Pathways of Change in Africa

Download or read book Pathways of Change in Africa written by Ian Scoones and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the literature of sustainable development, many have argued for the encouragement of mixed farming (involving the integration of livestock and crops on one farm) to meet the needs of small-scale African farming systems. Scoones and Wolmer (both with the Environment Group at the Institute of Development Studies, U. of Sussex) argue that behind this argument is the implicit or explicit assumption that mixed farming represents a stage in a normative evolutionary process towards an ideal. They suggest that this view is mistaken and that mixed farming is only one of a range of possible pathways of change in agricultural systems. They present case studies from Ethiopia, Mali, and Zimbabwe and analyze how social actors have varying access to resources. This variance is often due to institutional arrangements that are too often ignored in discussions of mixed farming and therefore fail to take into account situations that could help development efforts to be more effectively targeted. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR