Beyond Farmer First: Rural People's Knowledge, Agricultural Research and Extension Practice - Hardcover

The purpose of this book is to reveal how agricultural research and extension, far from being discrete, rational acts, are in fact part of a process of coming to terms with conflicting interests and viewpoints, a process in which choices are made, alliances formed, exclusions effected, and worldviews imposed. By going beyond Farmer First, this theoretically informed perspective describes agricultural development as what it is: a highly ideological and political process. As Robert Chambers notes in his foreword, the concerns of Farmer First with performance and Beyond Farmer First with process indicate that a radical rethinking of knowledge, power and agricultural science is well under way.

Ian Scoones is co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex and joint convenor of the IDS-hosted Future Agricultures Consortium. He is an agricultural ecologist by original training whose interdisciplinary research links the natural and social sciences. His most recent book is Avian Influenza: Science, Policy and Politics.