A New Practice: Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture 315society. These conditions are the outcome of the efforts of people who have an
interest in creating and maintaining them. That is, ‘social actor networks’ are nec-
essary to maintain these conditions. Changing the conditions, for example, as a
result of trying to reduce the use of chemical inputs in agriculture, invariably leads
to resistance as actors’ interests are affected (e.g. Aarts and Van Woerkum; Hamil-
ton). The transformation to sustainable agriculture is not politically neutral.
What about the impact of social science? As we have seen earlier, from a posi-
tivist point of view, social science has little to contribute, but from a construction-
ist view, the contributions are assessed in different terms. All forms of knowledge
which claim the ‘science label’, social science included, are seen as special cases of
social reality construction. The scientist actively constructs a fresh perspective on
reality and this, in turn, affects the way others see it. Giddens (1987) has called this
‘the double hermeneutic’. The behaviour of celestial bodies such as the sun and the
Earth presumably remain the same, whether people think the sun circles around
the Earth or vice versa, but people and societies do change their behaviour in the
light of what science has to say about celestial movements. This also holds for the
social sciences. Economics, for example, has been quite effective during the past
few decades in making us believe that we are largely driven by maximization of
monetary values and that society must be organized to allow the unhindered oper-
ation of market mechanisms.
The impact of constructionist thinking becomes abundantly clear if we con-
sider what it implies for the professional field of most of the contributors to this
book: extension studies (Box 16.9) (Leeuwis, 1993). Within the realist–positivist
epistemology, extension is looked upon as a necessary delivery mechanism of the
results of scientific research. We do not need to repeat the criticism of that perspec-
tive here (Freire, 1972; Chambers, 1983; Kline and Rosenberg, 1986; Röling,
1988; Long and Van der Ploeg, 1989). Within the constructionist epistemology,
extension is a means for socially (re-)constructing agrarian reality through com-
munication and information sharing activities. More generously and truly con-
structionally, extension can be seen as a societal mechanism for facilitating social
learning of appropriate responses to changing circumstance. It is easy to see from
this perspective how the transformation of agriculture implies an active social
reconstruction of what our natural resources mean to our survival, and how to use
them to support our continuing livelihood. It is equally easy to see that the trans-
formation cannot be accomplished only on the basis of positivist science, elite
expertise and on transfer of technology to farmers.
Soft Systems Thinking
Finally, it is necessary to say by way of introduction that we accept systems think-
ing as a necessary holistic approach to complex issues such as the sustainability of
agroecosystems. Such issues cannot be understood by examining only the parts in