Connecting Agriculture to better Nutrition in South Asia: Innovation as a process of socio-technical change
This paper explores the role of innovation in strengthening the linkages between agriculture and nutrition in South Asia
Abstract
This paper explores the role of innovation in strengthening the linkages between agriculture and nutrition in South Asia.
It eschews the common bias in discourse about ‘innovation’ towards eye-catching novelty and invention, which emphasises high-tech gadgets and devices, external inputs and industrially and/or commercially produced technologies. Instead, this paper adopts a broad conceptualisation of innovation as a change process, which involves a reconfiguration of technical and social components, and has material, economic and behavioural dimensions. Thus, the paper embraces practical and behavioural changes at farm- and household levels, such as the establishment of home gardens for improved nutrition, as well as more obvious technological novelties such as machines or the genetic engineering of biofortified crops. This inclusive, catholic approach is inspired by insights from the anthropology and sociology of technology, and the specific field of science and technology studies, which view technology first and foremost as an assembly of social and technical components, in which purposeful human agency interacts with the material world in order to accomplish particular goals.
From this perspective, the study of innovation entails a focus on changes where information and knowledge, practices and behaviours, and tools and inputs are being introduced, eliminated, modified and/or transformed. The particular cases discussed in this paper are examples selected from the range of interventions studied by partners in the LANSA consortium (Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia).
The paper introduces a framework comprising a series of useful questions that may be asked before, during or after an intervention that intends to achieve better nutrition outcomes through technological change in food production or consumption systems. Using this framework of questions, which focus on the practices and practitioners of technology, the paper identifies the different and contrasting ways in which the interventions have been conceived and, in particular, differences in their expectations about who will practise the technologies concerned, how the desired benefits are supposed to be realised, and how readily these expectations may be met.
Citation
Glover, D. Connecting Agriculture to better Nutrition in South Asia: Innovation as a process of socio-technical change (2017.) LANSA Working Paper 16, 35pp
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