Richard Bawden

Western Sydney University · Office of Sustainability

Everyone involved in agriculture has a responsibility for ensuring that they are aware of the ethical dimensions of their practices and act accordingly. In this manner, the impacts that agriculture have on the environment deserve critical ethical attention. The emergence of sustainability as a vital context for agricultural development, provides a...

India has the largest area of rainfed dryland agriculture globally, with a variety of distinct types of farming systems producing most of its coarse cereals, food legumes, minor millets, and large amounts of livestock. All these are vital for national and regional food and nutritional security. Yet, the rainfed drylands have been relatively neglect...

Non-technical summary Until the past half-century, all agriculture and land management was framed by local institutions strong in social capital. But neoliberal forms of development came to undermine existing structures, thus reducing sustainability and equity. The past 20 years, though, have seen the deliberate establishment of more than 8 million...

Chapter 2 makes the case for using systems thinking as a guiding perspective for TEEBAgriFood’s development of a comprehensive Evaluation Framework for the eco-agri-food system. Many dimensions of the eco-agri-food system create complex analytical and policy challenges. Systems thinking allows better understanding and forecasting of the outcomes of...

The world’s arid lands are living example of nature/culture dynamics in the face of global changes in both their biophysical and sociocultural environments. These water-stressed biomes are inherently vulnerable to environmental challenges on any scale and from whatever source. This vulnerability is being subjected to a veritable barrage of stresses...

The TEEBAgriFood ‘Scientific and Economic Foundations’ report addresses the core theoretical issues and controversies underpinning the evaluation of the nexus between the agri-food sector, biodiversity and ecosystem services and externalities including human health impacts from agriculture on a global scale. It argues the need for a ‘systems thinki...

While there would appear to be a general awareness and appreciation of the foundational significance of values to sustainability science, they, along with other philosophical dimensions associated with beliefs and assumptions, rarely seem to make the headlines. With reference to a seminal contribution on macroethical systems that was published in t...

Over a period of little more than 15 years, starting in the late 1970s, a small group of academics in the School of Agriculture at the Hawkesbury Agricultural College in Richmond, Australia developed and sustained a unique participative systemic experiential approach to rural development. Their approach came to identify the significance of the tran...

Scenario praxis, critically explored as the theory-informed practice of scenarioing, is proposed as a modality for institutionalising knowing within a systemic governance framework. Framing and institutional considerations associated with a constructivist inquiry-based learning approach that might open capacity for innovation in future scenarioing...

If Farming Systems Research is to truly embrace sustainability as the overall context of its mission, then the inclusion of ethics (and especially systemic ethics) is an imperative. There are matters of responsibilities of producers to the ecological integrity of the land that they farm as well as to the manner by which they use resources. There ar...

Setting directions and goals for animal production systems requires the integration of information achieved through internal and external processes. The importance of stakeholder input in setting goals for sustainable animal production systems should not be overlooked by the agricultural animal industries. Stakeholders play an integral role in sett...

In this paper, we address the challenge of translating the concept of resilience into effective educational strategies. Three different cognitive dimensions (ontological, epistemological and axiological) that underpin assumptions held about the nature of nature, the nature of knowing and the nature of human nature are identified. Four case studies...

In this presentation I intend to narrate a story that has its particular origins in three strategic decisions collectively taken, almost 20 years ago now, by a small group of educators within a small agricultural polytechnic located on the urban/rural fringe of Australia’s largest city. It is a story which arises out of the integrated thoughts and...

This chapter continues the story of the tradition of systemic praxis that emerged from Hawkesbury Agricultural College in Australia from the late 1970s. While critical social learning systems (CSLS) best describes this ongoing tradition at this present time of writing (2009), the concept of a critical learning system did not appear explicitly in th...

There are two questions that are central to talk of improvements in any particular human enterprise: Who decides what constitutes “better” in any specific context– And what particular criteria for betterment are privileged in that context– As animal scientist David Fraser illustrates in his chapter on the intensification of livestock production, ev...

This paper, through a systemic inquiry, explores the context of, and makes the case for systemic development rather than sustainable development. Systemic development is a form of praxis and thus a process rather than an end state. The move from sustainable to systemic development contains conceptual and practical transformations involving discours...

Faced with a plethora of ever-increasing demands from citizens and producers alike for the design of more responsible and sustainable livestock production practices, animal scientists are becoming increasingly interested in exploring 'systems orientations' to their research and development work. However, two interrelated factors are proving to be e...

This book comprises selected papers from the third conference in the series 'Horizons in Livestock Sciences'. The conference series was established in 2003 to provide an international forum for scientists, science managers and policy makers to explore some of the emerging science solution that will be important for future livestock production syste...

The further economic development of modern, multi-functional and responsible agricultural and food systems must be set within a global context of ecological sustainability and social responsibility. This presents all of those who are concerned with such development, with a much more complex challenge than that posed by the relatively straightforwar...

Education for sustainability is a challenge that is being met in many different innovative ways under many different circumstances in many different parts of the world. In this paper, the author draws on his personal experiences with radical systemic pedagogies within a context of agriculture and rural development appropriate to an emergent Era of...

Hawkesbury's Systemic Development differs from other systemic approaches is that it has a pedagogical, rather than methodological focus, with individual and social learning outcomes, and with ethical as well as instrumental concerns. The paper describes the logic of this approach, particularly the key role of epistemic learning in the development o...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Complexity is, as they say, everywhere you look these days. Of course, it has been there all along, but only recently has its significance become appreciated, particularly as it relates to challenges to the human condition (Gleik 1987). Along with growing concerns about the impacts of...

With kind permission of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, we are able to publish Professor Richard Bawden's ‘Von Bertalanffy Lecture’, presented in July 1993, at the 37th Annual Meeting of the Society at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, Australia.

In the short time that it will take you, the reader, to read to the bottom of this page, countless numbers of people across theworld will die of starvation.Avery high proportion of them will be infants and young children. Even as you read on, many millions of others will be suffering from such acute under-nutrition and/or malnutrition that they wil...

Let me start with “The Slump, the Recovery, and the New Normal” by Edmund Phelps. With this stone, I would like to hope that I am killing two birds: Ned Phelps’s paper is, in part, a non-mathematical version of the “Macroeconomic Effects of Over-Investment in Housing in an Aggregative Model of Economic Activity”, written by Hian Teck Hoon. The firs...

One of the most significant and enduring ideas associated with the systems initiatives at Hawkesbury has been the inter-connections that were made there between systemic acts of development in the ‘concrete world’ and the abstract ‘epistemic developments’ of the actors who participate in them. Each is seen to be constitutive of the other in a profo...

For more than a quarter of a century, academics at Hawkesbury Agricultural College have been committed to the development of a public discourse about the nature and scope of the development of rural Australia, and of the sustainability of the role of agriculture within that. In their work they have explicitly privileged systems theories and practic...

Presents a conceptual framework for process management of groups involved in action learning and action research. Discusses propositional, practical and experiential learning; and the concept of meta-learning (learning to learn) in relation to the “learning organisation”. Presents a model of process management that concerns people and process, with...

If the engagement movement is to mature, scholars need to document and share the values, beliefs, and approaches that guide their work. Otherwise, engagement efforts will be buried in unarticulated perspectives and characterized by unexamined practices. The purpose of this article is to make explicit our en-gagement model. First, we share and discu...

The problems now being faced by those concerned with the responsible development of global resources are immensely complex, with many aspects that reflect a very high level of riskiness to the integrity of the entire planet. This situation has many moral as well as techoscientific dimensions, yet conventional development paradigms continue to both...

Without Abstract

Sustainability is a concept which is entirely appropriate to the age which has spawned it. Being as ambiguous, complex, mystical and multi-faceted as it is, it represents a wonderful example of the confusion that comes with what has been termed reflexive modernity (Beck, 1992): This epoch where we must now face up to the “hazards and insecurities i...

The metaphor which is central to all of the activities at the Centre for Systemic Development at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, is that of the critical learning system (CLS), a construct developed as the framework for the systemic education of students in the School of Agriculture and Rural Development at Hawkesbury. CLSs are constru...

This paper describes the context and the systemic experiential theories that have informed the praxis of educating agricultural systems practitioners. The praxis has involved a process of action research with students and with clients in farming and other rural community organizations. The praxis encourages learners to bring a range of methodologie...

This paper describes the rationale and major features of a unique systems approach to agricultural and rural development at one of Australia's oldest institutions for agricultural education. Concerned by the inadequacies of the philosophies, theories and practices of reductionist science and technology as exposed by their own experiences, academics...

Reductionist science with its positivistic philosophical roots and experimental research practices has generally served agriculture well for around 150 yr. Technological innovations based on the propositions generated through this paradigm have played a profound role in the extraordinary productivity growth that has occurred in agriculture across t...

The achievements of the agricultural universities have been substantial since their relatively recent establishment. They now find themselves in a rapidly changing social and natural environment and need to adapt, in structure and philosophy, to meet the new challenges of the next century. The role they are destined to play is an increasingly devel...

Hawkesbury Agricultural College (Australia) reformed their program with a student-centered curriculum and client-centered research and extension. The bases of the Systems Agriculture program are experiential learning and a systems approach. Staff and student learning projects meet the criteria of action research. (SK)

The background to the role of assessment in the evolution of an experiential programme in agriculture is presented in this paper. The point is made that in such a context, the process of assessment is itself in a dynamic state. The notion of a matrix of competencies is presented, as is a framework for the development and evaluation of assessment pr...

The need for competency-based tertiary education to meet the demands of contemporary agriculture is explored. The response at one Australian agricultural college has been a fundamental reform of its curricula. The aim is to produce graduates who take a holistic approach and are effective problem solvers and situation improvers. A conceptual model o...

A systems approach has been taken to a review of agricultural education programmes and as the essential theme of resultant curricula at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in Australia. The systems thinking and practices which have guided, and been shaped by, the innovations are outlined, and the rationale and framework of the major programme are descr...

This article outlines some of the innovations associated with the development of a learning environment for systems agriculture at one of Australia's oldest agricultural colleges. The coincidence of events that led to the major overhaul in curricula is presented in a manner consistent with an experiential approach to learning. Thus, the situation d...

This paper refers to the limitations of the traditional linear approaches to parasite control in livestock systems as exemplified by their reliance on the use of limited specific control methods. It is claimed that these approaches show little appreciation of the complex dynamic nature of host/parasite associations and give little indication of con...

Adult Oesophagostomum columbianum populations were larger in sheep fed low-protein diets than in adequately fed animals. Diet did not influence the numbers of larva which became established in sheep. Sheep fed high-protein diets eliminated more worms and were more immunologically competent than poorly fed animals. More encapsulated larvae, showing...

1. The mean retention time of stained food residues was longer in sheep maintained on a chopped straw ration than in sheep maintained on a chopped lucerne ration. 2. Infection of sheep with 1500 infective Oesophagostomum columbianum juveniles was associated with increased mean retention times. 3. The extent to which the mean retention times were in...

Scenario praxis is critically explored as the theory-informed practice of scenario-ing. Our concern is to appreciate its potential in increasingly common situations that may usefully be framed as wicked problems, situations or issues and which increasingly warrant innovations that produce more systemic and adaptive governance. Our framing of the is...

The establishment of N. dubius juveniles was more successful in mice maintained on a diet inadequate to support the full growth potential of the animals than in mice maintained on an adequate diet. The distribution of encysted juveniles along the duodenum was considerably more extensive in the former group of mice. More juveniles were established i...

The infection of young sheep with 1500 infective larvae of the parasitic nematode Oesophagostomurn columbianum was associated with loss of weight of degree and duration varying with the plane of nutrition. Greater losses of weight were observed in sheep maintained on a low protein ration of chaffed wheaten straw and molasses than in those on a high...

Young sheep fed on a low protein (6%) diet were more susceptible to infection with O. columbianum than those on a high protein (18%) diet. Both the number of adult nematodes recovered 56 days after infection, and the fecundity of the female worms prior to autopsy, were greater in the former group. Examinations at the 10th and 56th days after infect...