The art of 'doing' sustainable agricultural innovation: approaches and attitudes to facilitating transitional projects
Year: 2010
Type: book
Abstract: The management of projects for sustainable innovation brings along varieties of intricacies.Facilitators play a central role in dealing with these challenges.Adopting an empirical approach, this paper discusses the practical approaches and attitudes that facilitators develop to deal with such challenges in the domain of agricultural innovation.To that end, the paper presents a list of four intricacies inherent in running projects that seek to enhance a sustainable development, based on literature: 1) the challenge of combining the ambition of sustainable change with the need for responsiveness in facilitating processes of joint planning an design; 2) the need to develop and use knowledge in a practice-oriented manner in an often science-oriented context; 3) the need to develop an innovative 'niche' within a context of vested powers; and 4) the need to reach beyond a project's duration to 'anchor' the dynamics by which its ambitions may be realised in the future.Three cases of managing projects for sustainable (agricultural) innovation are described, highlighting the practical ways in which the respective facilitators in each case deal with the four identified challenges.It is found that attitudes developed by a facilitator differ per project yet that similarities can be indentified.Difference can be observed mainly between approaches in facilitating projects that seek to explore the notion of sustainability in terms of guidelines for future practice, and in facilitating projects that aim at developing concrete implementable designs.Within these two types of projects, facilitators are seen to be engaged in a continual balancing act between two identifiable attitudes: a responsive, serviceable attitude, via which the facilitator seeks to connect with participants and be responsive to their needs and wishes (dubbed here a Learning approach), and an attitude of leadership, via which the facilitator more or less solitary decides on the way the process is to move forward (dubbed here a Leading approach).
Authors: Loeber, A., Vermeulen, T., Barbier, M., Elzen, B.
Institutions: University of Amsterdam, Wageningen University & Research
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1826599034