Change Laboratories in Southern Africa: Lessons From Formative Interventions in Sustainable Agriculture Workplaces

• In Event: 44.082 - Change Laboratories Across Cultures: Lessons From Formative Interventions in Work and Education

Abstract

This paper discusses how the Change Laboratory (CL) method was used to stimulate expansive learning and collective transformative agency in four sustainable agriculture workplaces in southern Africa. The study focused on three forms of a qualitatively new and advanced agriculture activity that seeks to overcome the negative social and ecological impact of conventional agriculture and productivity limitations of traditional/indigenous agriculture: Permaculture, Machobane Farming System (MFS) and Organic Farming (Mukute, 2015). The paper discusses the CLs in relation to:

•Cultural-historical background, phase of development of the sustainable agriculture activity, and production of mirror data through ethnographic research;

•Application of two epistemological principles of double stimulation and ascending from the abstract to the concrete to surface, analyse and tackle historically emerging contradictions, produce and implement creative practical solutions; and

•Empirical analysis of the learning, agency development and transformative actions that emerged from the formative intervention process that took place in and between the CL sessions.

The following four cases studies were conducted between 2008 and 2013:

•St Margaret Primary School and its community under the Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE) in Hwedza district, Zimbabwe. The research participants were school teachers, pupils, farmers and agricultural extension workers (AEWs) practising and promoting Permaculture and facing production and marketing challenges;

•Isidore Organic Community in urban and peri-urban Durban in South Africa, comprising organic producers, facilitators, donors and marketers. It was driven by the need to develop a local vibrant organic value chain and system; and

•MFS farmers and promoters and government AEWs in Mafeteng and Mohale’s Hoek districts of Lesotho where the thrust was to find ways to foster the adoption of and budgetary support for the MFS.

•The fourth case study was conducted in eight districts of Mashonaland East Province of Zimbabwe and involved 32 newly established organic farmer associations that worked with three organic promoting organisations and government AEWs to produce and market organic crops.

Inductive, abductive and retroductive analyses were used to analyse the CL processes and reflect on the results. Agentive talk analysis (Sannino, 2008; Mukute & Lotz-Sisitka, 2012) was used to trace the emergence of agentive actions.
In all the case studies the principle of double stimulation was used to first identify the major problematic issues faced by the farmers (first stimulus) and the use of conceptual tools that help the research participants to grasp contradictions and tackle them (second stimulus): mainly models of second and third generation activity systems, and the expansive learning cycle. This resulted in the generation of site-specific solutions that research participants applied using the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete in working towards collectively constructed future directions of their activities – zone of proximal development (ZPD). Contradictions served as push factors and the ZPD served as the pull factor in the research participants’ learning and agency development (Sannino & Engeström, 2016). Some of the solutions in each case study had longer-term generative and transformative consequences.

Author

• Mutizwa Mukute, Rhodes University