ICT and family farming: local, systemic and future-oriented

At the Agrifuture Days 2014, participants discussed how ICTs can contribute to improve family farming and make it more sustainable, resilient and profitable.  Work in groups alternated with more formal presentations. The working group discussions culminated in a session where the participants were asked to elaborate elements of an action plan for ICT to improve family farming. The question was : If you had to invest in ICT for family farming, where would you put your resources ? This question was asked to the participants after they worked on real cases studies of family farms to ensure a concrete grasp with the reality of family farming.

 

Very often, the outputs of interactive working groups hold in conferences or workshops  are poorly presented and passed on to a wider audience, leaving participants frustrated by the loss of the meaningful issues that the wealth of their discussion generated. Bullet point presentation in particular are usually the easiest and most common way to pass  from working groups outputs to plenary session discussion. However, some consider them that “There’s no good reason to use them, and plenty of reasons not to”.

 

At Agrifuture Days 2014, a system thinking and system mapping approach was tested with the objective of avoiding the production of a bullet points list. The process used in a working group of twelve participants combined the 1-2-4-All method, visualisation techniques using coloured cards and flip charts and a prioritization process based on the understanding of logical connections between the various ideas presented. These logical connections included anteriority (one action needs to take place before another one), influence (one action will make easier the other one take place), and synergies (having both will provide a better result that having them separately). All logical connections were made explicit and represented by informative arrows. 

 

Now let’s compare the results between a bullet point list and a system mapping. The list of priority investment participants identified is displayed in the figure on the left. It does not help very much identifying where and how to start and what should be prioritised, why and by whom. If turned into recommendations it would entice investors to make their choice according to their own preferences, competences and habits of work, leading either to a very likely business-as-usual approach of disconnected actions, or to global recommandations far away from the specific needs of family farmers.

 

The same list of actions when presented through system mapping shows a very worldview as indicated in figure 2. In this figure, ICT can serve the needs of family farming  through several interconnected actions/investments that must take place with clearly identified interactions. The

presentation of the same priorities for investment displayed here already forms an action plan.

 

 

With figure 2 every one can see that there is no priority but the need to simultaneously invest in a series of interconnected actions which will require communication means (“3G for all”, and “expert interface”), information sources and information storage (“centralised data technology” and “on line ICT platform”), informed users   (through networks) and an enabling environment to ensure that users will have the capacity to benefit from the whole system.

 

The implication is also that such a system cannot be implemented at once globally and must be tailored locally, with the direct contribution of the local users in the design of its components, including the expert interface, and the on line platform. What will be then reproducible is not the specific technology and instruments developed locally but the principles on which the system is based.

 

System thinking and system mapping not only enhance the coherence of an ICT based approach for improving family farming, they also change the relationship between ICT providers and ICT users from a top-down technocratic process to a co-construction process with a stronger endogenous dimension.