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Technology, institutions and development

Technology, institutions and development:

Perspectives from economics, anthropology and geography on agrarian change

DIME Workshop
Max Planck Institute of Economics
Jena, Germany
February 18-19, 2011

Aims

Development studies have devoted a large amount of research to understand the processes and impacts of institutional and technological change, using different theoretical and methodological approaches. Notable examples are the post WWII contributions of Hirschman, Rosenstein-Rodan and Myrdal among others, recent economic growth literature, anthropological studies of participatory development, international political economy, economic and cultural geographies of globalization, and the evolutionary and institutional approaches that incorporate insights from various social science sub-disciplines, including economic sociology of networks. Despite the richness of contributions, crossbreeding between different research programs and disciplines has been occasional, and cross-disciplinary discussions of research results on focused issues are rare.

A privileged vantage point for conducting such cross-disciplinary discussions is provided by the phenomenon of agrarian change, which has allowed detailed analyses of the relations between institutions (e.g. property rights, socio-cultural power structures, colonial burdens and their post-colonial incarnations), agri-production technologies, exchange practices and wider rural development. The study of agrarian change has also sparked debates on appropriate technology, structural change, poverty alleviation, distribution of resources, and the functioning of markets. Recently, in the wake of the 2007-8 food crisis and massive land-grab investments in Africa for food and fuel, coupled with continuing smallholder distress and indebtedness in fast-growing countries such as India and China, agrarian change and food security/sovereignty have become crucial points of debate on development processes and policies at the national and global scales.

We aim to bring together contributions – theoretical and empirical, qualitative and quantitative, from any disciplinary background – that focus on the multifaceted interactions between (groups of) individuals, science and technology, institutional structures, and the different social practices associated with them in development processes. We especially encourage contributions that map these interactions in the context of the current agrarian transformation in developing countries through further integration into global and local branded markets, changing patterns of use and distribution of resources (e.g. due to climate change impacts), and the multi-dimensional sustainability of development processes.

Topics

The following is an incomplete list of themes and topics that should serve as a guide to submit papers, and for which one or more leading scholars in the field has been invited to contribute

AGRARIAN CHANGE:

• Technological change in agriculture (A)
• Production and exchange practices (B)
• Agricultural markets: local and global (C)
• Value chains, contract farming, fair trade, and the multiple forms of global demand/production relations (D)
• The impact of bio-fuels on agrarian change (E)
• GMO’s and the market of seeds (F)
• Land distribution and land grabbing (G)
• Quality standards and certification (H)

TECHNOLOGY, INSTITUTIONS AND DEVELOPMENT:

• Power and institutional asymmetries in the process of development (I)
• Gender issues in institutional and technological change to development (J)
• Science and technology: producers and users (K)
• Change in consumption, structural change and agrarian change (L)
• Economic development: evolutionary approaches (M)
• Development studies: historical views (N)