Society faces enormous challenges in the transition to sustainable rural development. We are unlikely to make this transition unless we move away from the 20th-century paradigm that sees the world as a logical, linear system focused on “scaling up” the use of technologies to reach hundreds of millions of smallholders.
In a new article published this week on NextBillion, Lennart Woltering of CIMMYT contends that “farming communities are unlikely to continue using a new practice or technology if the surrounding system remains unchanged, since it is this very system that shaped their conventional way of farming.”
