Moreover, the fact that one system is not as productive as another—which is only one of many measures of performance in an agricultural system—does not mean that it can be transformed through simple imitation. Adaptation, as understood in ecology and evolution, is not “adaptation towards” some target or end goal, but “adaptation from” some starting place, and the situation is no different in agricultural systems. This research turned the conventional approach to driving agricultural adaptation on its head by emphasizing relative change from the current practices and performance, rather than to some optimal or idealized state. Trials were conducted not on research stations under carefully controlled conditions, but in farmers’ fields and with their full participation, such that the results would best capture the full complexity and heterogeneity of the system. This research was conducted over three years through partnership with local and international non-government organizations and thousands of participating rural households. It began with 50 trials in 2014, expanded to 420 trials in 2015,fodder sprouting system and finished with nearly 600 in 2016. These trials were split among 6 major crops and 7 regions spanning the heterogeneity of Senegal and The Gambia.
Half of the trials tested multiple new cultivars and the other half, which are discussed here, tested alternative practices relating to 1) certified seed stock of new cultivars, 2) inorganic fertilization, and 3) local organic materials. These pathways are all sometimes used to improve yield, but differ widely in cost and availability. Eighteen different treatments were tested on each of the 1000+ trials, one of which was the common practice of using local seed and no fertility inputs, and another was the common official recommendation of using new seed, high levels of inorganic fertilization, and no organic amendments. These trials found that each of these three adaptive pathways—new seed, inorganic fertilizer, and organic amendments—could improve the production of rainfed crops, and the benefits were reliable across these countries, comparable to each other, and largely additive in combination. The recommended practice, which relies on imported high cost inputs, on average doubled the crop yield, but this same result could be had through three of the other treatments, which were all lower cost and less dependent on infrastructure and global markets. Other practices had a greater effect than the recommendation, and the addition of a low rate of manure to the recommended practice led to nearly a tripling of yield. However, the outcome of these trials was not to identify some new general recommendation for maximum production but to get away from that top-down prescriptive sort of approach entirely and to emphasize the role of farmer decision-making in agricultural adaptation.
That there are multiple adaptive options rather than a single “best practice” is of critical importance, and presenting farmers with options and allowing them to determine what it best for their circumstances is a new and highly effective means of driving change within complex and heterogeneous agricultural systems. Bringing diverse perspectives to bear on shared problems or interests is an increasingly popular intellectual strategy that is being applied a wide range of issues, such as those relating to social and environmental concerns . This approach is explicitly central to the trans- and inter-disciplinary literature and is foundational to many recently emerged fields, such as environmental and international studies . Even many academic fields that are now often considered to be coherent disciplines in themselves, such as ecology, were founded as intentionally integrative studies and retain high internal heterogeneity . However, these discussions among diverse participants can easily be hampered by unnecessary confusion resulting from semantic differences among the participating intellectual disciplines . The need to develop a shared language is often identified as critical for cross-disciplinary communication, but there has been limited application of this idea to practice or discussion of what such semantic inquiry should look like .
This study focuses on the use of the word “development” in the field of “development studies,” which is a particularly tricky example of the more general semantic problem. Whereas some interdisciplinary discussions have a central word that is broadly understood in a common way, such as perhaps “international” in “international studies,” this is not the case in this field. Instead “development” is used in diverse but highly specific ways that vary widely among the interacting disciplines, yet it is also relied upon to bring those disciplines together and provide coherence to the resulting discussions . In this case it is not likely that the participants would settle for a single shared concept, nor any reason why they should. Rather than arguing that a specific understanding of “development” should be given priority, this study presents a summary of the diverse but related ways in which the word is used and how that use has changed over time. This paper begins by introducing the semantic issues surrounding the use of “development” in development studies then discusses the philosophical foundations of semantic inquiry, with a focus on Socrates and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Prominent literature in development studies is then surveyed to produce a classification scheme, or descriptive typology, of the diverse ways in which the word is used in these interdisciplinary conversations. This typology is then used to perform textual analysis on certain influential and provocative texts and on select publications in the journal World Development from 1973, 1993, and 2013, an analysis that allows for the identification of general changes in use over time.The final chapter of the seminal book Doctrines of Development is entitled “The Jargon of Development” and is focused around the question “what is development?” . The authors Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton conclude, “development defies definition,” and support this claim with a wide-ranging critique of diverse attempts to provide a positive answer to this seemingly straightforward question.
This conclusion and the method of inquiry echo the first sentence of the book, which is “Development seems to defy definition, although not for a want of definitions to offer” . The authors’ intent with such statements is clearly not to argue that the term is therefore meaningless, but rather to encourage a more subtle investigation, one that requires the reading of the several hundred intervening pages. This line of questioning and the resulting ambiguous conclusion are not uncommon in semantic discussions of “development” within the field of development studies. For example, James Ferguson begins his preface to The AntiPolitics Machine with the same question and concludes that while it is “almost nonsensical to denythat there is such as thing as ‘development,’ or to dismiss it as a meaningless concept … it seems almost impossible to question it, or to refer it to any standard beyond its own” . He then proceeds to focus in on a specific interpretation of “development” and critique it from a standard of his own. Ferguson and many other modern commentators, such as Amaryta Sen in Development as Freedom , Caroline Moser in Gender Planning and Development , and Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development ,microgreen fodder system take issue with some conventional understanding of “development” and seek to expose unappreciated implications , define new goals , demand expanded dialogues , and encourage the transition to a “post-development” future . However, while each author attacks some conventional interpretation of “development” and presents an alternative understanding, their views of “development” have little in common. Escobar is clearly not seeking to move beyond Sen’s concept of expanding human freedoms, nor is Moser explaining how to conduct gender planning within what Ferguson describes as a political vacuum. While all of these authors make careful and diverse arguments attacking some understanding of “development,” they also rely heavily on the word itself to support their divergent positions. For example, Escobar uses the word over 150 times prior to the first chapter of the book that has since defined him as a “post-development” thinker. The result is the ironic intellectual situation where a central term apparently cannot be defined, yet it continues to define the discussion itself. A partial explanation for this situation lies in the semantic history of the term.
The deep etymology of “development” is uncertain, but one prominent theory is that it comes from the Latin words “dis,” to open or part, and “volvere,” to roll . In support of this, the modern English word can be traced more immediately to the Old French term “developer,” which appears in texts starting in the mid 1700s where it carried the literal meaning of “to unfold or unfurl” . By 2017, however, the Wikipedia entry for the word was a “disambiguation” page with over 60 links to more specific entries. Eleven of these are classified under “Social Science,” eight under “International and Regional,” and three under “Land Use,” all of which are major overlapping themes in the interdisciplinary field of development studies. . This pattern suggests a semantic radiation, where the historical root word differentiated over to time to lead to a variety of highly specialized uses. While this word may have once related to a single concept, this is no longer the case. The diverse perspectives that contribute to development studies represent a wide range of these specialized understandings of “development.” By and large, economists use it to imply economic growth, politicians recognize it as referring to policies and deliberate interventions, anthropologists imply the side effects of colonization and globalization, and historians interpret it as some specific result of interacting historical forces. Within each of these fields, the occurrence of “development” in a text or conversation is unlikely to cause significant semantic confusion. However, when these communities interact, the interpretation of even a seemingly well-qualified phrase, such as “the process of global economic development,” is highly dependent on the specific background of each reader. “Development” is therefore not an ambiguous term because it has not yet been adequately de- fined, but rather because it has been rigorously defined in diverse but related ways. As Cowen and Shenton point out, “development” in such discussions “comes to be defined in a multiplicity of ways because there are a multiplicity of ‘developers’” . This presents a semantic situation that is unlike terms that are ambiguous due to the lack of any specific use, and it increases the odds that discussants depending on the word “development” might be talking rigorously but entirely past each other. This semantic investigation of the term “development” may seem to lack the moral and political overtones that are common in development studies, but no less than Confucius identified this “rectification of names” as the appropriate first step to take in pursuing normative goals. “If names be not correct,” he writes in the Analects, “language is not in accordance with the truth of things,” and the resulting confusions will undermine subsequent efforts . The philosopher Henry Bergson takes a similar but more general position when he says that the common “first error” in trying to understand a system of thought is “to take for the constitutive element of doctrine what was only the means of expressing it.” . Given the importance of the larger human issues that come to the surface in discussions of “development” and the benefits of drawing from multiple perspectives, it would be a shame if the conversations were then undermined or inhibited by avoidable semantic misunderstandings. This paper therefore leaves it to others to explore the concepts associated with “development,” and instead addresses the less glamorous work of shoring up the semantic framework that supports these conversations.The aforementioned semantic inquiries into “development” pose the question “what is ‘development?’” and expect that it be answered in the positive with “‘development’ is ________.” When it cannot be, the authors then conclude that “development” cannot be defined. However, this approach rests on a common but naïve philosophical view of semantic inquiry that equates meaning with an explicit denotative definition. As a result, the seemingly nihilistic conclusions, while useful as a rhetorical tool, should not be understood as the result of a rigorous semantic investigation. The “what is X?” form of questioning was widely popularized by Socrates and other early Greek philosophers as a fundamental method of inquiry, and they considered a failure to supply a satisfactory response to this question as an indication that either the term was meaningless, the respondent was ignorant, or both. However, such a conclusion was in fact often the point of their questioning, and Socrates repeatedly states that recognizing the extent of his own ignorance is sufficient consolation for not answering the original question.