xxxii Sustainable Agriculture and Food
centred on encouraging local people to contribute their labour in return for food,
cash or materials. But material incentives distort perceptions, create dependencies,
and give the misleading impression that local people are supportive of externally
driven initiatives. When little effort is made to build local interests and capacity,
then people have no stake in maintaining structures or practices once the flow of
incentives stops. If people do not cross a cognitive frontier, then there will be no
ecological literacy.
The dilemma for authorities is that they both need and fear people’s participa-
tion. They need people’s agreement and support, but they fear that wider and open-
ended involvement is less controllable. But if this fear permits only stage-managed
forms of participation, then distrust and greater alienation are the most likely out-
comes. Participation can mean finding something out and proceeding as originally
planned. Alternatively, it can mean developing processes of collective learning that
change the way that people think and act. The many ways that organizations inter-
pret and use the term participation range from passive participation, where people
are told what is to happen and act out predetermined roles, to self-mobilization,
where people take initiatives independently of external institutions (Pretty,
1995).
Agricultural development often starts with the notion that there are technolo-
gies that work, and so it is just a matter of inducing or persuading farmers to adopt
them (Leeuwis, 2004). But the problem is that the imposed models look good at
first, and then tend to fade away (Kerr et al, 1999). Alley cropping, an agroforestry
system comprising rows of nitrogen-fixing trees or bushes separated by rows of
cereals, has long been the focus of research. Many productive and sustainable sys-
tems, needing few or no external inputs, have been developed. They stop erosion,
produce food and wood, and can be cropped over long periods. But the problem
is that very few farmers have adopted these systems as designed – they appear to
have been produced as suitable largely only for research stations, with their plenti-
ful supplies of labour and resources and standardized soil conditions.
It is critical that sustainable agriculture and conservation management do not
prescribe concretely defined sets of technologies and practices. This only serves to
restrict the future options of farmers and rural people. As conditions change and
as knowledge changes, so must the capacity of farmers and communities be
enhanced to allow them to change and adapt too. Agricultural sustainability should
not imply simple models or packages to be imposed. Rather it should be seen as a
process of social learning, and emergent technologies fitted to specific local cir-
cumstances. This centres on building the capacity of farmers and their communi-
ties to learn about the complex ecological and biophysical complexity in their
fields and farms, and then to act on this information. The process of learning, if it
is socially embedded and jointly engaged upon, provokes changes in behaviour
and can bring forth a new world (Maturana and Varela, 1992).
What lessons have we learned from programmes that successfully promote
social learning and sustainable natural resource management? The first is that sus-
tainability is an emergent property of systems high in social, human and natural