Another epistemic culture of development is emerging with an increasingly important role to play in constructing knowledge for sustainable rural development practices in the Mekong Delta, yet it is often
“hidden” from the mainstream development and knowledge for development landscapes. While it is still important that strategic planning and governance is needed for the development of this alternative knowledge production culture and that the role of State and its policies contributes an important communication system in knowledge democratisation and bridge building, bottom-up and from within knowledge initiatives and practices provide the fundamental frame of reference for this epistemic culture to be further discovered, cultivated, and fostered. The sociological institutionalist construction of learning- based extension system delineating a grassroots instigated elusion from current bureaucratic knowledge transfer praxis (Chapter Three) well illustrates paths and approaches towards another epistemic culture. In other words, it is from internalist reconstruction and transformation within reflective communities (Williams 2010), such as farmer-led communities of practice, and hybrid knowledge developed from interaction and networking logic that the alternative epistemic culture of development is beginning to spring, and in this same orientation it should be boosted up.
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“For government to become a learning system, both the social system of agencies and the theory of policy implementation must change. Government cannot play the role of ‘experimenter for the nation’, seeking first to identify the correct solution, then to train society at large in its adaptation. The opportunity for learning is primarily in discovered systems at the periphery, not in the nexus of official policies at the center. Central’s role is to detect significant shifts at the periphery, to pay explicit attention to the emergence of ideas in good currency, and to derive themes of policy by induction. The movement of learning is as much from periphery to periphery, or from periphery to center, as from center to periphery”
(Schửn 2010/1973, 16).
Farmers are no longer merely homogenous recipients of knowledge for development, as evidenced by those in our cases who have actively engaged in knowledge diffusion through brokerage practices and networking. They also play a crucial role in cultivating networks and communities of practice and connecting experts in the fields and farmers across the delta, from whom knowledge is shared, used, and re-produced, as well as the unknowns framed and formulated. Development and knowledge professionals are no longer staying within their disciplinary or work boundaries. New identities and hybridised organisations and communities have been created through knowledge (system) interactions. Thus, managing knowledge diffusion should involve managing knowledge transfer and creation processes encompassing knowledge from the source and receiving actors, the knowns and (relational and rational) unknowns. It should also appreciate farmer-led learning structures in practice and encourage the connection of frequently ignored informal knowledge flows with the common “knowledge for development” goals of responsible organisations and the agricultural and rural development sector. In other words, the agricultural extension system, knowledge system, and innovation system need to place significant emphasis on multi-agents, multidimensions, and interactive learning in agricultural and rural research and development. Further, enabling spaces should be generated, including learning space, practice space, and knowledge (re) generation space. Transdisciplinary research should also be encouraged, especially in the context of dynamic workforce movements. ICTs and mass media, particularly live television programs, should be designed to embrace thematic dialogues in which all voices are included and that contain situational analyses that provide useful information or trend understanding and decision making of rural communities.
Practical implications for knowledge diffusion project managers are as follows. First, ecologically sound agricultural systems should receive further research and development efforts for improvement and adoption and aim to promote sustainable development in the Mekong Delta and throughout Vietnam.
Second, interventions should facilitate farmers’ personal development and learning processes. It is evident from our study that “training the trainer” is appropriate for building the capacity of farmers, who potentially continue to diffuse and share technology and knowledge with their wider rural community. The training of trainers is a long-term process involving the careful selection of participants, communication design, and monitoring mechanisms. It is important to create opportunities for these trainers to get involved in training and in different environments. This task relates to a human resource development
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strategy rather than immediate transfer quantity focus. Research/development projects should put forward the objective to train more farmers who will and can share knowledge rather than the better off and technology harboured ones. Third, the farmers’ stories imply that the learning process is not well defined and newly explored knowledge is not codified or externalised. A learning cycle can be conducted by the construction of a feedback loop, which not only provides a participatory tool for a project’s evaluation but also helps to manage new knowledge produced and lessons learnt.
For managers in the agricultural and rural development sector, firstly, research/development projects conducted by development and knowledge professionals with the participation of farmers should be encouraged and prioritised for funding. The study cases show that “professional” knowledge brokering farmers interact and work together with project scientists/researchers to generate new knowledge through problem solving or by framing and formulating problems to create new values and maintain the learning cycle in complex environments. Local extension workers should consider the imitation of a participatory research approach, though less elaborate, in their diffusion planning (cf. Ton 2005). Secondly, in addition to recognised formal farmers’ groups and associations, farmers also connect via networks and communities of practice to help each other to develop, including sharing and exchanging knowledge. Despite their effective contributions to sector development, such networks and communities tend to be invisible to managers. As such, local rural development agencies should identify these networks and communities to cultivate their learning culture and/or inter-community learning. Some concrete interventions or measures could involve the following: participation directory compilation; training invitations to coordinators;
experience, techniques, and stories selected and published; invitations to deliver presentations in seminars and conferences; and utilisation of lessons learnt in the community and network as well as other motivation and incentive mechanisms. Thirdly, the way farmers organise their communities or networks of practice calls for an alternative approach to managing knowledge flows beyond the traditional administrative boundaries. In the case of Farmer Z’s network, management interventions and support can be more effectively implemented via the NAVG, as a national professional association, and provincial sectors rather than single, unconnected efforts only at the local level. The stereotypical understandings of the knowledge deficits in rural areas should be carefully applied in the Mekong Delta context or elsewhere despite the fact that far more conceptualised and institutionalised efforts are needed to democratise and promote local, non-standardised, non-universalised, everyday knowledge currently positioned at the bottom in status and power (cf. Bruckmeier and Tovey 2009). In this sense, development knowledge should not be managed somewhere by someone, but instead “it should, indeed, be debated - not only by academics [...] but more importantly by those who are supposed to be its ‘beneficiaries’” (Broad 2007, 706).
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