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Prasad, S. C. 2016. Innovating at the margins: the System of Rice Intensification in India and transformative social innovation.
Ecology and Society 21(4):7. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08718-210407
Research, part of a Special Feature on Game-Changers and Transformative Social Innovation
Innovating at the margins: the System of Rice Intensification in India and
transformative social innovation
Shambu C. Prasad 1
ABSTRACT. I explore transformative social innovation in agriculture through a particular case of agroecological innovation, the
System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in India. Insights from social innovation theory that emphasize the roles of social movements and
the reengagement of vulnerable populations in societal transformation can help reinstate the missing “social” dimension in current
discourses on innovation in India. India has a rich and vibrant tradition of social innovation wherein vulnerable communities have
engaged in collective experimentation. This is often missed in official or formal accounts. Social innovations such as SRI can help
recreate these possibilities for change from outside the mainstream due to newer opportunities that networks present in the twenty-
first century. I show how local and international networks led by Civil Society Organizations have reinterpreted and reconstructed
game-changing macrotrends in agriculture. This has enabled the articulation and translation of an alternative paradigm for sustainable
transitions within agriculture from outside formal research channels. These social innovations, however, encounter stiff opposition
from established actors in agricultural research systems. Newer heterogeneous networks, as witnessed in SRI, provide opportunities
for researchers within hierarchical research systems to explore, experiment, and create newer norms of engagement with Civil Society
Organizations and farmers. I emphasize valuing and embedding diversity of practices and institutions at an early stage to enable systems
to be more resilient and adaptable in sustainable transitions.
Key Words: civil society; innovation networks; social innovation theory; System of Rice Intensification
INTRODUCTION
The complex socioeconomic and ecological challenges faced by
the world today require creating newer relationships and newer
ways of thinking about social innovations. As a framework that
has evolved in the West and industrial nations in response to
global crises, Transformative Social Innovation Theory, or
TRANSIT, has highlighted the potential of social innovations in
enabling transformative change by challenging, adjusting, and/or
providing alternatives to the dominant systems and institutions
in society (Kemp et al. 2015).
TRANSIT examines processes through which social innovation
contributes to societal transformation by drawing from and
linking research on social innovation, sustainable transitions, and
social movements. Societal transformation is seen as the result of
“coevolutionary” interactions among (“between” is just for two
parties; you refer to many more) game-changers (such as the
economic crisis), narratives of change (e.g., “a new economy”),
system innovations (e.g., welfare system reform), and social
innovations (e.g., new design practices) (Avelino et al. 2014).
I explore and extend TRANSIT analysis in a developing country
and agrarian context through the case study of an agroecological
innovation, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), in India.
TRANSIT, I suggest, helps better articulate and position
alternative “narratives of change” that can open up, and position,
discussions on social innovations for their potential
transformatory role. How could this be in the Indian context
wherein the world’s largest farming community facing agrarian
distress is seeking to rethink agrarian futures? Would reframing
social innovation within narratives of social movements create
opportunities for newer narratives of change that can empower
vulnerable communities by focusing on their adaptive capacities
and resilience? Can TRANSIT’s focus on game-changers help in
reframing the dominant productionist narratives (Segal et al.
2015) to those on securing sustainable food sovereignty?
Societies like India wherein a large body of indigenous knowledge
and its practitioners coexist with modern scientific knowledge
often face challenges in creating knowledge dialogues due to
institutional hierarchies and rigidities. “Institutional entrepreneurs”
(Moore and Westley 2011) who could change systems and enable
system-wide innovations do not easily emerge in such contexts.
What would be the role of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in
such contexts as intermediaries and in creating spaces for “creative
dissenters” in articulating alternative narratives of change? I seek
to address these questions through the SRI case in India.
I begin with an overview of discussions on innovation in India. I
first show how social innovation is underplayed or missing in
current narratives on innovation policies in India that are
excessively focused on techno-economic innovations. Drawing
from research on social movements and social innovation
(Mulgan 2006, Murray et al. 2010, Westley and Antadze 2010,
Westley 2013, Westley et al. 2013, Avelino et al. 2014, Smith 2014),
I propose an alternative narrative of change drawing from
Gandhi’s experiments on a science by people during India’s
freedom struggle.
Social innovations, I show, have often been incubated by a vibrant
civil society in India that has gone beyond state and market failure
to experiment with and articulate alternative and sustainable
visions of development (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012). Applying
TRANSIT frames of linking social innovation to social
movements helps us better appreciate this tradition of innovations
by vulnerable communities. Thus, although SRI originated as a
grassroots innovation in Madagascar, I suggest that it is because
of this rich, yet forgotten tradition of social innovation and
movements that India has become the institutional home for
diverse experiments and innovations on SRI.
In the section Agrarian Crisis, Game-changers, I show how
macrophenomena are interpreted, (re)constructed, contested,
and dealt with by vulnerable people and CSOs working on
1Institute of Rural Management Anand
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alternative agricultural imaginations amidst a large-scale farming
crisis in India. The evolution of SRI in India is traced as a dynamic
and diverse response shaped by a coalition of actors articulating
alternative “narratives of change” as a transformatory socio-
technical innovation. I show how ideas of “learning alliances
“ (Lundy et al. 2005, Douthwaite et al. 2009) and innovation
platforms (Kilelu et al. 2013) have played an important part in
enabling sustainable transition.
Unlike strong institutional entrepreneurs acting in European and
North American contexts, innovators in developing countries
often encounter significant resistance in (re)orienting systems
toward sustainable transitions. Civil Society Organizations play
an important role both in enabling and embedding the diversity
of social innovations in developing-country contexts. They create
and use innovation networks to foster and enable “creative
dissent” (Prasad 2014a, 2015) by potential change-makers. I use
empirical data and insights from a long-term study on innovation
and SRI, as well as my participation in several policy dialogues
in trying to change agricultural narratives of change in India. The
focus is on interpreting innovation processes by multiple actors
on SRI.
SOCIAL INNOVATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN
INDIA
India’s rise as a twenty-first century innovation superpower has
been celebrated with new phrases such as “frugal,” “reverse,” and
Jugaad (the Indian equivalent of Bricolage) entering the
innovation management lexicon (Birtchnell 2011, Kumar and
Puranam 2012, Govindarajan and Trimble 2013). However, social
innovation and sustainability in public policies is conspicuous by
their absence in discussions of India’s Science, Technology and
Innovation Policy (GoI 2013) or the more recent mission on
innovation and entrepreneurship (GoI 2015). Policy documents
in this linear model of innovation privilege the know-all technical
expert who would deliver solutions to the “lay” citizen seen as
lacking knowledge. Public policies tend to delegate civil society’s
role to the bottom of the innovation chain (Prasad 2005) in
seeking to disseminate innovation rather than regarding other
actors as partners in a search for newer models of “inclusive
inclusion” (Bound and Thornton 2012). India’s lesser-known
innovation networks, I suggest, have, however, demonstrated the
capacity and resilience of vulnerable people in bringing
transformative social innovation.
The Indian national movement led by M. K. Gandhi, who
envisioned an alternative narrative of change and development
as part of India’s political struggle for freedom, could be seen as
a precursor to social innovation in India. The rejuvenation of the
handmade cloth industry (khadi) that empowered millions during
the Freedom Movement involved large-scale collective
experimentation. Social innovations were seen as a space for civil
society in areas that required “tender nursing,” which neither the
state nor the market could institutionally provide for.
Gandhi viewed his own ashrams (religious hermitages),
traditionally associated with spaces for spiritual and religious
practice, as laboratories where technical experiments in cotton
growing, processing, spinning and weaving, rural industries, and
sanitation went along with transformative social innovations.
More men became engaged in spinning, an activity otherwise long
seen as women’s domain. These social movements invited
innovations through contests and awards such as the Rs. 1 lakh
(7700 pounds) prize offered for an improved spinning wheel in
1929 by the All India Spinners Association, which had strong
social design criteria and principles for innovators to adhere to.
The contest eventually had no winners, but the award and
discussions between the short-listed entries and Gandhi and his
coworkers indicate the true value in creating an atmosphere for
social change through citizen’s participation (Prasad 2002:112–
129).
Several CSOs in independent India drew from Gandhian ideals
of social innovation. Prominent among these were Baba Amte’s
Maharogi Sewa Samiti (founded in 1949), which transformed the
lives of lepers, Manibhai Desai’s Bharatiya Agro Industries
Foundation in 1967, which pioneered innovations in animal
husbandry, and Ela Bhatt’s Self Employed Women’s Association
in 1972, which pioneered women’s empowerment by organizing
the poor. The space for social innovation had a surge in the late
1970s and early 1980s, with many qualified scientists and
technologists exploring alternative scientific futures for India’s
poor as part of a vision of science and technology for rural
transformation (Jain 2002, Prasad 2005, Bhaduri and Kumar
2011, Gupta 2012).
Social innovation movements today are recognized for their role
in envisioning innovation processes that include local
communities in terms of knowledge and processes, and in the
framing of a collaborative innovation activity (Smith, Fressoli,
and Thomas 2014). SRI is one such movement from below led by
CSOs in recent times that has enabled articulating a
transformative social innovation to the ongoing large-scale
agrarian crisis in India.
AGRARIAN CRISIS, GAME-CHANGERS, AND THE
SUSTAINABILITY IMPERATIVE
Agriculture in India is beset with paradoxes. India leads world
production of milk and buffalo meat, is second in wheat, sugar,
fruits, and vegetables, and paradoxically also leads the world in
number of farm suicides. The world’s largest farming community
has witnessed farmer suicides at unprecedented scales in the
twenty-first century and is part of a long-standing agrarian crisis
(Mishra 2014). While productivity has increased, farm incomes
have stagnated or declined. High dependence on external inputs
—seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation water, coupled with increased
indebtedness—has meant that Indian farmers are experiencing a
loss of agency, “agricultural individualization,” and “knowledge
dissonance” (Vasavi 2012), and deskilling (Stone 2007). The
Indian farmer is more vulnerable to game-changing trends that
include increased costs, declining and fluctuating commodity
prices, and high variability and unpredictability of weather.
Drought is now a recurring phenomenon, with monsoon patterns
commonly shifting by a few weeks or even months. (At the end
of the 2015 season, half of India’s districts had deficit rainfall.)
Globally, agriculture is on an unsustainable track with a high and
ever-increasing ecological footprint. Application of synthetic
fertilizers as one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas
emissions is one such game-changing trend. Agriculture accounts
for 70% of water use withdrawals and 86% of consumptive use
globally (McIntyre et al. 2009:279). Nearly 2 billion hectares and
2.6 billion people have been affected by significant land
degradation resulting from agricultural practices associated with
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the Green Revolution (Nierenberg 2013, Smith, Bustamante, et
al. 2014). Farmers groups, especially those of, or for, small
landholders, have little bargaining power in global agricultural
value chains (Van der Ploeg 2014).
These global trends are compounded by game-changing trends
that are specific to India. The annual extraction of groundwater
in India (210 billion cubic meters) is the highest in the world. Poor
quality and shortages of groundwater are experienced in more
than 60% of districts in India (Shah 2013). Fertilizer subsidies in
India not only cost the Indian exchequer vast amounts of money
but are skewed with greater use of urea and nitrogen to benefit
irrigated areas and a few crops, with soil quality consequently
deteriorating in the longer run (Rupela and Gopikrishna 2011).
Macrotrends or landscape developments can lead to newer
narratives of change for social innovation (Elzen et al. 2012,
Avelino et al. 2014). Social movements for agroecology have
articulated the sustainability imperative and the need to move
away from existing Green Revolution-based technologies and
food systems. Agroecology—defined as “the application of
ecological concepts and principles to the design and management
of sustainable agro-ecosystems”—draws from ongoing food
sovereignty and ecology movements, and presents an alternative
narrative of change and response to these macrotrends on climate
change and agriculture. Agroecological methods provide greater
environmental sustainability and enhance the resilience of
farmers by reducing their dependence on costly and sometimes
difficult-to-access chemical inputs. There is increased overall
productivity through a diverse range of agricultural products and
environmental services, and reduced risks of crop failure (Wezel
et al. 2009, Silici 2014, Tittonell 2014).
However, existing institutions and research practices hinder the
greater expression of local innovations that have demonstrated
this potential for societal transformation. Vanloqueren and Baret
(2009) have shown how overall organization of research systems
favors dominant genetic engineering research rather than
agroecological methods. This is not necessarily due to any
inherent merit of the former or demerits of the latter but due to
technological lock-ins in agricultural research. In agriculture, a
sustainable transition in agriculture research would require more
than increased funding or expenditure but also attention to the
larger framework and power that influences S&T choices. Despite
support from broad-based social movements, CSOs, and policy-
makers within various countries, there has been little shift in
international thinking on agricultural futures (Feldman and Biggs
2012). These issues of power relations, especially in agricultural
research, I suggest, hinder system innovations within the
TRANSIT framework. In the case on SRI, I show how these
macrodevelopments have been perceived by CSOs to contribute
to “the collective understanding of the persistency and
unsustainability of the dominant discourses and practices to
encourage a diffusion of alternatives” (Avelino et al. 2014:19)
through networks and creating spaces for creative dissent.
SPREAD OF THE SYSTEM OF RICE INTENSIFICATION
IN INDIA: SOCIAL INNOVATION AND VULNERABLE
FARMERS
The System of Rice Intensification is an agroecological
innovation that does not depend on conventional Green
Revolution strategies of intensification through introduction of
improved genotypes for productivity enhancement—genotypes
that are themselves dependent on the application of purchased
agrochemical inputs. Instead, through changes in the
management of rice plants, soil, water, and nutrients, with reduced
use of material inputs, SRI principles enable the emergence of
more productive and robust phenotypes. These principles
translate into a set of practices that differ from conventional rice
cultivation techniques and involve transplantation of young
seedlings, widely spaced, in unflooded but moist soil conditions,
and involve the greater use of organic matter in soil, and a hand
or motorized weeder for weed control which also aerates the soil
surface. As an innovation, SRI emerged through constant
experimentation with farmers by Fr Henri De Laulanie in
Madagascar in the 1970s and 1980s, and later through the
Association Tefy Saina that he founded in 1990.
The System of Rice Intensification was unknown to the rest of
the world until 1999, and it was through the institutional
entrepreneurship of the Cornell International Institute of Food
Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD) and its then director,
Norman Uphoff, that treated the innovation as “open source”
from the outset, thereby ensuring free access by farmers and
researchers to the new ideas and opportunities. As SRI practices
involved no miracle seed or herbicides for improving productivity,
resource-poor farmers, first in Madagascar and later in other
parts of the world, were encouraged to draw on their own
potential for experimentation instead of expecting and letting
commercial interests drive and dominate agricultural innovation.
The rapid growth of the Internet, through e-mail and websites,
and more recently social media, helped the spread of SRI across
the world with continuous adaptation. An estimated 10 million
farmers across 50 countries have experimented with many or all
SRI principles on more than 4 million hectares (Kassam et al.
2011, Uphoff et al. 2015). Most of the spread of SRI has been
from five Asian countries—China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia,
and Cambodia.
The System of Rice Intensification presented an alternative
“narrative of change” to the strategies and narratives of yield
enhancement of the International Rice Research Institute that
involved enormous investments in developing a radical new plant
type or genetically modifying rice to have a C4 photosynthetic
pathway instead of C3. The high yields reported from SRI fields,
exceeding what was seen as the biological maximum, led to “rice-
wars” and scientific controversies (Prasad and Basu 2005,
Berkhout and Glover 2011, Glover 2014) from 2004 (the
International Year of Rice) onward, with critics even dismissing
SRI results derisively as “Agronomic UFOs” (Sinclair and
Cassman 2004). The international controversy had an effect on
Indian researchers who were largely reluctant to carry out
research trials on SRI. India since has been an important site for
contestations, controversies, dialogues, alliances, and experimentation.
The System of Rice Intensification has been shaped by multiple
actors in complex and diverse relations of formal researchers in
the agricultural establishment and CSOs and their networks
(Prasad 2006). Table 1 summarizes this process, and highlights
five broad phases using categories of subprocesses of social-
ecological transformation processes (Moore et al. 2014)
India started later than China and Indonesia on SRI research,
but SRI tapped diverse routes for knowledge creation and
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Table 1. Complex evolution of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in India (1999–2015).
Phase Period Characteristic of social innovation Key events Key actors
1 1999–2003 Early experimentation by civil
society and researchers in South
India, drought as a trigger
Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) access innovation
through LEISA article 1999, India represented in
International SRI conference in China (2002), modest
results
Organic farmer groups
in South India,
researchers in Tamil
Nadu and Andhra
Pradesh
2 2004–2006 Sensemaking and envisioning:
building the network and
innovation platform
Indian researchers respond to SRI “Rice Wars,” World
Wide Fund (WWF) organizes multistakeholder national
symposium 2006
WWF, PRADAN, state
universities
3 2007–2009 Gathering momentum, selecting,
learning adopting diversified SRI,
navigating transition
National symposiums in different locations (2007–2008),
state-level alliances (2007 onwards)
Sir Dorabji Tata Trust
and partners
4 2010–2014 Navigating transition and
attempts to institutionalize
Policy dialogues (2009 onwards), extensive
experimentation in other crops, rural development
department newer leader
National Consortium on
SRI and CSOs, rural
livelihood missions
5 2014– Rethinking and reperceiving
system
Open system with no “strategic agency” for cross-scale
interactions
National Consortium on
SRI and livelihood
missions
dissemination. An ecological crisis, drought in 2002–03, spurred
research on SRI in South India, with state agricultural universities
in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh taking leads. Simultaneously,
CSO networks, particularly on organic farming, popularized SRI
principles, enabling reinterpretation of the debates and
controversies on SRI that were excessively focused on super-yields
through SRI. They pointed instead to its potential for resilience
and adaptation for small farmers facing climate stress (Prasad
and Basu 2005, Prasad 2006).
A new chapter in Indian SRI emerged due to the active
involvement of a CSO envisioning and positioning an alternative
narrative of SRI through “institutional entrepreneurship”
(Moore and Westley 2011). The World Wide Fund (WWF) in
India, based at the International Crop Research Institute of Semi-
Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), was attracted to SRI due to its water-
saving potential, and incorporated it in the ongoing “Dialogue
Project on Water Food and Environment” conducted between
WWF and ICRISAT. The WWF project funded evaluation trials
by researchers from the Andhra Pradesh state agricultural
university, and collaborative research by the Directorate of Rice
Research and ICRISAT researchers that was conducted on
farmers’ fields, which included dialogue with farmers and CSOs
on their work.
These dialogues constituted “innovation platforms” (Kilelu et al.
2013, Klerkx et al. 2013) that broke the pattern of “reluctant
partnership” (between researchers and farmers) generally
witnessed in Indian agriculture (Farrington and Bebbington
1993). Researchers, policy-makers, CSOs, and farmers shared and
exchanged ideas on agricultural futures through SRI
experimentation and evaluation that also saw the creation of novel
innovation spaces such as the National Symposium on SRI in
2006 at Hyderabad (followed by similar events in Agartala in
northeast India in 2007 and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu in 2008).
In a third phase, there was a deepening of these knowledge spaces
through several nodes that repeated these institutional
experiments through state-level platforms and learning alliances.
The System of Rice Intensification spread as a knowledge
commons (Prasad and Sen 2010) through e-groups with actors
exchanging notes across states through learning alliances (Prasad
et al. 2007, Prasad 2009). The changes in location and actors not
only extended SRI as an innovation but also brought newer
meanings and dimensions to SRI. The inconsistent SRI uptake
in the state of Andhra Pradesh, despite successful trials and early
farmer experimentation, pointed to the need for changed behavior
by farmers and laborers, both individually and collectively.
Farmers with larger landholdings in South India, especially
Andhra Pradesh, experienced the need for greater managerial
time in organizing and supervising laborers to ensure timely
operations in SRI, and some began “disadoption.” With support
to CSOs through an Indian donor, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust,
SRI spread in many of the poorer rain-fed regions of Bihar,
Odisha, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, as well as the mountain
states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The surprising
spread of SRI away from irrigated Green Revolution areas to
rain-fed areas, and from farmers with larger landholdings to
farmers with small and marginal landholdings also meant a shift
toward household or local food security, with water management
(and saving) not the primary concern.
Intensive policy dialogues for SRI scaling up characterized the
fourth phase of SRI. This happened at both the national and state
levels and even a policy by the Department of Agriculture that
included SRI as part of the National Food Security Mission in
133 food-insecure districts. An informal network, the National
Consortium on SRI (NCS), that built on the work of WWF and
Sir Dorabji Tata Trust’s partners, took the discussions to the
Indian research establishment, which was still reluctant to
institutionalize ongoing SRI experiments as a regular agricultural
practice. Mainstreaming the social innovation to becoming a
system innovation, the NCS pointed out, required investments
and institutional changes in extension systems. Local
communities that were neither public nor private agents took a
lead in disseminating the innovation. This need to invest in human
and institutional capacities of communities as experimenters and
transmitters of knowledge was brought out strongly by the
experiments of various CSOs. They, however, found little
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acceptance in policy circles, with SRI seen merely as a technical
innovation that was added as an option in existing institutional
arrangements. Thus, when SRI was introduced in the National
Food Security Mission by the government, it was reduced to the
supply of weeders or hybrid seeds within the dominant input
supply paradigm of agricultural extension.
The diversity of practices enabled unanticipated policy
innovations. The Rural Development Ministry’s National Rural
Livelihood Mission and its state agencies saw in SRI an
opportunity for its empowered community resource persons from
women’s self-help groups. The poverty reduction and livelihoods
focus of the Livelihood Mission was in contrast to that of the
Departments of Agriculture that worked with and supported
large or progressive male farmers. The ongoing phase of SRI is
one where in the absence of a “strategic agency,” cross-scale
changes in complex systems do not occur easily (Moore and
Westley 2010). The System of Rice Intensification today has
features of an open-system wherein an actor could seize the
opportunity for transformative change by making these changes
across scales in the system. Left to itself, the agricultural
establishment is, however, unlikely to lead this change due to
institutional rigidities. From tentative beginnings and
experiments in early 2000, India today is a world leader in SRI,
both in terms of publication outputs and number of
experimenting farmers. Indian farmers have led the System of
Crop Intensification movement, an extension of SRI principles
to other crops, much before researchers have conducted any on-
station trials. The NCS worked with the Indian Agricultural
Research Institute to set up and conduct on-station trials on the
System of Wheat Intensification, with an interesting reversal of
roles where civil society brought in farmers and their expertise to
the research centers to conduct the trials (Dhar et al. 2015).
Indigenous varieties of rice that fell out of favor during the Green
Revolution have responded well to SRI management, enhancing
the scope for farmers to focus on varieties that improve household
nutritional security in many parts of malnourished India. Indian
researchers lead in total number of journal articles, books, and
other publications (Prasad and Barah 2013, Thiyagarajan and
Gujja 2013, Prasad 2014b, Abraham et al. 2014, Uphoff et al.
2015). The reemergence of drought, and newer narratives on
collective action and adaptations by farmers (Sen 2015), can lead
to rethinking system innovation in and through SRI. In this, CSOs
and networks are likely to play an important role.
INNOVATION SPACES AND NETWORKS IN SYSTEM
INNOVATION
The overview of evolution of SRI in India over a decade reflects
some features of innovation undergoing system transitions.
Game-changing trends such as climate change, soil degradation,
and farmers’ suicides require responses and strategies that build
and enhance communities’ capacities to experiment and change.
Conventional research focused on measuring diffusion of
innovation and adoption rates of SRI as a technology treats
communities and farmers as static entities and does not account
for the adaptations by different users who constantly shape the
innovation through experimentation. The System of Rice
Intensification in India is not one agroecological innovation
replacing a Green Revolution technology but an opportunity that
fits differently in different agroecological and institutional
contexts. Actors, farmers, and CSOs understand and interpret
SRI differently. Embedding this diversity in policy design is
important but poses challenges in the way that the social
innovation is framed. A dominant framing based on metaphors
of spread of mobile phones is that SRI has not scaled or spread
fast enough. However, from a social innovation point of view, the
creation of new innovation spaces and networks that can enable
sustainable transitions and reengage vulnerable communities is
as important as policy uptake or rapid spread of a technology.
Innovation spaces provide opportunities for actors to learn both
individually and collectively (Prasad 2009). The System of Rice
Intensification has seen the emergence of a heterogeneous
“support network” with embedding different institutional
entrepreneurs that transcends conventional agricultural networks
(Basu and Leewis 2012). The National Symposia (2006–08) and
state-level “learning alliances” and workshops enabled a few
scientists to work outside their disciplinary (and crop) biases and
integrate better with other actors. The open-source collaborative
architecture enabled emergence of a new knowledge commons in
agriculture (Prasad and Sen 2010). This has had diverse forms
such as e-groups and regional networks, joint participation in
subpanels at mainstream rice conferences, wide sharing of newer
manuals, videos and PowerPoint presentations made in different
forums, and specialized Facebook pages on equipment. The
diversity of these networks induces transformation in knowledge
systems and could avoid the kind of domination by researchers
in innovation platforms witnessed elsewhere (Schut et al. 2015).
New knowledge often resides in the interaction of diverse actors
facilitated through networks aligned, but not necessarily in
agreement, around common interests. The Cornell University
support capacity (initially CIIFAD but now SRI-Rice within
Cornell’s College of Agriculture’s International Programs) and
Norman Uphoff, in particular, have provided useful support to
young researchers in the informal transnational networks by
serving as an informal peer group and building research capacities
of researchers from developing countries by providing pro bono
editorial support and advice. Researchers have benefited from the
specialized documentation service on the SRI-Rice website
(http://sri.cals.cornell.edu/research/index.html), which provides
access to all SRI articles in a single location made possible through
coordination of many informal networks and capturing local
research that often escapes international databases.
Networks have had a silent, often invisible empowering role for
individuals within established and hierarchical organizations.
They have encouraged agricultural researchers to be “creative
dissenters” by providing space for conversations across the
boundaries of their own disciplines (Prasad et al. 2012, Prasad
2014a). Power relations are altered not only through active dissent
by CSOs and farmers groups. It often requires creative dissenters
within the scientific establishment who have the ability to listen
to nonresearch actors and translate ideas of paradigm change
and sustainability to agricultural researchers. Scientists like the
late Sanghi and Rupela were part of several multiactor networks
that had flat organizational forms. They played important roles
in empowering nonresearch actors (CSOs, farmers, and their
organizations and networks) toward pushing for an alternative
discourse in policy circles on sustainable transitions in agriculture.
Innovation needs creative dissent, and networks provide
opportunities for expressing and strengthening these capacities
(Prasad 2015).
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CONCLUSIONS
Twenty-first century agriculture in India has been known for farm
suicides, deskilling, and agricultural individualization. Coincidentally,
the spread of SRI offers an alternative narrative of farmers
reclaiming control over their livelihoods through experimentation,
collective action, adaptation, and innovation. While not all
farmers have continued with the package of practices
recommended for SRI, and as conventionally understood even
disadopted, viewing SRI from the lens of system transformation
(Westley and Antadze 2010) allows for reworking the relationship
between the social innovation (SRI) and the resilience and
reengagement of vulnerable populations. While the imperative of
change and sustainability is evident from many of the game-
changing trends in agriculture, there is a need for public policies
to rethink how to manage sustainable transitions.
Designing policies on largely technical parameters such as yields
or productivity is not likely to support transformative change
unless the social aspects of the innovation that enhance resilience
and the adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities are taken
into account. Recent literature on social innovation and social
movements indicate some contours of such a shift. The System
of Rice Intensification in India can be explained through existing
frameworks of social innovation (Moore et al. 2014), highlighting
“triggers” like drought or ecological crisis for change, or
“preparing for change” through networks and creative dissenters.
The transition to sustainability, however, is not navigated as easily
because current frameworks perhaps do not adequately account
for power relations and knowledge hierarchies in developing
country contexts that resist change. The persistence of the linear
or pipeline model of innovation deters alternatives that emerge
outside the agricultural research establishment, and sustainable
transitions in agriculture might require creative responses. In
managing a transition, researchers need to go beyond simply
building their organizations, or their academic networks, and
should concentrate on building capacity outside their
organizations (Wei-Skillern and Marciano 2008). The investment
in newer institutional forms, such as common innovation
platforms and innovation networks and learning alliances, should
be an important aspect of shifts toward sustainable intensification
of food systems (Klerkx et al. 2010, Schut et al. 2015).
As an innovation, SRI relates well to the idea of social innovation
as one that encourages collective experimentation, as expressed
in the EU’s report on “taking knowledge seriously” (Felt and
Wynne 2007), as well as in the Indian tradition of innovating at
the margins, following Gandhi. I have shown how game-changers
such as the agrarian and ecological crisis can open up spaces for
social innovations such as SRI. These innovations have the
potential for societal transformation if, using TRANSIT’s
framework, greater attention is given to narratives of change. In
the context of Indian agriculture, social innovations are
strengthened by CSOs and by their innovation networks that not
only enable the reengagement of vulnerable populations but also
provide opportunities for creative dissent. Institutionalization of
a new trajectory as a phase in TRANSIT framing does not easily
happen and would need greater space for dissent within
institutions. The Indian case also highlights the need to embed
diversity in ongoing discussions on sustainable transitions.
Responses to this article can be read online at:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/issues/responses.
php/8718
Acknowledgments:
I acknowledge the contribution of the Knowledge In Civil Society
network for insights on social movements in India, the Wageningen
University team of researchers for insights and collaborations from
the project “SRI as a socio-technical movement in India” and SRI
RIce, Cornell University for discussions and material on innovation
networks on SRI. I thank the DRIFT team and TRANSIT networks
for useful leads and theoretical insights at the Rotterdam conference
in September 2014 ,and the reviewers for their useful comments and
suggestions. Usual disclaimers apply.
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