The Mekong Delta is well known for being the largest and most active agriculture region in Vietnam. It is the rice basket of the whole country, ensuring national food security while at the same time contributing a significantly large proportion of rice, fruit, and aquaculture exports. It is increasingly recognised as a modern hydraulic society in which waterways and networks have been steadily regulated and controlled by high dykes and new technology, blissfully leading to the triple rice crop revolution and aquaculture boom.
Last decade progress endeavoured to foster the region to become urbanised and industrialised by 2020 have incubated industrial zones and clusters in which Can Tho takes the nucleus role. It is also well documented that the delta is projected as one of the regions most impacted by climate change, as well as ecological and local livelihood threats by upstream dam construction and water resource over-exploitation.
Commercialised agricultural production is under pressure to be reorganised in the face of environmental protection and international market requirements.
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It is little known that the river and water civilisation that developed over 300 years has been inherited by and upheld in Mekong Delta dwellers’ perception of nature-human interactions, and the delta’s cultural traits govern their behaviours in community and society. They “lean on” water bodies, not control them.
Every year, the rising water usually mistaken as a flood by outsiders is welcomed as a symbol of prosperity and the return of an old friend with a meaningful message from nature. The delta society is structured in an open system with emergent properties of tolerance, affection and gratitude appreciation, dynamics, and practicality. Building a community house that can take the role of a Northern village’s communal house becomes alien along the canal communities in the Mekong Delta, which requires a different development approach, rather than a simple imposition of an outside model. Even in cases where local people claim to be “victims of their habits” (Herbst et al. 2009), scientific proof, wide educational programs, and local participation are also needed.
This is not to argue against modern developments and achievements that the Mekong Delta residents have laboured and mastered. Our analysis of the delta’s development landscape indeed establishes that there is a convergence of modernisation, sustainable development, and strategic governance. Thinking, behaviour, and practices of the river and water civilisation have been deliberately incorporated into recent sustainable and strategic development planning in the delta. Farmers’ agricultural diversification practices, such as VACB, are invigorated. High dyke systems are modified to match the farmers’ crop seasons. To more or less harmonise the development objectives of food security, economic growth, propoor development, and environmental sustainability, sets of both modernistic and sustainable (traditionally developed or externally introduced) concepts and practices have intertwined and interacted, facilitated and constrained. I find it difficult to convince local state officers or farmers in the Mekong Delta to willingly and firmly adopt environmentally friendly technology without economic benefit calculations. At the same time, good intention flood reallocation projects have faced failure because of culturally poor designs. Nature and humans, the river and water civilisation and a modern hydraulic society, modernism and sustainability, economic growth and inclusive development, short-term and long-term goals, external support and local resources, and scientific and local knowledge exist in a both-and relationship; in their duality; they cannot be separately analysed or promoted in development planning and implementation. Under a certain circumstance or time, one element becomes stronger than the other, and it is Mekong Delta people as the knowledgeable and reflexive agent who interactively (re) create resources and (re) construct changes. These characteristics illustrate the duality of development practice in the Mekong Delta.
The duality of development practice in the Mekong Delta is crucial for policy makers and planners with a modernistic and mechanistic mindset in times such as reform, “innovation,” or national building oeuvres.
Planning a shortcut and sustainable development is dubious and dicey in cases such as administrative urbanisation, foreordained statistics, urban-rural discontinuum, tightened coupling poverty cycle of the
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rural poor, or ignored double marginalisation of underprivileged groups. The diffusion of new sustainable innovations has to overcome a number of epistemological, technical, and cultural barriers. Vast literature on a Vietnam in transition or debates regarding its continuity and transformation are time-framed in post- doimoi, making the discussion of development in Vietnam fall into the state-society, authoritarian topdownism-democratic everyday politics polarisation. The duality framework facilitates a holistic understanding of knowledge interaction in power and resource manipulation of multiple actors with different intentions and goal setting. Change and transformation in duality cannot be created from one single source of external interventions or within the non-stop transition of development in that the old is not yet completely cleared and the new not fully “activated.” Structural change is made possible through interaction among sources, types, and processes of knowledge in creating local actions when, more than ever before, knowledge is needed to address new and upscale challenges the delta is facing.
Placed in such a developmental environment in the delta, knowledge diffusion for agriculture and rural development in the Mekong Delta is conceptualised in a complex interactionist system within systems.
Systems of agricultural extension, research, and agribusiness are investigated in their knowledge diffusion toward the rural community in the Mekong Delta. The conventional model is still prominent in the knowledge diffusion landscape of the delta; researchers are knowledge producers, and extensionists are the main knowledge transfer agents of research results and technologies to rural residents. With their advantages in production-based knowledge and wide sales networks, agribusinesses are increasingly becoming important knowledge brokers to farmers in the Mekong Delta. The triple helix of state’s extension, research, and business has been promoted in agricultural research and farmers’ production and consumption, yet due to its economic contract foundation, the quadruple association of the state, scientists, agribusinesses, and farmers has reached an in-reality impasse. Sets of actors remain confined to their own life worlds, reading from their own scripts while farmers are perceived as passive knowledge and development receivers. The local knowledge system has, therefore, mainly reacted and responded to external changes by modifying its environment, such as using policy instruments to change production practices, instead of internal system change generation.
Veritably, each system has undergone its own internal transformation. For example, our policy analysis highlighted three patterns of in-transition change within the extension system since its formation in 1993:
repositioning as a professional organisation within the state agency system, extension objective shift from hard technology and state policy dissemination towards more farmer-driven, diversity-appreciated and sustainable development-based extensions, and restructuring focuses on the development and expansion of local extension networks. In practice however, the system replicates the state bureaucratic system structure of “elephant’s head, little mouse’s tail”; physical, financial, and human resources are mainly concentrated and distributed by the upper level organisations. The serious consequence is that besides the
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development of high-level bureaucrats as a strategic group, grassroots extension is a crisis in both motivational and professional dimensions. As such the system solidifies bureaucratisation of extension work characterised by “peel feet to fit shoes” or “one-size-fits-all” technology transfer. Public agricultural extension cannot lead but instead “chases after farmers.” The agricultural research system in the Mekong Delta has also developed its focus on the second and third missions: research and social development.
Recent research workers have intensively engaged in international cooperation, focusing more on regionally complicated and “hot spot” research problems, interdisciplinary exploration, and policy consultation. Researchers and farmers have fabricated a close relationship, metaphorically referred to as
“water and fish” through various formal and informal channels of knowledge communication. Despite these efforts, knowledge interaction between researchers and extensionists, researchers, and farmers is essentially governed and limited in educational or applied research projects featured by bounded timeframes and good intentions but hard realities of going “beyond model” dissemination. The agribusiness system especially in the Mekong Delta is becoming an important source of farming-related technology and knowledge, especially agrochemicals, for the rural communities, yet, the partisan pursuits of profit and thus simplified, sometimes conflicting message transmission have blocked the potentially productive cooperation of agribusiness and other actors.
Our research has also explored a restructuration of knowledge diffusion from grassroots, informal, bottom- up efforts and networks. In the extension system, we can still observe a career-based extension group that takes extension as their profession or career. They are grassroots extensionists who directly work with farming communities and maintain their love to learn with/from farmers despite structural bureaucratisation. A small number of highly qualified staff members with leading positions who are intensively engaged in research activities are also subsumed in this group. They are the agents of change as a reflective learning culture is nurtured and cherished within the research system through their extension services. Our study has also revealed cases in which farmers have worked as knowledge brokers and generators through their diverse formal and informal interactions with academics. Through social relationships, many farmers have developed learning opportunities or even long-term partnerships with researchers. Researchers also work as development practitioners, especially in communities surrounding campuses. Some private companies have created research opportunities with the participation of scientists from different disciplines. Several farmers are invited to be university lecturer assistants or participate in breeding projects as a researcher’s partner.
Knowledge diffusion for agricultural and rural development in the Mekong Delta is still prominently characterised by teaching thinking and practices. As such, despite its complexity and multi-actor engagement, knowledge diffusion is rightly represented as a one-way pipeline of knowledge flow from agricultural extensionists, academics, development practitioners, and agribusiness professionals as a
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knowledge source to farmers as passive knowledge receivers. Knowledge is narrowed in an explicit form and technological solutions for problem solving. Artefact-oriented knowledge diffusion thus aims merely at knowledge transfer success based on adoption velocity and coverage. Nevertheless, streams of knowledge diffusion practices, which emphasise reflective learning and coproduction of knowledge among actors engaged in sustainable development, have been developed. Although such alternative knowledge practices are observed from below and in informal spheres, which makes them unrecognised if not ignored in mainstream development and formal policy making, they offer energy for knowledge generation and diffusion approaches for rural communities in the Mekong Delta. As previously discussed, the adoption of participatory or bottom-up methods without continuous learning and dialogical reflections easily becomes a fad instead of a fundamental change. Sustainable agricultural development cannot be achieved unless a co-learning culture between rural development and knowledge professionals and farming communities is cultivated. These epistemic practices challenge the traditional culture of knowledge creation for rural development rooted in the dichotomy between academics and development experts as knowledge producers and brokers and farmers as passive knowledge receivers for development. It is in this sense that I call the duality of knowledge diffusion for agriculture and rural development in the Mekong Delta.
Recognising different plural knowledge worlds with different forms of knowledge in interchanging roles of sources and recipients of knowledge, dialogical and interactive channels are the most important task to be taken in the contemporary Mekong Delta context. In addition to producing and presenting their research findings, scientists need to get involved in knowledge brokering activities. Besides their production and supply of agricultural inputs, agribusinesses also produce knowledge and engage in agricultural extension.
Extension professionals are now increasingly participating in research activities. Farmers receive new knowledge and technology for development and create locally practiced knowledge as well. The mass media, especially television programs of high-quality agricultural extension and education, can be used to support public dialogical domains. Nourishing such interactions may bring about socio-economic rural sustainable development as well as the transformation of an epistemic culture of development.