Laxmi Prasad Pant

Learning and Innovation Competence in Agricultural and Rural Development

Abstract Purpose: The fields of competence development and capacity development remain isolated in the scholarship of learning and innovation despite the contemporary focus on innovation systems thinking in agricultural and rural development. This article aims to address whether and how crossing the conventional boundaries of these two fields provide new directions for developing learning and innovation competence in international development. Design/methodology/approach: Using mixed methods research, this article assesses work environments for experiential learning and innovation, and investigates effective ways of enhancing core competence in agricultural research, education, extension and entrepreneurship. Findings: Findings suggest that while the focus on input and output indicators are relevant for technological innovation competence development, outcome indicators, such as measures of changes in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of learning and innovation, would better serve the purpose of developing organisational and institutional learning and innovation competence. Practical implications: This research concludes that crossing the conventional boundaries of competence development and capacity development serves as a way to renew the role of education within the innovation systems thinking. However, such an attempt to enhance human capabilities and functionings through education should integrate theory-based, competence-based and experiential learning components as a coherent whole. Originality/value: This article demonstrates the value of crossing the conventional boundaries of the two seemingly unrelated fields—competence development through education and capacity development through extension—to provide new directions to operationalise innovation systems thinking in agricultural education and extension.

The Least Developed Countries Report 2010: towards a new international development architecture for LDCs

gate picture of land access in a specific Southeast Asian country. It is only in the concluding chapter, when the authors discuss the recent economic crises and the onerous implications of foreign direct investment, that readers acquire a more acute sense of the very real danger that countries and their populations could run out of land. The absence of macro-level trends is closely related to the authors’ failure to offer predictions of events that may further challenge land negotiations in Southeast Asia. This form of forward thinking would have strengthened the utility of the book, which otherwise is limited to its understandably nonprescriptive, exploratory character. Another important concession is that Powers of Exclusion is a human-centered account of land transformation: regulation, the market, force and legitimation are all anthropogenic means for creating and framing exclusion. Missing from the analysis is an examination of the power of the environment to influence land change, which is particularly interesting considering the book’s alignment with political ecology theory. Given the increasing severity of resource shortages and “natural” disasters, such as the tsunami that wracked this region in 2004, human-centred approaches to understanding processes of land transformation should be tempered by environmental analysis. These latter two critiques should not diminish the contribution this book makes to the literature on land transformation, nor its strengths in dissecting the forms of power shaping land processes. By bringing together a large number of diverse examples from the region, Powers of Exclusion addresses a highly relevant and escalating problem in Southeast Asia. Contestation surrounding land use and ownership will increasingly require mediation as land for agricultural purposes is threatened. In this way Hall, Hirsch and Li have provided a robust resource for understanding the dynamics that fuel and obstruct land change processes.

Adaptive Transition Management for Transformations to Agricultural Sustainability in the Karnali Mountains of Nepal

Current agroecological approaches to farming have provided a limited understanding of transformations to sustainability, particularly in subsistence agrarian economies of geographically isolated regions of the world. Some suggest mitigating social and ecological impacts of modern industrial farming while others advocate for local adaptation to changes in socioecological systems, such as climate change, extreme weather events, and biodiversity loss. This article investigates effective pathways of fundamental transformations in technologies, livelihoods, and lifestyles referred to as “agricultural sustainability transitions” in the Karnali Mountains, the most impoverished region of Nepal. Findings suggest that neither management of change referred to as transition management nor adaptation to change referred to as adaptive management effectively leads to agricultural sustainability transitions in this region of the country. An integration of these two approaches, which this article theorizes as “adaptive transition management,” can help charter transition pathways through system innovation making new and improved technologies more accessible and adaptable to smallholders while developing local capacity to adapt to changes in agroecological systems.

Beyond Biodiversity: Culture in Agricultural Biodiversity Conservation in the Himalayan Foothills

This chapter explores the cultural dimensions of agricultural biodiversity conservation through a case study of the relationships between caste-based food traditions and local varieties of rice and finger millet managed by smallholder subsistence farmers in the Himalayan foothills of western Nepal. The empirical material for this study is derived from interviews with primary stakeholders, a household survey, and direct observation of cultural practices and spiritual traditions of rural farming communities. The different caste-based food traditions in the study area relate directly to differential use and appreciation of the local landraces of both crops, which are in turn conserved or managed to varying degrees. The empirical data provide strong evidence that agro-biodiversity management is not simply an agronomic or biogenetic issue, but that cultural preferences and practices are central to the creation, maintenance, and ultimate viability of biodiversity in agroecosystems. These findings suggest that future conservation efforts must engage local communities and their cultures fully in agro-biodiversity management, through participatory plant breeding, increased awareness and marketing of landrace identity within commodity supply chains, and through advocacy on behalf of smallholders’ rights.

Long-term solutions for a short-term world: Canada and research development

individuals shows how they are interwoven into the fabric of capitalism and how interconnected the food system is. The language is also simple and straightforward, starting with the captivating and insightful stories of both ordinary peasants and influential figures, and supported by powerful statistics and analyses. This makes Akram-Lodhi’s message not only relevant to researchers and activists already versed in the topic, but also accessible to a wider public. I believe this is one of the rare books on agrarian issues and the food system that is not only scientifically well documented, but is also successful in its reach beyond an inner circle of specialists to convince a greater audience and, ultimately, have a wider impact. But this quality of synthesis and brevity may also inevitably be one of the book’s weaknesses. First, while explaining how the globalised food system has transformed food, making it cheap and addictive at the expense of nutrition, Akram-Lodhi does not discuss the more complex entanglement of interests beyond those of conglomerates, which have translated into a broad food safety crisis, mounting in both developed and developing countries. Second, while the author provides a convincing critique of the World Bank’s model of capitalist farming, his assessment of Via Campesina’s food sovereignty, notably its neopopulist influence, needs further elaboration if it is to benefit the broader audience, as the rest of the book successfully does. Lastly, and more fundamentally, Akram-Lodhi acknowledges the ecological impact of the global food system, but should have more clearly articulated those contradictions to the widening metabolic rift resulting from industrial, globalised and capitalist agriculture. This would have allowed the book to account for the dependency of capitalist food production on ecosystems, and hence its inherent vulnerability in the current context of environmental change. The author could then have better inserted his valuable analysis into a bigger picture of systemic risks: that socio-ecological stressors (notably biodiversity loss and climate change) could bring this productive but precarious food system to a halt, and prevent a reversion to alternative cultivars and coping strategies, threatening the food security of hundreds of millions more.