Suchergebnisse

Influence of an on-farm maize research project, over a four-year period, on the overall priorities and programmes of a maize research programme in Northern India. Role of the research decision maker. Importance of conceptualizing research as a dynamic and adaptive process. Relation between transfer of technology and learning and feed-back. (NL-409)

AbstractThis paper attempts to develop a framework to clarify some of the processes which take place in rural technological change. It moves beyond an acceptable description of dynamic interaction, towards a model based on states of dynamic disequilibrium, where analysis needs to focus on the forces which move the economy and give rise to changes in resource use and social welfare. An attempt has been made to model a part of what goes on inside the 'black box' of technical and institutional innovation: especially the way in which different private, government and non‐government organizations interact over time, and how their aims and objectives are reflected through the dynamics of the mechanization process. Some lessons for practitioners involved in technological change are proposed, which may act as guidelines for policy analysis and implementation.

Lewis et al (2003) establish a cogent argument which suggests that serious analysis of the culture of aid organizations, and of the relationships with other actors, matters, and that it is a neglected area of analysis. Their discussion raises important new questions about the development enterprise from an internal perspective that heretofore has been neglected or ignored. Contrasting the article by Lewis et al. with a book by Harrison and Huntington (2000) reinforces that conviction. Throughout the Harrison and Huntington book-- whose authors provide an excellent overview of the history of the study of culture as something that certainly does 'matter' in development--we kept saying to ourselves that 'All this is fine, but it is focussed (as is much of the ancillary literature on 'culture' in development) on looking outward, at others undergoing development, without consideration of the development agency actors themselves. It mostly addresses questions and issues concerning the question: Why some political and national systems succeed and others fail.