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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2010

THE NEW COMMONS IN AGRICULTURE: LESSONS FROM THE MARGINS AND SRI IN INDIA

Résumé

With increasing evidence of the unfavourable ecological footprint of the industrialagricultural paradigm, ominous climate changes, and embarrassing social and economic crises in India manifested in farmer suicides over the last decade, there is an urgent need for India's agricultural research system to give more attention to sustainability as well as equity in innovation systems. This requires openness to acknowledging past failures and a willingness to reconfigure the research system's relations with non-research actors. This paper looks at possible lessons to guide this reconfiguration by examining the rapid and surprising spread of a novel sustainable innovation in India – the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). SRI shows how a less hierarchical and less linear architecture of innovation has enabled a new ‘knowledge commons' to emerge in Indian agriculture, contributing substantially to household-level food security, also enabling farmers to cope with vulnerabilities. Open innovation in SRI has enabled the creation of this new commons in an era when privatization of agricultural knowledge has gained sway. Rainfed areas that have been marginal to the Green Revolution are becoming more central to the establishment of sustainability regimes. This innovation has been enabled by the extensive use of the internet, based on new kinds of networking within civil society playing an important role ensuring collaboration among diverse actors from the farm to the national level. The paper highlights the importance of facilitating knowledge dialogues, learning alliances and innovation networks to enhance innovation capacities. ‘Open innovation' and the new ‘commons' have important policy implications for the future of innovation systems and sustainable development.
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hal-00521398 , version 1 (27-09-2010)

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  • HAL Id : hal-00521398 , version 1

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Shambu Prasad Chebrolu, Debashish Sen. THE NEW COMMONS IN AGRICULTURE: LESSONS FROM THE MARGINS AND SRI IN INDIA. ISDA 2010, Jun 2010, Montpellier, France. 11 p. ⟨hal-00521398⟩

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