Frugality and cross-sectoral policymaking for food security

Highlights

•	The need for a cross sectoral policymaking is suggested to better achieve food security in local contexts.
•	Frugality thinking in policymaking is an important way to achieve such cross-sectorality.
•	Frugality can offer a theoretical framework for discourses on grassroots innovations and Sustainable Rural Livelihood.
•	A frugality lens can ensure diagnosis of local institutions needed for policymaking.
•	Two Kenyan cases were discussed as an illustration.

Abstract

The growing concerns about food security, especially in the disadvantaged regions of the world, often point out the inadequacies of strictly sectoral approaches to addressing the problems of agriculture. Such policy approaches coincided with the rise of a global, top-down, formal, science-driven development of agriculture. Over time, such interventions have drawn criticism from multiple corners as inadequately addressing the need for local variation in institutional contexts. The objective of this paper is to adopt a bottom-up perspective to address the need for cross-sectorality in food security policies. Sustainable Rural Livelihood (SRL) and Grassroots Innovation (GI) are two well recognized schools of thought which emphasize the cross-sectoral approaches to livelihood and local level problem-solving. By embracing a frugality lens, we can offer a conceptual regularity in the patterns of behaviour and decision-making highlighted by the SRL and GI schools of thought. Taking a step further, the frugality lens, by focusing on the usefulness of a decision in the actual environment, emphasizes the need to diagnose local institutions better. Note, however, that the contention of the current paper is not to posit ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ as two competing paradigms. It only argues that a frugality lens helps us to better appreciate the strengths of a bottom-up approach for effective policy formulation, an appreciation of which would promote a dignified marriage between the two perspectives.

Keywords:

• Frugality
• Sustainable rural livelihood
• Grassroots innovation
• Food security policy

1 Introduction

Ensuring food security for the ever-growing global population remains a major concern for policy makers across the board. Indeed, agriculture has seen a major transformation in the last few decades, purportedly to address this concern. For Adam Smith (1776), what distinguished agriculture from industry was the absence of a division of labour in agriculture. Industrial labourers, in his view, became stupid, undertaking only a few simple operations throughout their lives, as specialization grew and the prime responsibility for technological change shifted from labourers to scientists and philosophers. Farmers, on the other hand, remained wise in the absence of a division of labour, and continued to undertake many integrated activities. In the last 50 years, however, we have witnessed a rapid change in this pattern, with increasing emphasis on the industrialization of agriculture and the creation of “agricultural scientists” (Raina, 1997).

Popularly, such processes became known as the Green Revolution. Farmers in this set-up often became passive recipients of technology, knowledge and decisions from the top, much akin to the condition of industrial labour as visualized by Smith. Such a ‘top-down’ model, analogous to automation in industrial units, was believed to bring about rapid productivity gains in agriculture, thus solving food crises for the ever-growing population on this planet. To what extent it has achieved this objective remains debatable.

While praise for the Green Revolution − the one-size-fits-all form of industrialized agriculture − has never been in short supply, scientists and ecological activists have in growing numbers started questioning its implications for growth, equity and as a sustainable solution to food crises. Manning (2016) points out that the Green Revolution has increased the level of energy use for food supply by ten. The satiation in sources of fossil fuel makes this process difficult to sustain in the longer run. In addition, its success seems to depend a lot on the predictability of weather conditions (e.g. rainfall patterns). The variabilities in this introduced by climate disturbances in recent years have, therefore, added further doubts to its future success. Small farmers have been the worst hit. Their inadequate knowledge of new technology-crop combinations have led to the overuse of fertiliser and ground water, resulting in increased incidents of pest resistance and salinity. At a deeper level, adoption of Green Revolution technologies has meant, for farmers, discarding age-old experiential knowledge (e.g. discontinuing crop variety in favour of monoculture).

In short, the one-size–fits-all approach to agriculture has turned farmers into quasi labourers who fail to incorporate their knowledge and expertise in production and feel compelled to be driven by the logic of technology decided elsewhere. Such a techno-institutional regime, seeking to view the complex diversity of institutional-ecological settings across the globe through the lens of homogenization, seems to have undermined agricultural productivity in the long run, especially in dryland areas.¹ A recent report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) (Krätli, 2015) criticizes the inadequate knowledge among policy makers about the variability of dryland ecological settings, with allegedly disastrous impact. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2012), most African countries will be suffering from significant food insecurities by 2050. Even today, most of Africa is characterized by low per capita food consumption, a high prevalence of undernourishment, high population growth, and a predominantly semi-arid agriculture (FAO, 2012). The call for a better diagnosis of the institutional character of these areas is therefore warranted and opportune (Frankema, 2014; Booth et al., 2015).

The problem of poor diagnosis of local institutions, however, may not be confined to policies on food security, or even policies related to dryland agriculture. Rodrik (2010) and his colleagues (Hausmann et al., 2008) argue that the rigidly sectoral, one-size-fits-all approach has been a dominant feature of development policies across the globe in the post-WW2 era. In this approach, less attention is paid to local context specificities, to the characteristics and interdependence of local institutions, to the bio-physical conditions, and to socio-technical practices (Schouten et al., in this issue).² The scholarship on institutional diagnosis bears a certain similarity to the discourses on frugality. For instance, both discourses highlight ‘what works’ and ‘what does not work’ in actual environments as well as the importance of experimentation, learning and incremental change as an integral part of decision-making processes (Smith, 1776; Gigerenzer, 2008). Clearly, experience in specific contexts holds the clue to success in both approaches. This paper explores how a frugality lens can offer a more grounded conceptual device for local institutional diagnosis.

In section 2, we briefly discuss some of the existing studies on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. Section 3 elaborates on the frugality lens, drawing upon arguments and findings from cross-disciplinary studies. Section 4 reviews the two dominant alternatives in policy thinking on agricultural development, namely the Sustainable Rural Livelihood approach and the emerging discourse on Grassroots Innovations, to show how these approaches embody, albeit implicitly and to a varying degree, the characteristics of frugality. Section 5 provides the data and describes their collection method. Section 6 subsequently articulates how an explicit recognition of the importance of frugality can provide the necessary ingredients for an alternative policy roadmap. Section 7 makes concluding observations.

2 Food security scenario in Africa

In the words of FAO,³ “a person must live in conditions that allow him or her either to produce food or to buy it. To produce his or her own food, a person needs land, seeds, water and other resources, and to buy it, one needs money and access to the market. The right to food requires States to provide an enabling environment in which people can use their full potential to produce or procure adequate food for themselves and their families” (p. 8). Lipton (2010: 1402), notes in this context that the proportion of small farm holdings in low income countries has been rising. Also, in several developing countries, farmland shifted toward the lowest size categories between 1986 and 2002 (p. 1402). According to Hazell et al. (2001) more than two-thirds of the world’s three billion rural people live on a farm less than two hectares in size, “These people include half of the world’s undernourished people, three-quarters of Africa’s malnourished children, and the majority of people living in absolute poverty” (p. 1349). Jayne et al. (2010), based on a survey of five African countries, suggest that many small farm households “are approaching landlessness”, with at least 25% of small-scale farm households controlling less than 0.11 ha per capita (p. 1386). Clearly such small farm holdings or landlessness also have consequences for food security, particularly when access is a problem. The majority of these households are in dryland areas. Dryland areas constitute around 43% of African land, and are the habitat of around 41% of Africa’s population. In fact, households in dryland areas remain most vulnerable in terms of poverty, with many subsisting on less than US $1 per day (White et al., 2002). Moreover, the threats from climate change and rising world food prices in the late 2000 s may have further enhanced the vulnerability of food insecurity in smallholder contexts.

Indeed, for the Kenyan economy at least, ensuring food security remains one of the unmet policy goals (MTIP,⁴ 2013–2017; ASDS,⁵ 2010–2020), and an important part of Kenya Vision 2030. Almost 68% of Kenyan land is arid, 21% semi-arid and only 11% is in an area of high rainfall. De Jode (2015) unequivocally establishes that technologies and policies need to take into consideration such diversity in bio-physical characteristics in order to be successful. Kenya experienced a decrease in the proportion of undernourishment in relation to the total population from 32.4% in 1990–92 to 21.2% in 2014–16 (FAO, 2015 and MTIP, 2013–2017). However, the decrease in the level of undernourishment was achieved at such a slow rate that Kenya could not meet the Millennium Development target of reducing by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger,⁶ or reducing this proportion to below 5% of the total population (FAO, 2015: 15).

2.1 Cross-sectorality and food security

The word ‘sector’ often assumes multiple meanings. In the current paper, we use the term to imply a specific sphere of activity. With cross-sectorality we refer to the intricate and inextricable inter-linkages between activities undertaken by famers, for example, that have been de-linked and separated by professional and academic sub-fields. For example, in both the academic discourse and the aid industry we often discuss energy, water, finances and food production as separate sectors of activity, with only a cursory reference to their inter-linkages. However, in the social and economic reality of farmers, these activities are not separate but intricately connected. Cross-sectorality in this paper therefore refers to the connected and related sets of activities useful to achieving food security; this includes farming practices as well as attempts to finance (changes in) these practices, and, for example, attempts to ensure access to water and energy. Clearly, an emphasis on cross-sectorality would necessitate an understanding of the local context: its bio-physical environment and social-cultural values, norms and practices.

If cross-sectorality and diagnosis of local institutions hold importance for a successful technological-policy linkage for food security, we intend to explore how the lens of frugality can help us gain new insights in this regard. In particular, we seek to examine how the discourse on frugality can legitimize a cross-sectoral, context-specific policy approach to food security which is sensitive to context-specific variations in institutions.

3 Frugality: the conceptual underpinning⁷

Despite the recent euphoria around ‘frugal innovation’, the terms frugal or frugality have remained inadequately analysed. We make an attempt to find an operational definition of the term frugality by reviewing the various branches of social science literature and studies on decision theory.

Literally, frugal means sparing, “economical”, “simple”, “plain” or “costing little” (Oxford Dictionary, 2017). However, the term has also been used to reflect a wide range of behavioural characteristics and search (or decision-making) processes in the various branches of social sciences. Our objective here is to outline the basic characteristics of the term before analysing how it can influence cross-sectoral thinking in agriculture.

Lastovicka et al. (1999), in ‘Lifestyle of the Tight and Frugal: Theory and Measurement’, find its usage in religion, psychology, behavioural sciences and economics. In religious doctrines, frugality refers to promoting asceticism or restraint from materialist desires. However, frugality is not to be taken to imply deprivation, but rather as “sacrificing a series of whims for the sake of obtaining a more worthy goal” (Lastovicka et al., 1999: 86, emphases added), such as seeking satisfaction in achieving spiritual growth (Lastovicka et al., 1999: 86), by sacrificing, for instance, material satisfaction.

In psychology, frugality includes being clever, heretic and resourceful in the use and reuse of products and services. De Young (1986: 285) defines frugality as the “careful use of resources and avoidance of waste” From the behavioural science perspective, Lastovicka et al. define frugality as the “degree to which consumers are both restrained in acquiring and in resourcefully using economic goods and services to achieve longer-term goals” (1999: 88). Being heretic, for them, is a sign of frugality too. A heretic individual, according to them, does not suffer from interpersonal influence and feels confident to “go without the most popular, or most accepted”.⁸ Presumably, to such a person, context and need are more important than what is popularly accepted.

Smith (1776) can be taken as an early user of the terms ‘frugal’ and ‘frugality’ in economics. In ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, he uses ‘frugal’ or ‘frugality’ 38 times in a variety of contexts. Along with the more conventional usage such as “‘usefulness’ of ‘thriftiness’ in contributing to “public opulence” (Smith, 1776: 5, 12), these terms find favour in pointing out the effectiveness of ‘sobriety’ in the conduct of a borrower who borrows money for productive purposes (Smith, 1776: 172). ‘Attention to minute detail’ about a phenomenon, and reliance on social relations in making judicious use of resources have also been interpreted to imply frugality. In an activity much closer to knowledge generating activities, frugality is observed by Smith as demonstrating the value of ‘experience’ in offering innovative solutions to frequently encountered problems in daily lives (Smith, 1776: 93).

One may wonder what kind of individual and resource predisposition augments frugality. Smith contrasts the frugal with the rich and prodigal to elaborate on this point. Although he did not rule out the possibility of both the rich and poor being ‘frugal’/or demonstrating frugality in their behavioural approach, he perhaps acknowledged that such a trait comes more naturally to the poor − who want to become rich − than to somebody who is already rich (Smith, 1776 53.). Drawing upon this discussion, one may argue that sources of frugality may be found more commonly in the activities of small farmers than in those of their larger counterparts.

The role of resource constraint in the context of frugality has been explicitly taken up in the scholarship on decision theory (Gigerenzer et al., 1999; Gigerenzer, 2008) According to this school of thought, frugality is embodied in a search process under conditions of resource (here, information) constraint. It impinges on ‘need satisfaction’ (satisfying as opposed to maximizing) and the ‘simple search rule’ (as opposed to constraint optimization) in situations of uncertainty. This way, frugality does not only (or even mainly) underscore what is achieved, but also (perhaps more importantly) how it is achieved.

This framework highlights three characteristics of a frugal way of decision-making:

a)	a search process using simple hierarchical steps and intuitive reasoning rather than fixed rules such as optimization;

b)	efforts to adapt to the environmental challenges through demonstrated capacity for learning and imitation;

c)	an emphasis on actual performance, practicability and effectiveness rather than on logical/scientific validation.

Gigerenzer (2008) asserts that decisions arrived at by using such rules are seldom inferior to decisions reached using logical theories, ‘expert knowledge’, and optimality-based processes. The implicit similarity with Smith cannot be ignored: Smith referred to the superiority of actions and decisions obtained by frugal means, attentive to minute contextual details using one’s skills of observations and experience. In addition, frugality demands adaptation to environmental challenges through learning and imitation, and focuses on actual performance. This is indeed what Smith had noted when mentioning the superiority of Columella’s experience and field-knowledge, which enabled him to suggest a novel solution to the problems of hedging kitchen gardens in ancient Rome.⁹

The discourse on frugality, in this respect, makes a connection with the discourses in the field of the public understanding of science. Scholars in this field also often criticize the conventional practice of giving ‘scientific/logical validation’ higher recognition over the practicability of a physical reality. These scholars discuss the significance of lay knowledge vis-a-vis ‘expert knowledge’. In an overwhelmingly large number of cases, experts’ accounts of physical reality have found to be in conflict with lay people's knowledge. Rather than the lay knowledge of local people being inferior and defective, it has commonly been seen to be more sensitive to local ‘realities’. Irwin and Wynne (2003), contesting the claim of modern laboratory science as ‘universal’, conclude that laboratory knowledge is a special case of local knowledge operating within its own set of norms. They argue that such knowledge often remains inapplicable outside the boundaries of laboratories. Explaining real life phenomena or solving real problems in their actual environment requires a combination of knowledge forms. A better recognition of frugality, in our view, would help us appreciate the value of the experience-based knowledge of so-called lay persons. Doing so would enable us to a find/suggest a more appropriate, less hierarchical mechanism of exchange of knowledge between so-called experts and lay people in solving practical solutions.

Indeed, such an interaction between practical, prescriptive experiential knowledge with more academic, propositional knowledge apparently played an important role during the first Industrial Revolution. Joel Mokyr, in ‘The Gifts of Athena’ (2005), recounts how highly educated scientists as well as illiterate lay persons played an equally important role in making the Industrial Revolution possible in Britain, and, as an example of how both forms of knowledge can be equally important, he cites the case of the Wright brothers flying an airplane long before physicists had invented the principle of wings. According to this strand of research, Britain became the site of a successful industrial revolution not because of its capacity to produce new inventions, many of which arguably came from France, but due to its capacity to blend various different kinds of knowledge for practical application.

To synthesize the discussion above, we could argue that frugality refers to both a behavioural trait as well as a specific kind of heuristic-based decision-making process, drawing upon knowledge about the environment gained through experience, intuition and learning. As a behavioural trait, it values ‘long term goals’, ‘experience about a context’, or a ‘capacity to observe in detail the minutest of problems’. As a decision-making process, it emphasizes flexible learning heuristics rather than rigid rules, in order to better adapt to uncertainties. A frugal process economizes on resources and bases its prescriptions on a deep understanding of knowledge and relations situated in a local context. Prior experience and judgement hold the key to success in such processes. Advocating the superiority of decision-making in an actual environment rather than in confounded/controlled set-ups, frugality can be assumed to appreciate the complexities of the real environment better, in order to endogenize it in the decision-making process.

Although both aspects of frugality, i.e. as a behavioural trait and a decision-making process, can be important in the debates on food security interventions,¹⁰ in the current paper we emphasise frugality as a decision-making process.¹¹ For us, therefore, frugality refers to a decision-making process based on flexible learning heuristics, and deep knowledge about the local institutions and resource constraints, gained through practical experience. We argue that such a decision-making process is often more efficient than decisions based on an information intensive optimization process, and leads to outcome that are more sustainable.¹² In this way, frugality can be assumed to be an institutionally embedded practice to solve actual problems in the environment. It can be assumed to be more sensitive to cross-sectoral linkages in the problem situation. As a result, frugality can have both a symbiotic and antagonistic relationship with policies and technologies. A technological or policy regime that operates along rigidly defined rules, seeking to validate the predictions of a controlled experiment while being insensitive to local skills and context variations would, in our view, crowd out frugality. On the other hand, a technology/policy regime providing opportunities for adaptation and experimentation based on context-specific knowledge would encourage frugality.

In the context of agriculture and rural development, the two strands of scholarship that have embraced frugality, though only implicitly, are the Sustainable Rural Livelihood approach (SRL) and the scholarship on Grassroots Innovations (GI). Both these approaches have pointed out the need to apply a cross-sectoral approach to the problems of food production, with a major role for context-specific, local, experience-based decision-making. Both approaches distance themselves from a rigidly defined input-output framework as propagated by the Green Revolution model. While both the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and the Grassroots Innovation literature offer compelling examples of the need to consider local heterogeneity and of the richness in local innovative responses, neither approach offers a strong theoretical basis, and can be benefitted by linking more explicitly to the framework of frugality.

By relying on SRL and GI as guiding structures for cross-sectoral frugal thinking, we aim to address two key points − 1) The frugal thinking process employed by grassroots level individuals; 2) The cross-sectorality embedded in the frugal thinking process. These two keys points pave the way for incorporating micro level, bottom-up processes into macro level policy making for food security.

4 Sustainable rural livelihood (SRL), grassroots innovation (GI)

Explicitly embracing frugality helps us to see the link between Sustainable Rural Livelihood (SRL) and Grassroots Innovation (GI). SRL and GI analyse the life of the farmer from two different perspectives. SRL studies how the farmer earns his/her livelihood and GI studies the degree of novel change introduced into that livelihood by a farmer him/herself. In both cases, cross-sectorality is embedded in the farmer’s decision-making process. Both SRL and GI study what resources are used by the farmer, how a set of resources are combined, and what the objective of combining the resources is. In both the cases, scholars have identified the need to answer questions such as − why do farmers combine their resources in a particular context and not in another? An understanding of the ‘why’ will help us to shed light on the local institutional set-up that shapes the behavioural traits or the frugality of an individual. In the following paragraphs, we briefly explain the SRL and GI approaches, the questions they have answered and the remaining research gaps, and how, by adopting a frugality approach, we can address these gaps and help to embrace cross-sectorality for food policy.

4.1 Sustainable rural livelihood

SRL studies the livelihood of the farmer − how does the farmer earn his/her livelihood on a daily basis, how does he/she move from one way of earning the livelihood to another? In other words, SRL studies the livelihood as a routine by attempting to understand the complex rural development problems from the local perspective (Gilling et al., 2001; Scoones, 2009). A leading scholar on SRL, Scoones (2009) explains the livelihood perspective as a means of understanding how different people live in different places. Sustainable livelihood was formally defined by Chamber and Conway in 1992 and their definition is still widely used for studying SRL. In their words: “A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base.” Chamber and Conway’s definition of SRL stresses two aspects of a rural life: ‘earning a livelihood’ and ‘making the earning sustainable’.

Scoones (1998) helps us understand the key components of the SRL framework by highlighting the role played by the context, the combination of different livelihood resources (i.e. the assets or different types of capital − natural capital, economic capital, financial capital, human capital and social capital), the combination of livelihood strategies (a rural person usually makes a living by combining many activities), the outcomes, and the institutional process in which the individual is embedded.

The arguments presented by the main SRL scholars can be summarized here in the following manner: SRL studies the means via which the farmer earns his/her living in his/her local context. These means are livelihood resources and livelihood strategies. The local context works here as the ‘institutional complex’ in which the actions play out. In other words, SRL sheds light on the actor (farmer), action (livelihood resources, livelihood strategies) and the context (institutional complex) in which the actor is embedded. At a micro level, the actions of the farmer or the livelihood resources and livelihood strategies span across different sectors, and one of the key objectives of the SRL approach is to provide insight into the cross-sectoral activities undertaken in a rural set-up to earn a livelihood (Chambers, 1995; Scoones, 1998; Scoones, 2009).

In the recent past, authors have combined the SRL perspective with the cross-sectoral approach to design and implement interventions which place the people (i.e. the grassroots level individual) at the centre of the intervention (Gilling et al., 2001). Gilling et al. (2001), argue that livelihood literature ensures the participatory, cross-sectoral, dynamic and sustainable approach while designing a cross-sectoral policy.¹³

4.2 Grassroots innovations

However, as Carr (2013) points out, the SRL framework does not provide much insight into the inter-linkages of the rural livelihood system with the macro political framework, including, for instance, the issue of climate change. The emerging scholarship on Grassroots Innovation, although as yet devoid of much theoretical underpinning, throws some light onto this aspect by documenting how farmers and rural communities undertake innovative interventions to deal with problems in the locality, many of which may have been the outcomes of larger macro level policies, and manifestations of climate change.¹⁴ The growing scholarship provides numerous examples of rural people using their agency to solve local problems. However, these individuals are not insulated from learning from others. Indeed, the scholarship on GI has studied the role played by sympathetic outsiders and the importance of combining knowledge technologies and raw materials from different sources (Letty et al., 2012; Gupta, 2016).

In this context, GI scholarship may be seen as adding value to the scholarship on Sustainable Rural Livelihood by being more explicit about the role of learning and capability building, while also being in sync with the larger macropolitical environment. Through sympathetic outsiders, farmers also become familiarized with evolving institutional and regulatory frameworks such as the evolving nature of intellectual property rights, and with market opportunities.¹⁵ In various countries, Grassroots Innovation movements have developed to form a national level alliance of people and civil society groups to shape the discourse on technology and development. However, these are rooted in their local context too. Bhaduri and Kumar (2011), analysing the National Innovation Foundation (NIF) database on India, find a majority of these innovations to be guided by motives to solve local problems. Curiosity, zeal to solve a problem and an obligation to the social commons appear to be in great supply among these innovators. Letty et al. (2012) report similar outcomes from Africa and Latin America (see also Muchie et al., 2015).

A common characteristic of these innovations, and where they find connections with the studies on SRL, is their cross-sectorality, often involving both the material and the social space. In its broadest dimension, cross-sectorality would mean that the issue of food security does not only depend, for instance, on the availability of seeds, fertilisers or irrigation, but also on the status of women and on other social and institutional relations which might have an impact on the way people manage and govern their practices in relation to water. However, these studies too are yet to develop an underlying conceptual-theoretical pattern behind such local, context-specific, intuitive, reasoning-based practices based on experiential knowledge, and require detailed observation of the surroundings to adapt to the changes in the immediate environment. This is where a frugality lens might complement.

As discussed in the previous section, frugality refers to a specific kind of heuristic-based, decision-making process, drawing upon knowledge about the environment gained through experience, intuition and learning. Such a decision can be more efficient a ‘one-size-fits-all’ decision in a resource constrained setting. By understanding the frugal decision-making process in a given context, it is possible to understand why an individual acts the way he/she does. This way, it is possible to shed light on the nature of the local institutions which partially shape the act of thinking, learning and innovating.

We now explore how a frugality lens can provide an pathway to the thoughts expressed in the scholarship on SRL and GI to contribute to a cross-sectoral policy approach. We do this with illustrations from a few case studies of Kenyan farming communities.

5 Data and method

Prior to starting the fieldwork, an extensive discussion was carried out with agricultural extension workers from the Embu area and with Miss Caroline Oywer of Jomo Kenyatta University, who had done prior work in Embu. Two scientists from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization at the Nairobi Show in September 2016 also gave useful insights into the nature and pattern of agricultural policy and technological interventions for the arid regions of Kenya. The objective of these discussions was to prepare a questionnaire and plan the fieldwork. The fieldwork comprised of interviews with two women’s farming groups in Embu between 2 and 5 November 2016 and discussions with extension workers. The farming groups belong to two different tribes, Kikuyu and Kamba.

The area of Embu belongs to the semi-arid part of Kenya. The interviews comprised of open-ended questions. The group interviews lasted between one to two hours. The individual interviews took around 45 min. Apart from the interviews, the data collection also involved participant observation. Besides the fieldwork, the research team also met Mr. Robert Musyoki, sales & marketing manager of Simlaw Seeds Co.Ltd (three times), Miss Monicah Njeri, a freelance agricultural consultant (once) and attended a conference on seeds (Seed Trade Association of Kenya 2016 Congress & Expo) to gather more information.

6 SRL, GI and frugality: some illustrative cases from Kenya

Seed security is often seen as a basic requirement to ensure food security (Cohen and Ramanna, 2014). We take one such seed intervention case to illustrate our point. In eastern Kenya, seed interventions were introduced based on two scenarios: regular and emergency. Regular intervention, which has taken place since the late 1990s, is comprised of producer marketing groups, small seeds packs and community-based seed production programmes (CBSPP). The objective of CBSPP is to develop commercial seeds with the help of farmers (Muhammad et al., 2003). In most cases, CBSPP was able to facilitate temporary access to good quality seeds. However, the programme quite often failed as it was unable to create a local demand for high quality seeds, had poor buy-back arrangements and provided inadequate information about the seeds sold by the groups (Muhammad et al., 2003).

The design of CBSPP sheds light on the way the government sought to encourage interaction between the formal knowledge of laboratories and the informal, experiential knowledge of the farmers. By formulating CBSPP, an intervention (or supporting a programme) that redistributes non-certified seeds and allows farmers to mix the different kinds of seeds in their farming, the government seemed to be encouraging farmers’ practice of generating new seeds, and can, therefore, be construed as encouraging frugality and, perhaps, cross-sectorality in the policy process.^16,17

However, a deeper scrutiny reveals otherwise. It is well established that access to seeds often depends on access to finance. In that respect the policy seems to appreciate cross-sectorality through the provision of a buy-back agreement, where the farmers give back two times the weight of seeds received by them in the previous year to the organization. Such a provision of (future) bartering seeds ameliorates the requirement of the market transaction of seeds and the need for credit markets. However, this top-down approach is at odds with the requirement of frugality. Our interactions with the farmers revealed that the programme did not leave much scope for farmers’ participation in a decision-making capacity. In other words, the seeds come with a set of instructions about the way they should be used, based on the laboratory knowledge about their best possible application.¹⁸ The input ingredient used by every farmer varies based on the agro-ecological context in which he/she is living. Hence, by ensuring that every farmer follows the same set of instructions, the intervention restricted the development of the diverse traditional agricultural practices and the farmers’ problem-solving attitude (De Jode, 2015). This, in our view, has long term adverse consequences for frugality. Due to non-use, farmers’ knowledge might disappear, over time shrinking the space for local innovative activities. Thus policies relying on ‘official fiat’ may crowd out local adaptive capacity and the advantage of building on local understanding of the institutional and bio-physical context, as well as local experiential knowledge.

The inadequate overlap between the knowledge that informs policies and the local contexts becomes more apparent when one investigates, for example, the link between the CBSPP programme and irrigation requirements. The majority of agriculture in Kenya depends on rainfall. Hence, a monsoon failure could have a devastating impact on the harvest. To illustrate, the Kamba group of farmers used to participate in the CBSPP seed bulking programme but they discontinued this following a drought when they lost all their harvest and nothing was left for the buy-back programme. Ironically, the Kamba tribe is not located very far from a river but is not able to use the river water for irrigation, arguably due to local politics. This illustrates the inadequate level of institutional diagnosis of the local area in designing the programme, where local (political) practices and social relations were perhaps not factored in when supplying seeds which would require a timely supply of water for survival. Furthermore, cross-sectorality becomes even more central to the discussion when road and transportation conditions are brought into the equation. These conditions are important for the timely marketing of perishable agricultural commodities, particularly in the face of inadequate storage facilities. Ironically, our interactions with the farmers did not provide much assurance that the cruciality of such conditions was appreciated in the programme. However, our conversations revealed that these elements featured quite importantly in the farmers’ decision-making process. The need for a proper diagnosis of local social relations becomes more heightened when we analyse the gender dimensions of decision-making processes and the division of labour. Quite often, government policies place women and children in the same category. The policy overlooks the cultural nuances that may vary for females across the different Kenyan tribes.

During our interactions with the extension workers, our participant observations revealed a regional diversity in the way women engaged with extension work. We found women in Kikuyu to be more outspoken and inquisitive than the women farmers in Kamba. While we observed the latter group to be mostly obedient receivers of the information passed on to them, the former group challenged the extension workers when they were not satisfied with their proposals. The SRL approach clearly highlights the importance of considering the extent of freedom available to a woman at the level of a household and the tribe. The power relations inside the tribe and the household are a part of the local constitution of social roles (Carr, 2014) which are embedded in the decision-making process of the female farmers.

We thus found Kikuyu women to enjoy more authority in the decision-making process compared to the Kamba women. The Kikuyu women’s group explained to us that they need to get permission from their husbands only when they contact someone new for farming. The Kamba women’s group, on the other hand, remained dependent on their families for almost every decision pertaining to farming. This difference in their decision-making power was reflected in the way the Kikuyu women collectively found a local solution to their water problems. The farmland of the Kikuyu women’s farming group is in an area that crucially depends on rain water for irrigation. However, 20 years ago the Kikuyu women decided to dig a big well and started water harvesting. As a result, they are no longer dependent on rain water for irrigation. Also, during our conversation with them, the Kikuyu group identified four innovative farming practices carried out by three farmers in their locality − digging a well to harvest rain water, planting maize in polythene bags, preparing insecticide, and soil conservation. In comparison, the Kamba group could only identify two innovative activities taken up by two of their members: one of them owned a bullock, and one member finished land preparation before other group members.¹⁹ Without knowing the distribution of wealth and income within the group, it remains difficult to judge whether such acts were reflective of innovative conduct or merely reveal better access to capital or human resources on the part of those farmers. In addition, the example clearly shows that, unlike the Kikuyu women, it was difficult for the Kamba women to self-organize to solve local problems, which might reflect their lack of independence from the men in their families in taking decisions.

However, in each case we find that the solutions were sought through one or more of the following steps − personal experience, discussions with husband, relying on trial and error, or by imitating a solution observed in a familiar location. In our view, such an approach incorporates frugality i.e. learning from personal experience embedded in the local agro-ecological context, experimentation, intuitive reasoning, as well as mixing information from other local sources they had access to. In other words, problem identification and solution finding was carried out with the help of local knowledge about the environment and learning capacity.

7 Frugality, cross-sectorality and food security policy: a discussion

Looking through the lens of frugality, this paper aimed to propose an alternative theoretical construct to top-down sectoral agricultural policymaking. We intended to show that a frugality lens can help develop an overarching pattern in the activities highlighted, as described by two streams of scholarship: Sustainable Rural Livelihood and Grassroots Innovations. While these streams are able to illustrate rich details of individual livelihood and innovative behaviour, they nevertheless remain largely descriptive. A frugality lens helps provide a conceptual umbrella to the variety of decision-making procedures and behavioural patterns highlighted by these two schools of thought. It is a central claim of the paper that a techno-institutional approach encouraging local knowledge and local behavioural traits of experimentation alongside heuristic-based learning is essential for successful food security interventions in the presence of diverse bio-physical conditions and socio-technical practices across regions. At their core, such interventions would, in turn, encourage cross-sectorality and would draw upon a richer diagnosis of the local bio-physical environment and socio-technical practices, since these elements form the basis of a farmer’s (a key actor in such a process) experiential knowledge, learning environment and, hence, innovative behaviour.

Our illustrative cases show how local level grassroots efforts to solve agricultural problems essentially take a cross-sectoral view by combining the issues of food, seed, access to water, cultivation methods, and local infrastructure, as well, of course, as being sensitive to local social relations. Drawing upon the three characteristics of frugality mentioned in Section 3, we can argue that the search process behind local innovations would follow sequential steps, where availability and knowledge of local raw materials would shape the search process, rather than any optimization-based practice. Much of the local knowledge upon which these innovative behaviours are based is un-codified and experiential in nature, resembling largely intuitive reasoning. Finally, the validation of these innovations depends predominantly, if not solely, on their performance in the actual environment.

We find, on the other hand, the inefficacy of a centrally designed seed programme to respond to uncertainties in, for instance, water supply. The failure of this programme to address such uncertainties, despite the widely held knowledge that farming in semi-arid and arid regions is susceptible to uncertainties in rainfall, highlights its reluctance to factor in bio-physical diversities and local social relations. This centralized intervention programme left very little room for farmers to implement their local knowledge and was designed based on a poor diagnosis of local socio-political practices and could not foresee the difficulties in irrigation from a nearby river. The success of the seeds depended largely on the timely allocation of water, which a poor understanding of local institutions failed to incorporate. Such an eventuality hints at a possible crowding out effect of a centralized, top-down agricultural techno-institutional approach on the use and application of local knowledge and farmers’ agency. Raina (1997) argues that in India, the Green Revolution, over time, has marginalized farmers’ knowledge in favour of ‘laboratory knowledge’. In the process, scientists have become more accountable to the patronage they began receiving from the State and the political establishment, at the expense of the un-codified, local knowledge of farmers. Apparently, this process of the commercialization of agriculture in developing countries marks a contrast with the way commercialization of agriculture had unfolded in the UK, where large farmers’ organizations negotiated hard with other knowledge holders in developing new technologies in the fields of agriculture (Raina, 1997). Although many developing countries have adopted the concept of rural extension centres in their agricultural policies, various country studies argue that such centres have remained ineffective in promoting the desired two-way knowledge communication, and have merely remained the mouthpiece of official knowledge and a medium to transfer new knowledge from ‘lab-to-land’ (Raina, 2003; Urama et al., 2010).

A reversal of this trend might be needed in order to enable a better appreciation of the plurality of knowledge and would help to identify which institutional set-ups can strengthen localized and context-specific ways to enhance food security. Such a reversal is, however, not easy, given its requirement to drastically alter the infrastructure and organization of research and development, and science communication to a more decentralized approach with an added emphasis on the plurality of knowledge. However, as has been argued, the success of the first Industrial Revolution depended a lot on the successful blending of various kinds of knowledge alongside a better appreciation of people’s experiential knowledge and creative aspirations. An appreciation of frugality may be crucial in bringing such a techno-institutional approach back onto the agenda of cross-sectoral agricultural policymaking.

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to two anonymous reviewers of the journal for their critical constructive comments. Reviews by Jeroen Candel and Greetje Schouten, and comments from other participants at the Writeshop, especially Saskia Vossenberg, importantly shaped the present version. We would like to thank Robert Musyoki (Simlaw seeds), Caroline Oywer (Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture &Technology), Monicah Njeri (agricultural consultant) and two scientists from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research organization for their time and invaluable support during the fieldwork.

Notes

1 However, the trend in the industrialization of agriculture continues unabated with the new genetic revolution and the development of terminator seeds. These interventions have further marginalized the scope for using the experiential knowledge of farmers in general and small farmers in particular, especially in dryland areas.

2 Rodrik (2010) also argues that in their proclivity to identify the ‘universal remedy’ or ‘the best practice’, the implementing authorities of this approach has even undermined the necessity to assess the validity of assumptions behind these ‘best practice’ in specific socio-economic settings where these approaches have been sought to be implemented.

3 http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FactSheet34en.pdf.

4 Government of Kenya (2013).

5 Government of Kenya (2010).

6 http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_goals.asp. Aaccessed on 28th November 2016

7 Discussions in this section are largely based on Bhaduri (2016).

8 One might find a connection here with the discourses on positive deviance behaviour in theories on social change.

9 For details, see Smith (1776: 93).

10 Indeed, as argued above, the discourse on positive deviant behaviour is gaining momentum in such developmental debates.

11 The data needed to examine frugality as a behavioural trait would have to be very different, with an emphasis on individual level factors which were beyond the scope of our field research.

12 For information on the intensive nature of an optimization process, see, for instance, Gigerenzer and Kurzenhaeuser (2005: 3–6).

13 A criticism has, however, been that the SRL literature gravitated towards the economic attributes of livelihood (Scoones, 2009) such as the material condition of the household (De Haan and Zoomers, 2005). This pattern of thinking, many argue, has overshadowed the role played by institutions. In other words, SRL research usually starts with a set of livelihood outcomes and undermines the basic question − how do people live in that local set-up? See, for instance, Carr (2013) for details.

14 The innovation of edible cutlery is a case in point: it seeks to reduce the burden of plastic waste on the one hand and ground water scarcity on the other hand by replacing cultivation of rice by sorghum. For details see, for instance, http://https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/apr/13/edible-cutlery-company-eat-plastic-pollution-oceans. Accessed on 15 December 2016.

15 India’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF) has been actively documenting such knowledge and promoting its scaling up, appropriation and commercialization.

16 The intervention adapts to the local seed market in two ways. Firstly, by redistributing the seeds. Secondly, the intervention builds on the assumption that after giving ‘2 x’ kg of seed back to the organization, the farmer will keep a certain amount of seed for him/herself and will sell the remaining seeds to other farmers either personally or via the local market. In the local market, the buyer of the seed could be a farmer, a wholesaler or a trader.

17 This is an important step because the informal economy is the backbone of Kenyan agriculture, it supplies almost 90% of seeds to the farmer (Muhammand et al., 2003; McGuire and Sperling 2016). The informal economy (the local market) in most cases remains active even during droughts.

18 The set of instructions are prepared when the seeds are under the supervision of the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute and the Kenya Plant Health Directorate Service. A few farmers may participate in the preparation of these instructions. However, claiming that these farmers are representative of the entire farming community in the region is surely not what such a response would mean.

19 Details are available in Appendix A.

Appendix A

Description of farmers’ behaviour observed in the field

Table

Farming activities	Ploughing	Planting–Harvesting	Taking the produce to the market	Setting the price and selling the produce	Permission required to participate in seed bulking	Constraints faced	Innovative practices
Tribe
Kambas (One group: 15 women)	Man’s job/Labourer is hired	• Done by women • Women cannot take any decision without the approval of the man • Man, decides the amount of produce that will be taken to the market		Done by women, approval is not required.	Yes	• Lack of capital • Dependence on rain fed agriculture • No access to water because of local politics	The farmer with ox plough is considered to be the most innovative and follow innovative practices
Kikuyu (One group: 7 women)	Women usually take care of ploughing	• Done by women • Decisions are usually taken without the man’s permission	• Women take the produce to the market • Men decide the amount of produce that will be taken to the market	Done by women, approval is not required.	Only if a new organization is involved.	• Lack of capital • Dependence on rain fed agriculture	• Dug a well 20 years ago to harvest rain water • Plant maize in polythene • bags • Soil conservation • Prepared insecticide