chambers
Farmer first and TOT
The new behaviours and attitudes presented by the contributors to this book conflict
with much normal professionalism and with much normal bureaucracy. Normal
professional training and values are deeply embedded in the transfer-of-technology
(TOT) mode, with scientists deciding research priorities, generating technology
and passing it to extension agents to transfer to farmers. Normal bureaucracy is
hierarchical and centralizes, standardizes and simplifies. When the two com-
bine, as they do in large organizations, whether agricultural universities, inter-
national agricultural research centres, or national agricultural research systems
(NARSs), they have an impressive capacity to reproduce themselves and to
resist change.
But to serve well the resource-poor farm families of the third – complex, diverse
and risk-prone – agriculture with which much of this book has been concerned,
requires these ‘normal’ tendencies to be reversed: for farmers’ analysis to be the
basis of most research priorities, for farmers to experiment and evaluate, for scien-
tists to learn from and with them; and for research and services to farmers to be
decentralized, differentiated and versatile.
The difficulty of effecting major changes and reversals in large organizations
underlines the importance of seeing what changes of behaviour and attitude are
required, what institutional conditions are necessary for them to be sustained and
spread, and how these might be achieved. To do this, we need to outline in more
detail the contrast between TOT and the farmer-first approach and methods rep-
resented in this book (see Table 6.1).
With farmer first, the main objective is not to transfer known technology, but
to empower farmers to learn, adapt and do better; analysis is not by outsiders –
scientists, extensionists or NGO workers – on their own but by farmers and by
farmers assisted by outsiders; the primary location for research and development
Reprinted from Chambers R. 1989. Reversals, institutions and change. In Chambers R, Pacey A and
Thrupp L A (eds) Farmer First. IT Publications, London, Chapter 4.4, pp181–195.