Excerpt
There has been a quiet revolution in land management research and extension in Australia, particularly in the field of land conservation, in which new models of interaction between farmers and the professionals working with them are emerging. This paper introduces a small selection of many possible initiatives, drawing upon more detailed explorations of these projects and programs (Campbell 1994a). This experience endorses the notion that the linear model of technology transfer—based on the assumptions of the theory of diffusion of innovations, in which information is likened to a static commodity produced by research and marketed by extension to progressive farmers, eventually diffusing to the rest—is inadequate for explaining knowledge processes in farming, and even less useful in generating models of research and extension that reflect the transition from the productivist era to the sustainability era in agriculture (Campbell 1994b; Pretty and Chambers; Röling).
Sustainability is a contested, constructed, contextual chameleon of a concept. It frustrates conventional institutional arrangements and ways of thinking about research and extension. Getting serious about sustainability means grappling with large and unfamiliar scales in space and time; technical uncertainties and risk; a multiplicity of stakeholders with diverse values and interests …
Footnotes
C. Andrew Campbell, Unite de Recherches sur les Systèmes Agraires et le Développement, Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, Centre de Recherches de Toulouse, BP 27, F31326 Castanet-Tolosan Cédex, France.
- Copyright 1995 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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