Generating transformative agency among horticultural producers: An activity-theoretical approach to transforming Integrated Pest Management

• Published in: Agricultural systems 2015-10, Vol.139, p.38-49
• Main Authors: Vänninen, Irene, Pereira-Querol, Marco, Engeström, Yrjö
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activity theory; Expansive learning; Integrated pest management; Intervention; Social learning; Transformative agency
• ISSN: 0308-521X; 1873-2267
• DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2015.06.003

This study presents a systemic innovation in the context of Integrated Pest Management – IPM. We introduce the Change Laboratory method as a tool for transforming pest management in a community of greenhouse firms that are interdependent through a shared pest. The objective of the study was to see if the Change Laboratory method, based on an activity theoretical and expansive learning approach, is appropriate for promoting the agency among greenhouse growers so that they become transformative agents of their own activity. The study is based on deductive and inductive content analysis of transcribed discourse data from six Change Laboratory sessions. By analyzing how expressions of transformative agency and its different forms of expression unfolded over the sessions, we showed that criticizing was the most important agentive talk that fed the reconceptualization of the current, problematic activity. The analysis of the envisioning expressions of transformative agency indicated a collectively produced reconstruction (re-design) of the object of IPM activity, i.e. a radical change, in activity-theoretical terms, in the activity of whitefly IPM. As a result of the process, the growers began knowledge sharing and collaborative learning in two villages of the study area, using a learning club as the platform. In contrast to traditional views of externally induced change, the agentive actions were performed by the growers themselves instead of external change agents. Being able to identify the discursive transformative agency actions in the talk of farmers can improve the capability of interventionists to support transformative change when implementing IPM through co-innovation. We propose that revealing the object of farmers’ and other stakeholders’ pest management activity through analysis of transformative agency actions during formative interventions could contribute to better understanding what it takes to implement IPM in ‘local conditions’. This study provided us an opportunity to contrast and compare the activity-theory-based approach to facilitated change with other social learning approaches to change, with their specific system concepts, in the domain of natural resource management. •Change Laboratory was used for the first time to transform IPM in horticulture.•IPM of a whitefly changed from partial optimization into a communal approach.•The birth of the new IPM concept was traced from expressions of transformative agency.•The analysis revealed how t