According to the authors of this paper, actual methods of scaling are rather empirical and based on the premise of ‘find out what works in one place and do more of the same, in another place’. These methods thus would not sufficiently take into account complex realities beyond the concepts of innovation transfer, dissemination, diffusion and adoption. As a consequence, scaling initiatives often do not produce the desired effect.
This chapter explores the interrelationships between economic change and environmental issues, by showing how aspiration, education, and migration are variously connected to a loss of agroecological knowledges for rural young people. It reviews a series of case studies from Vietnam, India, and China on the implications for rural youth of changed aspirations and ecological and economic stress. The economic and cultural pressures of globalization mean young people increasingly aspire for a life outside of agrarian- and natural resource-based livelihoods.
Global technology education is largely dominated by Western universities. Students from developing countries face an enormous challenge when moving from their local education system into the competitive international education market. Their local knowledge gets lost in a foreign education system where the students are required to acquire a new set of skills. This paper presents a survey among international technology students that highlights the differences.
Providing food through schools has well documented effects in terms of the education, health and nutrition of school children. However, there is limited evidence in terms of the benefits of providing a reliable market for small-holder farmers through “home-grown” school feeding approaches. This study aims to evaluate the impact of school feeding programmes sourced from small-holder farmers on small-holder food security, as well as on school children’s education, health and nutrition in Mali.
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.
Innovations in the agri-food sector are needed to create a sustainable food supply. Sustainable food supply requires unexpectedly that densely populated regions remain food producers. A Dutch innovation program has aimed at showing the way forward through creating a number of practice and scientific projects. Generic lessons from the scientific projects in this program are likely to be of interest to agricultural innovation in other densely populated regions in the world.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a promising concept for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation in sustainable agricultural development, but empirical evidence from the farmers’ viewpoint is scarce. This paper contributes to empirical insights on the knowledge creation in CoPs as valued by farmers. Using concepts from CoP theory (domain, community, and practice) and the value creation framework (VCF) developed by Wenger et al. (Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework.
Proven that the adoption rate of a new product is influenced by the network characteristics of the early adopters, the aim of this paper is to find the network features of the early adopters associated with high adoption rates of a specific new practice: the use of biodegradable mulching films containing soluble bio-based substances derived from municipal solid wastes. The study simulated the diffusion process by means of an agent-based model calibrated on real-world data.
To give more attention to the normative character of sustainable development, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and Food Quality requested for a participatory approach to evaluate Dutch agriculture, which was characterized by stakeholder workshops, dialogue, and learning. This article describes and reflects on this approach, using the Fourth Generation Evaluation framework developed by Guba and Lincoln (Fourth generation evaluation, 1989).
The purpose of the TATA-BOX project was to develop a toolbox to support local stakeholders in the design of an agroecological transition at local level. A participatory process based on existing conceptual and methodological frameworks was developed for the design of new configurations of stakeholders and resource systems in the farming systems, supply-chains and natural resources management that were to form a new agroecological territorial system. This process, presented here, was adapted and tested on two adjacent territories in south-western France.