Rhetorics and realities of participation: the Ethiopian agricultural extension system and its participatory turns

ABSTRACT

We present a context-sensitive perspective on participation in rural development, revolving around the reconstruction of unique sets of differences between rhetorics and realities. Using a theoretical frame inspired by the Evolutionary Governance Theory, we identify mechanisms of reinterpretation and delimitation of participation in the context of evolving rural governance. Through a detailed case study of the Ethiopian agricultural extension system, we observed that various path dependencies, interdependencies, and goal dependencies in the extension system but notably also in the embedding system of rural governance limit and shape farmers’ participation. It is argued that the precise difference between official state rhetoric and on-the-ground realities of participation become understandable through reconstruction of embedding governance paths, and that the difference is further defined by relating it to the way other key concepts in rural development are implemented: decentralization, self-governance, and agricultural extension itself. Mapping out these coevolving rhetorics and realities gives insights in real reform options, for extension in particular and rural governance in general. Our case findings show that despite numerous reforms in the agricultural extension system and a steady increase in the extension coverage with a huge number of extension workers (Development Agents), participatory approaches largely failed to meet farmers’ needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural extension
• decentralization
• dependency
• Ethiopia
• governance
• participation

Acknowledgments

This study was conducted as part of the interdisciplinary research project “BiomassWeb: Improving Food Security in Africa through Increased System Productivity of Biomass-based Value Webs” at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn (www.biomassweb.org). BiomassWeb is financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) for which we are grateful. The first author extends his gratitude to Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen, for hosting during the writing up phase. We are also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers’ comments that helped us to further enrich the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A development team is known as ‘yelimat budin’ in Amharic and ‘gare misooma’ in Afan Oromo languages. It refers to a group of 20–40 neighboring farmers and five one-to-five farmer groups in a village organized for the collective implementation of AES under one farmer leader (a model). However, the number of members varies from kebele to kebele, according to the size of population and their settlement patterns (Leta 2018).

2. Smallholder refers to farmer operating traditional farming on small and fragmented lands of variable sizes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the BiomassWeb Project at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn.

Notes on contributors

Gerba Leta

Gerba Leta is currently a Technical Advisor at Sustainable Use of Rehabilitated Land for Economic Development (SURED) Programme, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. He is trained Agricultural Sciences and received PhD degree from Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn in agriculture. Gerba also received his MSc degree in Agronomy from University of Hawassa, Ethiopia. He worked for national and international research and development organizations such as International Livestock Research Institute, International Water Management Institute, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organization. He is interested in agricultural extension, natural resource governance and political economy of agriculture. His recent publications also focus in those areas.

Articles and their websites:

1. Nikinake: the mobilization of labour and skill development in rural Ethiopia (Gerba Leta, Girma Kelboro, Till Stellmacher, Kristof Van Assche and Anna-Katharina Hornidge)

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nrf

2. Social learning in smallholder agriculture: the struggle against systemic inequalities (Gerba Leta, Till Stellmacher, Girma Kelboro, Kristof Van Assche, Anna-Katharina Hornidge)

https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jwl

Girma Kelboro is a senior researcher at the Department of Political and Cultural Change, Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. He holds a PhD degree in agriculture from the University of Hohenheim specializing in the social dimension of natural resource management and rural development. His scientific field of expertise is agricultural/rural development sociology with research interests on governance; innovation and knowledge in smallholder agriculture; biodiversity conservation; and livelihoods and sustainability. He currently coordinates innovation governance research and science-policy dialogs at ZEF.

A recent peer-reviewed publication: Kelboro, G., Stellmacher, T. 2019. ‘Global Changes in Local Governance of the Commons: The Case of the African Parks Foundation Engagement in Nech Sar National Park, Ethiopia.’ In the Commons in a Global World: Global Connections and Local Responses, edited by Tobias Haller. Abingdon: Routledge (forthcoming).

Kristof van Assche is currently Professor in planning, governance and development at the University of Alberta. Kristof is interested in evolution and innovation in governance, with focus areas in spatial planning and design, development and environmental policy. He worked in various countries, and often combines fieldwork with theoretical reflection: systems theories, interpretive policy analysis, institutional economics, poststructuralism. He held visiting positions at McGill University, Krakov Agricultural University, Wageningen University, Bonn University. He published widely on these topics. Books include ‘Rural Development: Knowledge and expertise in governance’ (with Anna Katharina Hornidge, Wageningen Academic), two volumes on Evolutionary Governance Theory (with Raoul Beunen and Martijn Duineveld, Springer), and ‘Local cosmopolitanism’ (with Petruta Teampau, Springer)

Mobile [phone]

Site: https://www.ualberta.ca/science/about-us/contact-us/faculty-directory/kristof-van-assche

Books: amazon.com/author/kristofvanassche

Publication overview: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=zBA-sD8AAAAJ&hl=en

Till Stellmacher is a Program Coordinator and Senior Researcher at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn. His main field of scientific expertise is governance, agrarian transformation, and environmental change in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. He holds a PhD in agricultural sciences and has several years of work experience in empirical development research in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Tanzania and Burkina Faso. He is currently focusing on questions related to smallholder farming and local governance.

Anna-Katharina Hornidge (Dr. phil.) is Professor of Social Sciences in the Marine Tropics, University of Bremen as well as Head of Department of Social Sciences and of the Working Group ‘Development and Knowledge Sociology’ at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT). Trained in Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies from Bonn, Singapore and Berlin, her research interests include the social construction and materiality of (environmental) knowledges, sustainability futuring (discourses) in contexts of globally prevailing social inequality, and social, cognitive, epistemic (im-)mobility-based conceptualizations of space in the context of global transformation processes. Her regional focus lies on Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia), with additional past and partly collaborative work having been conducted in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) and East Africa (Ethiopia).