Yes, farmers are increasingly becoming knowledge and innovation workers, for their sustainability-oriented development. How agrarian communities in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam talk, think, and apply knowledge for their everyday life and production has been shaped by and has shaped their knowledge work interaction and partnership building with agriculture scholars, extension and business communities.
This research has illustrated and reaffirmed that development and knowledge principles proclaimed by the post-development theorists, the integration of the rural community as a pillar of the expanded triple helix and, the holistic theory of knowledge management, the orientation of the third generation of knowledge management, and epistemic culture as a culture of knowledge creation, diffusion, use and regeneration, which are well founded in contemporary global development and post-industrial societies, are compellingly informative on constructivist understanding of knowledge creation, diffusion, use and regeneration for agricultural and rural transformation in Vietnam. The approaches such as Beyond Farmer First (BFF), Farmer Participatory Research (FPR), transdisciplinary research, and Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) are significantly instructive and should be sufficiently promoted in knowledge for development practice.
Significantly, another epistemic culture of development has emphasised epistemic culture pluralism and epistemic culture convergence. The construction of such another epistemic culture might contribute to the definition of new dimensions of a knowledge civilisation in its formation through the destruction of the industrial episteme that is based on the reduction principle.
Founded on constructivist perspectives of systems thinking and symbolic interactionism and placed in a broad analysis of the delta’s river and water civilisation (van minh song nuoc), modern hydraulic society developments and recent natural and social change impacts, the present research has revealed the duality of knowledge diffusion for sustainable agriculture and rural development in the Mekong Delta. Despite the still prominent technocratic teaching-oriented paradigm in the knowledge landscape of the delta, as our findings have illuminated, a restructuration of knowledge generation and diffusion derives from grassroots, informal, bottom-up efforts and networks conditioned on interactive environment, new identity of actors, and hybridity of knowledge work organisations. Another epistemic culture of rural development characterised by knowledge inclusionality, co-creation and reflexivity is emerging.
Another epistemic culture of rural development in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta underlines multi-form interactions and endless transitions of interfaces among and across knowledge production and utilisation communities and networks considering their embedded epistemic cultures over cycles of knowledge processes. Knowledge growth, transformation and transmission for development are no longer the unconnected work of individuals or groups of professionals who provide “treatment” to “problems” they identify in rural communities. A new epistemic paradigm nourishes and encourages cooperative and participatory knowledge circulation throughout infinite knowledge production, use and reproduction
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spirals, and reciprocally among knowledge domains and worlds, while the subsystem’s practices, pursuit of other interests, and interactions with its own larger influencing environment are also taken into account.
Thus, only within a single knowledge transaction can a knowledge source and recipient be clearly distinguished, but they cannot in a knowledge system and process perspectives where knowledge role exchange takes place continuously as knowledge is constantly contextualised, used, and regenerated, in whatever scale of knowledge management and governance are used. As such, the fundamental of change stems from the promotion of learning organisation cultures in which learning within and between knowledge systems is maintained. To this extent, the question of who’s first, farmers or scholars and professionals, as asked in the beginning of the thesis, becomes less important, disregarding issues linked with knowledge legitimacy and ownership. Instead, mechanisms of interaction and cooperation maintenance of epistemic communities and networks might gain more attention for new knowledge practice engineering.
The emerging epistemic culture as argued and demonstrated in this thesis is based on examples and stories of various dispersed arrangements and structures at interactive levels of epistemic communities and networks, rather than on organisational or sectoral scales. In this research, the “becoming” of another epistemic culture of development has been interpreted throughout interactive knowledge work practices, including informal, non-institutionalised and even hidden forms of interaction, as the change energy. It now raises the question of “making” the alternative epistemic culture on a regional and/or national scale engaged with mainstream institutions and formal relations. Though “fences were broken locally, but dismantled centrally” (Rama 2008, 27), as learnt from the country’s history of transition into the economic reforms and development renovation since the late 1980s, innovation decision making in post-doi moi is indeed a difficult process of mediation and struggle between conservative-reformist thinking, old-young leaders and staff, and traditional-modern methods in finding a path that is not available elsewhere for a replication or is not easy to define from the beginning of the process but from continuous and joint learning in practice (cf. Duong Phu Hiep 2008) . Still, the traditional epistemology is largely in operation and use, if not prominent in the contemporary Vietnamese rural development context, and it is further supported by top-down planning and management mechanisms and expanded bureaucracy. Although it was implicitly admitted in this thesis that such a large and comprehensive development policy and program can hardly reach the grassroots and informal structures and practices, it is still crucially necessary that local initiatives are integrated and facilitated with enabling contexts into a long-term, strategic, and reflective planning by the state with a catalytic role in the current Vietnamese context.
Among others, I would argue that a mindset change about the role of agricultural and rural development is a fundamental determinant of the sector’s policy change. If not linked with and beneficial for local rural development, high-tech agricultural zone development projects would become closed fiefs of experts and
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technicians only. In the recently developed national tam nong (comprehensive agriculture, farmer, and rural development program), farmers are reaffirmed as the agents of agricultural and rural development processes, but how this concept is operationalised in community projects and everyday practices need much more joint effort of experts from related sectors in local knowledge mobilisation. The enculturation of the sector’s decision makers and planners to a mindset change that agricultural and rural development is a fundamental foundation and a harmonious link to the long-term sustainable development process rather than functioning as an input supply source of or big leap into industrialisation and urbanisation through promotion of the biggest possible extraction of rural resources and ignorance of the fatality of rural civilization is essential (cf. Pham Xuan Nam, Dang Viet Be, and Hainsworth 2000). The pure quantitative increase of more experts and high-tech devices and infrastructure with the absence of mindset- transformative epistemic practice cannot lead to the sustainable transition to a more knowledge-based development form of society.
Systamic or strategic change now becomes first dependent on neither farmers nor scholars/professionals but on how knowledge management and governance mechanisms and strategic decisions on promoting interactions among actors and expanding the alternative epistemic culture of rural development can be developed on a larger scale based on local developments of interactive knowledge world practices depicted and discussed in this thesis, both on mindset change and action planning. Yes, in the vast ocean of knowledge and emerging islands of new epistemic practices, micro-to-macro knowledge governance (see Foss and Michailova 2009) has to bridge and breed knowledge-processes-based interaction and learning cultures among communities and networks. If not, distributed transformations of the described epistemic culture of development only fall into being marginalised, budding, and unstructured features of knowledge-based societal change projects and cannot effectively lead (to) rural development transformation. Such recommendations become most critical in the rapid changing context of and increasing development interventions on the Mekong Delta under the impact or even pressure of modernisation, economic international economic integration, construction of upstream dams, and climate change.
This research is one of the first to add a knowledge dimension to the systematic understanding of the rural development in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and can be part of a broad-researched area of Vietnam development in transition with a large interest in state-society relations under the lens of knowledge, power, and development. As such, the rural transformation in Vietnam needs to be incorporated with the analysis, which was not thoroughly investigated in this research, in the fields of agro-genetic technology, green agriculture, land reform, rural-urban migration, and urbanisation. Moreover, government agencies can be further investigated beyond the agricultural extension system to see their knowledge generation and use for policy making and implementation at different levels. How different sources of knowledge are used
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to generate policy at the central and provincial levels can be of high interest. In the same manner, how knowledge is used and produced for development by civil society organisations that burst into operation also is worth being investigated and included for a full picture.
To understand knowledge for development practices that are locally specified and culturally contingent, further research will have to consider the dynamics of knowledge alliancing and networking between and among actors in the agricultural and rural development sectors. Knowledge diffusion and brokering can be researched within the epistemic cultures in which they are embedded and/or knowledge management and governance frameworks. Knowledge sharing between communities of practice could also be further investigated, while research on contemporary Vietnamese farmers could explore how technology and knowledge are adopted and how they impact production and the lives of different groups of farmers, or how knowledge is extended within formal arrangements set up by external interventions in comparison with informal networks built up by the rural community to promote knowledge and experience sharing for their own development.
For a more generalised Vietnam-wide understanding of epistemic culture change and policy suggestions, other studies should be conducted in other regions with elevated recommendations for those with a more closed peasant social system, such as the Red River Delta, or even in other major river deltas of the world.
Most importantly, forms of interactions or hybridised organisations among knowledge worlds and epistemological communities have to be examined throughout their formation and operation processes.
What factors determine the success or failure of such forms, and how these forms in turn nourish and enhance the new epistemic culture of development are some examples of this interesting area for further research. Capitalisation of knowledge and knowledge marginalisation and inequality may also be included.
The aforementioned topics invite further academic endeavours under the form of either pure research or action research. Establishment of community-based knowledge centers in rural areas, small-scale incubator-based agribusinesses, or farmer-professional agricultural research projects can be practical references for the latter orientations, as well as bringing them into operation and researching knowledge processes within such arrangements. I hope that this research forms an early phase for any future “double hermeneutic” (Giddens 1987) endeavours in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam and Southeast Asia as “a laboratory” of global developmentalist and ecological change (Antweiler and Hornidge 2012).
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