230 Governance and Education
in a better position – in terms of status, skills and authority – to contribute posi-
tively. As Röling (1994a, 1994b) suggests, such efforts may take place on a ‘plat-
form’ where different stakeholders are brought together to overlook the situation
and learn and negotiate towards more productive outcomes (i.e. coordinated
action). Although conflict management has not been a traditional extension serv-
ice or strategy, we feel that ‘new style’ extension organizations may have to become
better equipped for it. This is because innovation, conflict and intervention are
closely intertwined, which essentially means that conflict management is some-
thing that change agents cannot run away from. Dealing with tension and conflict
requires insights and skills that, in our experience, are not yet widely available in
public or private organizations that apply communicative intervention.
Supporting organization development and capacity building
In many cases innovation involves and/or depends on the adequate functioning of
farmer and community organizations or groups, such as irrigation management
committees, credit groups, marketing cooperatives, commodity groups, study
groups etc. For purposes of conflict resolution it can be important too that weaker
parties become better organized and improve their ability to make claims. Thus, an
important role for communication workers can be to contribute to organization
development and human capacity building, so as to strengthen a particular group’s
capacity to innovate, help themselves and/or make claims. The role of change
agents here can range from initiating organization development, contributing to
organizational activities and processes, providing training in organizational skills,
facilitating processes of organization change etc. Such activities are often inspired
by ‘political’ sympathy with particular, often disadvantaged, groups. The term
‘political’ here does not refer to political parties or movements, but rather to the
fact that ‘strengthening a group’ means almost automatically to improve their
‘power position’ with regard to others.
Persuasive transfer of policy and/or technological innovations
The most widespread form of communicative intervention is to persuade farmers
or other target groups to adopt specific technological packages and/or to accept
certain ideas or policies. The main intervention goal here is to help realize specific
policy objectives (e.g. increase export earnings) by the stimulation of predefined
behaviour changes (e.g. the adoption of cash crops and/or new varieties). Typically,
such efforts have been in the form of comprehensive extension campaigns, which in
their eventual form and method partly resembled what we have called ‘advisory com-
munication’ and ‘horizontal knowledge exchange’. However, whenever external^2
persuasive concerns enter an interaction between communication workers and
farmers, we would prefer to call it ‘persuasive transfer’ rather than ‘advisory com-
munication’ or ‘horizontal exchange’ – even if the form may be the same – because
it means that a different intervention goal and operational logic enters the scene.
As part of this logic, the required role of the communication worker in persuasive
transfer is much more that of a social engineer who tries to manipulate strategically