Sustainable Agricultural Techniques
and Performance Oriented Empowerment
An Actor-Network Theory Approach to CEDAC Agriculturaland Empowerment Programmes in Cambodia
by Hart Nadav Feuer
Thesis, Master of Philosophy
in Development Studies
Queen Elizabeth HouseSt Antony’s College
University of Oxford

April, 2008

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis was made possible by the care, support and critical feedback of many people in
Cambodia and England. I am most indebted to my advisor, Graham Brown, for putting
clarity to my faults, and to my field assistant, Piseth Som, who was my best informant andgreat friend.
In Cambodia, I was cared for with the utmost generosity and hospitality by the senior staff of
CEDAC, including Vuthy Bao, Seng Suon, Koma Yang Saing, Kimthan Yi and Thy Or. My
gratitude goes to Koma and Seng for reviewing my final drafts and finding those errors that
one else could. For hosting me warmly in Angtasaom and Vaspors Village, my thanks go to
Sister Sokha, Mr Leak and Uncle Mom. For nursing me back into Cambodian life andalways being the warmest friends, my heart goes to Sary Seng and his wife Pisey Meas.
Special thanks to Ayako Hiwasa and Payal Rajpal, two good friends in Cambodia who
provided me unsparingly with their companionship and perspectives. For putting up with myodd working hours in Phnom Penh, I thank the staff of the Center for Khmer Studies,
especially Kethya Kheng, Philippe Peycamp and warmest housekeeper I know. Last but notleast, my appreciation goes to the numerous field staff of Zone II for putting up with myconstant presence and onerous questioning.
In England, my gratitude goes to Julie Taylor, who edited my messes, and in America, myfamily for making that last-minute edit.
Last but not least, my heartfelt appreciation goes to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation forsupporting me so comfortably and caringly through these past two years. May there be many
more years to come!

ABSTRACT
Presently, there is strong evidence to support the position that development strategies
focussing on sustainable agriculture, especially low external input cultivation, are rapidly
increasing in influence. Investigating the dialectic of the evolution in ideas and practices forsustainable agricultural development is important for an understanding of how and whether
this new “shift” will affect poverty and development. Without risky and poorly-understoodinvestments in agrochemical inputs, many poor Cambodian farmers have been able toachieve increased yields over 100% whilst reducing water consumption by employing the
System of Rice Intensification (SRI). The promotion of SRI, and its corollary sustainable
initiatives, have been hailed as a major success and have seen full integration into national
development schemes and international NGO work. Such technology or technique-oriented
development programmes often expand into local organising, empowerment and private
sector practice. This progression often involves increasingly strict normative prescriptions
about how society should be transformed and how this promotes sustainability. Definitionsof sustainability, however, tend to be fluid and are thus easily adaptable to new contexts, andeasily appropriated to justify various measures. This thesis explores the pathways throughwhich sustainable agricultural programming has transgressed the boundaries of strict
ecological sustainability by highlighting the tensions and advantages of the evolving NGOmodel of extension, participatory development practice, and socially responsible enterprise.
By exploring the agricultural livelihoods of involved Cambodian farmers empirically, and inethnographic detail, and by analysing the concomitant evolution of organisational discourseand practice, I will show how an initial focus on technical agricultural improvement andpoverty-reduction has transformed into grand plans for widespread sustainable enterprisepromotion in Cambodia. This has been marked by a shift in accountability that favours apassive, critical mass-based strategy for drawing in previously uninitiated farmers, rather than
the grassroots-based micromanagement approach favoured since the inception of ruraldevelopment programming. I argue that this is symptomatic of the larger convergence ofpromising sustainable agricultural initiatives upon the reformist, technocentrist andincreasingly hegemonic ‘market sustainability’ or ‘developmentalist’ paradigm of sustainable
development.

Table of Contents

1

List of Acronyms

2

1. Introduction
2. Livelihoods To Actor-Worlds: Situating Theories Of Sustainability And Rural
Development
2.1. Actor-Network Theory
2.2. Sustainable Livelihoods Approach
2.3. Melding the Discourses of Sustainability and Agricultural Development
2.3.1. The Discourse of Sustainability
2.3.2. The Discourse of Agricultural Development
2.4. Non-Governmental Organisations: Brokers and Translators
2.4.1. The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture
2.4.2. The System of Rice Intensification
2.5. Applied Actor-Network Theory
3. Encountering the Extension and Empowerment System
3.1. Historical Context of Agricultural Production in Cambodia
3.2. CEDAC Programming in Zone II
3.3. CEDAC’s Typology of Farmers
3.3.1. The “pioneers”
3.3.2. The “wait-and-sees”
3.3.3. The “difficult group”
3.4. The “strategic agents”
3.5. Encountering the Farmer: Stereotypes, Sympathies and Frustrations
4. Results: Investigating Past and Future Narratives
4.1. The Current Situation, Looking Backward
4.1.1. Asset-based Livelihood Assessment
4.1.2. Scalar Valuation of Rice Cultivation Practices and Yield
4.1.3. Through the Figures: Accomplishment and Build-up
4.1.4. From Dynamic Action Research to Holy Pedestal: The Birth andAdolescence of SRI
4.1.5. Structural Constraints to the Adoption of SRI
4.1.6. Social Constraints to the adoption of SRI
4.1.7. Conclusion: How CEDAC arrived at its present state
4.2. The Current Situation: Looking Forward
5. Conclusions and Discussion
5.1. Prospects

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Appendix 1 – Research Methods and Methodology
Appendix 2 – Rubrics and Factor Analysis Weights
Appendix 3 – Secondary Statistical Results
Appendix 4 – Occupations Listed by Salary Classification
Appendix 5 – Interview List

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Bibliography

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List of Acronyms
CBA
CBO
CEDAC
CIIFAD
FA
FCS
NAPMP
FSR
GRET
IAK
IF
IRRI
ITK
LEISA
MAFF
MPF
NGO
PAR
PRA
SID
SRI
TOT
VBA

Feuer

Community-Based Animator
Community-Based Organisation
Centre d’Étude et de Développement Agricole Cambodgien;
Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture
Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development
Farmers Association
Farmer Community School
Natural Agri-Product Marketing Program
Farming Systems ResearchGroup for Research and Exchange of Technology
Indigenous Agricultural Knowledge
Interested Farmer
International Rice Research Institute
Indigenous Technical Knowledge
Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture
Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Government of Cambodia)
Multi-Purpose Farm
Non-Governmental Organization
Participatory Action ResearchParticipatory Rural Appraisal
System of Intensification and Diversification
System of Rice Intensification
Transfer of Technology
Village-Based Animator

2

1.0

INTRODUCTION

In development discourse, the concept of sustainability has grown to encompass awide range of ideas and practices, ranging from specific methods for improving ecoefficiency to broad theories concerning how to (re)structure consumer society (Jacobs, 1999;
Lélé, 1991; O'Riordan, 1981, 1989; O'Riordan & Voisey, 1997; Tripp, 2006; UNCED,
1992a: Section II, 1992b). In this thesis, I follow Jacobs’s (1999: 281, note 217) view thatsustainability has achieved ‘buzz word’ status; it is employed broadly in a cavalier mannerand has thus escaped definition. In practice, sustainability is operationalised by each user,
often in a non-linear, ecological process of long-term planning mediated by short-term
problem solving (Judge, 1990). In the short-term, sustainability is often provisionally defined
as a point of reference, such as sustainable rice production, which then implies the applicationof various agroecological techniques for improving production. Promoters of thesetechniques, such as development NGOs, eventually recognise that agricultural techniques areof limited use unless broader market and societal configurations are brought into alignment
with production realities. Thus, engaging with short-term issues breeds a longer-term—andbroader—view. For the long-term, it becomes clear that the path towards a sustainableoutcome (e.g., sustainable consumer society, sustainable industry, sustainable agriculture,etc.) involves comprehensive engagement with society and markets. In this thesis, I criticallyexamine how rural livelihoods are affected by this ad-hoc (re)configuration of idea andpractice of sustainability through studying the past and future programming of theCambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC).1 The question to
begin this analysis is: what are the implications for beneficiaries and NGOs of continuously
redefining sustainability to suit new social realities, given the increasing dominance ofmarket-based frameworks in civil society?
1This is a French acronym, the original of which is Centre d’Étude et de Développement Agricole Cambodgien.

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This thesis explores how and why sustainable agricultural programming has expanded
beyond the boundaries of strict ecological sustainability and made compromises with thecapitalist world system. It highlights the tensions and advantages of the evolving NGOmodel of socially responsible enterprise adopted over time by CEDAC. In particular, I show
how an initial focus on the improvement in rice-based agricultural livelihoods has
transformed into an imperative for building broad market-based framework for the promotionof sustainable agriculture in Cambodia. Improving rural livelihoods has thus become a byproduct of system expansion rather than a purposeful activity unto itself. This has beenmarked by a shift in accountability that favours a passive, market demand-pull-based strategy
for drawing in previously uninitiated farmers, rather than the grassroots approach favoured
since the inception of rural development programming. I argue that this shift is symptomaticof the larger convergence of promising sustainable agricultural initiatives upon the reformist,
technocentrist and increasingly hegemonic ‘market sustainability’ paradigm of sustainable
development (SustainAbility, 2003). This state of affairs concurrently provides immense
potential for displacing traditional industrialist modes of agricultural development, but also
makes it increasingly vulnerable to cooptation by them (Jacobs, 1999: 281).
The primary approach taken for defining the domain of study is the ‘sustainable
livelihoods’ framework, which outlines how rural livelihoods, and which vectors of socialand ecological sustainability should be studied. The primary theoretical grounding derives
from actor-network theory, which sees the evolving activities and goals of sustainableagricultural development as the product of self-reaffirming ‘translation’ (i.e., networkbuilding) on the part of NGOs, local organisations, academics, and professionals. In order tobegin making sense of the arena in which this practical and discursive battle is being waged, I
directly introduce the theoretical framework in Chapter 2 and outline how it is used toilluminate the concepts of sustainability, agricultural development as well as the conceptual
space of non-governmental organisations. Chapter 3 describes the Cambodian context within

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which this discussion will take place and the institutional background of this case study. In
Chapter 4, I present statistical and ethnographic evidence for the institutional shift towards a
performance orientation and its implications for accountability. In Chapter 5, I conclude.

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2.0

LIVELIHOODS TO ACTOR-WORLDS: SITUATING THEORIES OFSUSTAINABILITY AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

This study focuses on two relatively discrete subjects—farmer families andinstitutions—and how they are bound together in a chain of relational macro-microinteractions that form a particular representation of the macro-social space of sustainable
development (Knorr-Cetina, 1981). I explore how one NGO melds together the discourses ofsustainability and agricultural development to construct its own proprietary definition ofsustainable development (Latour, 1987). In particular, I focus on how various ‘technologies
of knowledge’—such as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), group formation and social
enterprising—have been employed instrumentally by CEDAC in order to enrol farmerparticipants into its practical model of sustainable development. This thesis draws on actornetwork theory to illuminate the processes of enrolment and network expansion and toreconcile the macro-micro levels of analysis in this case. As a discursive tool forunderstanding the conceptual lens from which CEDAC views rural communities, I use aqualified form of CEDAC’s own ‘Sustainable Livelihoods Approach’ (SLA).

2.1

Actor-Network Theory

Developed in diffuse fashion from the late 1970’s by sociologists Bruno Latour,
Michel Callon and John Law, actor-network theory (ANT) primarily evolved as a reply to thetheoretical limitations confronting sociological scholarship on the interaction between
science, technology and society. Although ANT was initially employed as a theoretical andmethodological frame for untangling the messy relationship between the hard sciences andtheir social embeddedness (Callon, 1980, 1986b; Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1987,

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1988), it has increasingly been used to analyse institutional behaviour, the sociotechnicalnature of ‘projects’ parented by organisations and the non-human objects and technologies
which mediate group functioning (Callon, 1991; Latour, 2004, 2005). Frequently
misunderstood or oversimplified as another framework for analysing ‘social networks’ and‘agency’ (Latour, 2 May 1997), ANT is actually something of a non-framework, in that it
favours a methodological toolkit that champions heterogeneity of actors (or actants) (Callon,
1986a: 19), open uncertainty about selection and constant dislocation (or churn) rather thanstatic states (cf. Callon, 1986a: 27-28; Latour, 2005: 11-12, 59-60). ANT is a particularappropriate theoretical framework due to the diverse nature of CEDAC initiatives andstakeholders, the organisation’s embeddedness within larger discourses of sustainableagriculture and rural development, and the presence of non-human technological elements
such as SRI.
Central to the understanding of ANT is the concept of ‘translation’, which is a mannerof imposed collaboration by which actors enrol others into, or maintain their presence in, an‘actor-world’. Actor-worlds, which are often conflated with ‘social networks’, areoperational spaces within which actors continually renegotiate their roles and redefine theirfunctionality. Aggregate acts of translation maintain the coherence of the actor-world andrecruit new support. This is done in a number of ways. Interessement, one form oftranslation, is the act of using enrolment to interest an actor by engaging in indirect
incentivising. Another form of translation is the strategy of rendering involvement in theactor-world indispensable by creating a “geography of obligatory passage points” (Callon,
1986a: 26-27), through which recruits traverse without necessarily comprehending theircontribution to the overall functioning of the actor-world. This form of translation relates toanother form, namely Problematisation, which involves the dismemberment of a larger
problem into small bits that are manageable, but at the same time give the impression of
being critical to the ultimate (re)solution of the larger ‘problem’. The last type of translation

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I will discuss is displacement—a set of roles and activities that keep members “busy”, andwhich tend to breed new activities that distance the actor from the implications of the ‘matterof concern’. Displacement is similar to the idea of institutionalisation commonly found inorganisational ethnography literature.
The result of aggregate translation exercises of actants is to maintain the coherence ofan actor-world. An actor-network, in contrast, is not an object, but a concept used to describe
collective translation (Latour, 2005: 131). It is useful to compare actor-networks to social
movements—both involve sprawling actor-worlds and actors (self-described and not)performing day-to-day activities that contribute to the identity and functionality of the social
movement. The main differences are that there is a tendency to reify social movements (e.g.,
the human rights movement, the environmental movement) and crystallise their goals,
whereas actor-networks are processual and conceptual. In this study, sustainable agriculture
and rural development are conceptual spaces maintained by actor-networking, “under” which
actor-worlds such as development NGOs, agricultural techniques, government and villagebased organisations are engaged in a self-reinforcing process of translation. Throughout thisthesis, I will italicise words related to actor-network theory if the reference is ambiguous.

2.2

Sustainable Livelihoods Approach

The sustainable livelihoods approach, originating in the work of Robert Chambers andGordon Conway (1992) at the Institute for Development Studies, is a largely institutionalised
format for rural appraisal. Once the flagship appraisal tool for the UK Department ofInternational Development (DfID), SLA has since declined in prominence (Batterbury, 24January 2008), although it continues to be employed officially and informally by manyagencies and local NGOs, including CEDAC. The approach is essentially a normative lensfor viewing rural life, in which ‘livelihoods’ are comprised of the abilities, assets (including

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both material and social) and activities required for a means of living. Livelihoods are
considered ‘sustainable’ if they can cope with and recover from shocks, maintain or enhancetheir capabilities and assets, all the while not undermining the natural resource base on which
they depend (cf. DfID, 2001). SLA, furthermore, is action-oriented insofar as its explicit goal
is to provide a means of thinking about the objectives, scope and priorities of development,so as to enhance performance in poverty reduction. The primary areas of interest are thecontexts (policy setting, history, agroecology, socio-economic conditions), including what
combination of livelihood resources (human, physical, and social capital) result in thecapability to follow various livelihood strategies (new cultivation practices, diversification,
migration, etc.) and to what extent these strategies produce sustainable outcomes (Scoones,
1998). These areas of interest are generally operationalised in various indicators, as specificdata gathering techniques and as strategies for presenting information in reports.
Because SLA has been institutionalised as an interdisciplinary lens for data gatheringand interpretation by many development NGOs, it serves the academic researcher as apractical basis from which to analyse institutional activity, behaviour and discourse. It is not,however, a matter of adopting the same approach and cross-checking the results of NGO
reports, but of studying ‘through’ the framework of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ to criticallyunderstand the internal logic of institutions employing this approach. However, this does notpreclude the researcher from using aspects of the approach that are, amongst other things,
intuitively appropriate for the subjects of research. Indeed, SLA has brought together auseful relational view of practices, forms of ‘capital’, and institutions that is useful forunderstanding agricultural change and intervention. However, SLA is not unconditionallysuitable, and many of its normative elements and theoretical blind spots have been criticised(Meagher, 24 January 2008). In this thesis, I use the organising principles of SLA to eamine
issues of risk, vulnerability, adaptation, inclusion, and ecological sustainability. I also SLA

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to explore, from a bottom-up perspective, how institutional processes (formal and informal)
mediate or facilitate livelihood strategies and outcomes.
To prevent confusion, throughout this thesis I will refer to ‘livelihoods’ separately inits softer definitional form, whilst ‘sustainable livelihoods’ will refer more specifically to
SLA.

2.3

Melding the Discourses of Sustainability and Agricultural Development

2.3.1

The Discourse of Sustainability

Contemporary theories of sustainability in agriculture are largely an emanation fromthe Global North, and in particular from the influences of environmentalism and postindustrialism and, later, neo-liberal economic discourse (Adams, 1990). The early paradigmof sustainability was largely normative in nature, emerging from post-industrialist atavistic
notions about returning to nature, leading simpler lives and honouring rural farm heritage (cf.
Leopold, 1981; White, 1967; Wilson, 1996). The collective translation of embedded actors
such as animal rights activists, family and artisan farmers, discriminating consumers andconcerned agronomists have radically increased environmental awareness and enrolled
support for international health and environmental agreements (Singer, 1974). More recently,
this paradigm has been appended and challenged, by scholarship taking an economic, or
pragmatic, view of environment and social development (Freeman, 1998). This newcleavage in the definition of sustainable development has arrived with considerable tension,as it is a discrete shift away from the moralistic and normative notions of sustainability
envisioned by post-industrialist authors. This new definition has either been seen as areflective shift away from the narrow concerns of mainstream economics and modernisation(Friberg & Hettne, 1985), or as falling in line with neo-liberal economic development,

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because it shares a similar foundational premise prioritising capital accumulation,competition, and efficiency (Adams, 1995; Aseniero, 1985; Haque, 1999). Between thesecleavages in the discourse of sustainable development, many hybrid development models
have emerged. Fairtrade is a recent manifestation of this more systemic, economistic
approach to dealing with rural agricultural livelihoods through the normative lens ofsustainability. Global institutional discourse has echoed this new tension, materialising mostsignificantly in the Kyoto Protocol’s market-oriented Clean Development Mechanism. The
non-profit sector, the primary subject of this thesis, has also been encouraged to partiallyadopt business plans and market-based structures (SustainAbility, 2003). These models are
essentially competitive in nature, each problematising the model of development in ways thatenable new incentives to be used to attract support and followers and provide new functionalroles for them to fulfil.
These hybrid models are compromises of the post-industrialist view, made in order tocompete with the reigning global paradigm of agriculture based on industrialisation,mechanisation and external inputs. The so-called Green Revolution was a modernist
paradigm for rural and agricultural development that, with the best of intentions andexperience from the industrialised North, refashioned agricultural practice in certain regionsin the Global South (Fairbairn, 1995; Kaosa-ard & Rerkasem, 2000). Land consolidation,
high-yielding varieties, and agricultural chemicals became obligatory points of passage,
through which farmers in India and Indonesia were recruited to the Green Revolution actorworld. Whilst prescriptive criticism of green revolution measures existed very early on, only
when declining yields, soil salination, the volatility of agricultural input prices and the longterm effects of social fragmentation became unmistakeable, did a serious revision of green
revolution ideals begin (Fairbairn, 1995; Pingali et al., 1995). This revision has beenhampered by institutional inertia and inflexible research methods, resistance from developed
countries’ agricultural sectors, and contradictory imperatives for short-term agricultural

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productivity (ITK Study Group (IDS Workshop), 1989; Mvena et al., 1990: 57; Ngasongwa,
1990: 33). International seed peddlers, agrochemical companies, and national governments
often penetrate rapidly into the most remote and marginal areas, pre-empting many attempts
to envision and plan alternative agricultural production (M. Altieri, 1987; Bawden, 1991;
Shiva, 1997, 2000; Uquillas, 1994). The proliferation of highly-capitalised external inputdriven cultivation practices of developed countries, combined with the high rates ofurbanisation experienced in the Global South have created a path dependence locking in thissystem of production that is not easily unravelled (Asia-Pacific Human Development Report,
2006; Brot für die Welt et al., 2002; Tiffen & Bunch, 2002). In order to face the hegemonicpresence of the green revolution paradigm, sustainable development has increasingly moved
towards a focus on market mechanisms, despite the fact that purist post-industrialist views areoften the ideological underpinning. The discursive shift towards market-compatibility withinsustainable development has been mirrored by a similar shift towards compromise within the
agricultural research community.

2.3.2

The Discourse of Agricultural Development

At the intersection of sustainable agriculture and rural development lies agroecology,
which is primarily the application of ecological principles to agricultural science. First
formally introduced by Miguel Altieri (1987), agroecology has increasingly come tosymbolise resistance (against the strict scientific rationality of agronomy) and cooptation (ofscientific methods for ecological purposes). Although extant long before in the works of
K.H.W. Klages (1928), the contemporary support for agroecology grew out of dissatisfaction
with green revolution (high external-input) systems of cultivation and social organisation(Bebbington, 1994; Fernandes et al., 2002). As such, it is a science that is fairly reactionary
in nature and often bundled with methodological considerations, such as local participation

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and organising. In part, agroecologists seek not only to undo the damage wrought byindustrialised cultivation practices and land management techniques, but also to foment a
paradigm shift in rural development as a whole (Francis et al., 2003).
Agroecology has assembled itself theoretically and methodologically from many
disparate fields. Firstly, agroecology is deeply rooted in the field of international
development and most scholars lay out the challenges of food security and rural livelihoods
as the premise on which agroecological principles are being developed. Secondly,
agroecology is not seen as synonymous with sustainable agriculture for the simple reason that
it is a scientific and scholarly corpus, not a grand theory. The purpose of this distinction is toallow agroecology to make collegiate inroads into the agricultural sciences by remaining
research-oriented, whilst at the same time drawing out agricultural scientists into broader
normative debates (cf. M. A. Altieri, 1995; Gliessman, 1998, 2006; Marten, 1986; Pretty,
2005; Uphoff, 2002c). Thirdly, agroecological terminology has appropriated many
conceptual elements from economics in order to pre-empt its own marginalisation from theinstitutional world dominated by development economists. Fourthly, agroecology is
diplomatically premised on reconciling populist views of rural development and those of thehistorical mainstream of agricultural research and extension (Kaosa-ard & Rerkasem, 2000:
11; Uphoff, 2002a: xv-xvi). And finally, participatory development practices have beeninternalised by agroecology in a manner commensurate with maintaining core scientific andresearch methodology. The field of agroecology has been successful with enrolment because
it has combined the macro-concerns of scientific knowledge with the micro-concerns ofdevelopment practitioners, farmers and ecologically oriented academics. Agroecology has
effectively displaced practical space from many fields in order to generate its own dedicatedactor-world, complete with journals, books, researchers, supporters and development
interventions.

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The development of agroecology as a counter-hegemonic discourse against modernist
agricultural development has been complemented by the emergence of the populist (orFarmer First) school of rural development. Farmer First strategies for actor-networking arevery similar to those of agroecology and their two actor-worlds overlap considerably in goaland practice. There is a shared view that the ‘transfer of technology’ methods by which
industrial agriculture has traditionally been diffused misunderstands that agriculture issimultaneously an occupation and a livelihood (Bawden, 1991: 2363-2364; Chambers et al.,
1989: xvii-xx). In the words of Paul Richards (1989), agriculture can be seen as a“performance” for which many objectives are conceived, such as balancing nutrition, earning
pride, structuring the flow of the year, and, of course, producing a good yield. Thus,
improving livelihoods and ameliorating poverty must cater to these various needs, in addition
to improving raw output and productivity (Dlamini & Simelane, 1990). Populist scholars
have argued for a shift away from the one-dimensional transfer of technology paradigm(Röling, 1994: 245) towards more participatory and people-oriented methods such as Farmer
Systems Research, Farmer Participatory Research, and Participatory Action Research(Byerlee & Tripp, 1988; Cornwall et al., 1994; Haverkort et al., 1991; Norman & Collinson,1986).
The Farmer First view of rural development was eventually revised and appended ina second gathering of scholars in an edited volume called Beyond Farmer First. Whilst
Farmer First extols the resilience and efficacy of indigenous knowledge, Beyond Farmer
First reflected new shifts in development thinking that focused more on the reflexive
navigation of ‘power’ and agency in rural development (see Scoones & Thompson, 1994a:
21-23).2 The Farmer First view saw peasants in the Global South as “situated agents”, who
critically evaluate new cultivation practices and structures for rural social organisation, so as
to ensure their contextual appropriateness. Beyond Farmer First authors argued that the2

Although not the only example of populist, farmer-oriented literature of its time, the book Farmer First,
published in 1989, is widely seen as the central unit around which similar literature has clustered.

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ability to critically assess the value of various agricultural techniques and inputs depends
upon having the information, awareness and capability to do so (cf. Scoones & Thompson,
1994b). As Bebbington (1994) argues,

The emphasis on what knowers know about technology and ecology has diverted
attention away from the myriad things they do not know about markets, politics andthe machinations of a world beyond the farm gate that have long since pushed thatgate open and irrecoverably influenced the farm’s future. (p. 89)

The Beyond Farmer First view, however, assumes that rural people are quite insulated fromthe technical and political world around them and need to “learn” how to interact with itusing the benefits of hindsight of Northern post-industrialist agriculturalists (Long &Villareal, 1994: 50-51).
Advocates of sustainable agriculture hope to see farmers generate fundamental andprofound critiques of the dominant agro-industrial models of rural development. The
structural dynamic underlying much of this notion is that the South, having begun agriculturalindustrialisation later, has a much larger cadre of peasants who are in a position to embark
directly on the post-industrialist path to sustainable agricultural development. In short, in thename of food security, ecological diversity, environmental protection, and health,ecologically-oriented Northern observers hope that peasants in the Global South will“leapfrog” the unsustainable path taken by the industrialised North (Judie Thorpe, quoted in
Elkington & Lee, 14 February 2006). This ethnocentric view is complemented to somedegree by the view that farmers in the South stand to benefit from the adoption of postindustrialist ideals for production.
Although the theoretical benefits of shooting for post-industrial agricultural methods
are well articulated, there is no correspondence between these benefits and a clear set of

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sustainable development practices. Sustainable agricultural development, however defined,
is often associated with opportunities to gain access to privileged markets such as Fairtradeand organic, improve eco-efficiency, reverse deleterious health effects of agriculturalchemicals and gain control over sociocultural change (D'Souza & Gebremhedhin, 1998).
Also embedded within many contemporary programmes for sustainable rural development
are expectations for heightened local cooperation, decentralised governance, and citizen
empowerment (Pretty, 2005; World Bank, 2008). In contrast, the yield and productivity
orientation of industrialised agriculture does not generally present these ‘fringe benefits’, andoften demands a radical and disruptive restructuring of land tenure and cultivation practices.
However, the ability to achieve all of the benefits associated with sustainable agriculturaldevelopment is wholly dependent on which practices (or development strategies) are
employed. Selecting a particular activity—such as natural resource mapping, interest groupformation or ecological agriculture extension—effectively defines (and delimits) whatcomprises sustainable development (Desai, 2006: 175), at least until a new practice isadopted. Therefore, in order to achieve the most benefits of sustainable development, morepractices corresponding to more benefits should be initiated. The problem that emerges fromthis “additive” nature of sustainable development is that new practices are not necessarily
commensurate with existing practices. NGOs associated with the discourses of sustainability
and agricultural development are often the first to experiment with different formulations ofpractices for sustainable development.

2.4

Non-Governmental Organisations: Brokers and Translators

Although NGOs3 are often some of the first to adopt certain vanguard models ofdevelopment practice, they often assemble themselves into an actor-world that brings
3
I will focus on NGOs that fall into the same category as CEDAC, which is a national-level, donor-funded
NGO comprised mostly of middle-class nationals with a professional or quasi-professional skill set (Sen, 1999).

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together many disparate, and often competing, development theories. Whilst there is a
growing scholarly corpus associated with sustainable agricultural initiatives, the historicalpre-eminence of modernist agriculture amongst large development agencies has meant that itis primarily smaller and more ideologically mobile NGOs that carry out most of the novel
programmes on the ground. NGOs can form rapidly around new fashions in development
and some pre-existing NGOs with less institutional inertia are quick to respond to postindustrialist trends in sustainable and participatory development. Whilst this might initiallymean that NGOs are pushing the frontiers of practice, this thesis will discuss how the middle
and long-term fate of these NGOs is difficult to predict. New and contested paradigms, suchas sustainable development, inherently contain unresolved discursive inconsistencies that are
not easily managed by small institutions.

Within environmentalism there is a tension between reformism and radicalism, andbetween technocentrism and ecocentrism. Because of its roots in environmentalism
the same tensions exist in debates about sustainable development. (Adams, 1995: 88)

I view national-level NGOs like CEDAC as meso-level brokers, whose task is toreconcile the diverse demands of macro-level discourse, donors and the realities of local
conditions (D. Lewis & Mosse, 2006). This thesis focuses primarily on how CEDAC
negotiates the discourses of empowerment, neo-liberal marketisation, participatory
development and sustainability (I have already discussed the latter two). Empowerment is arelatively loosely defined term that is closely associated with the works of Paulo Freireconcerning ‘conscientisation’, and is generally seen as the development of the “potential ofpoor people to challenge structural inequalities through education, organization, andmobilization” (D. J. Lewis, 1997: 35). Neo-liberal marketisation refers to the compromises
made to post-industrialist knowledge systems in order to enhance their effectiveness and

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survivability in a society dominated by capitalist ideology and functioning. Embedded withinthese discourses are world-views and practices that are not necessarily commensurate witheach other, or with donor requirements and local conditions. Strategic compromise isnecessary to combine these disparate demands in a unified framework of sustainable
development.
An NGO such as CEDAC engages in strategic translation in order to assemble aninstitutional framework that outwardly exhibits coherence and functionality despite theinternal contradictions of internalising so many disparate discourses. However, NGOs are far
from being at the mercy of their stakeholder discourses. By operating at the “interfaces ofdifferent world-views and knowledge systems”, NGOs are strongly positioned to negotiate
novel representations, discourses and practice of development (D. Lewis & Mosse, 2006: 10).
But to say that an NGO is able to reconcile complex demands and mould its own framework
does not mean that this process is without contention. Furthermore, the institutional nature ofNGOs—their bureaucratic operations, motivational needs, growth aspirations andpersonnel—generates institutional pathologies and barriers that complicate how“development meanings are produced and negotiated in practice” (D. Lewis & Mosse, 2006:
9).

2.4.1

The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC)

CEDAC is a national-level NGO in the throes of redefining its self-image andoperating structure in response to the perception that their initial programming was limiting
their potential to respond to emerging development challenges. Founded in 1997 by a cadreof seven Cambodian professionals focussing on the promotion of low-external input,
management-oriented agricultural extension, CEDAC was poised to benefit from the growing
movement within the development industry for partnerships with national NGOs. The

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French NGO GRET4 was the first to co-sponsor CEDAC’s activities by providing seedfunding from which it was able to develop its initial rural programmes. This recognition andthe base programmes it spawned attracted funding from Oxfam America and, in subsequent
years, many other donors. The primary draw of CEDAC during this early period was its
success in farmer-to-farmer extension, SRI cultivation, and other sustainable land
intensification and management practices. CEDAC’s initial identity and purpose wererelatively clear: it was promoting agricultural practices embedded in the sustainableagricultural discourse and its work symbolised the alternative to the modernist AusAidfunded project of the International Rice Research Institute called the Cambodian Agricultural
Research and Development Institute (CARDI).5 Following the “additive” logic of sustainable
development, CEDAC began expanding the scope of its programming rapidly. It began
establishing Farmers Associations (FAs), intended as an umbrella under which local interest
groups could form and information could be disseminated. These FAs are viewed by
CEDAC as an entry point for empowerment programming and a forum for farmer-to-farmer
extension and local cooperation.6 FAs were also, importantly, the organisational hub for
local savings groups that provide one alternative to high-interest moneylenders and largescale microfinance organisations.7 FAs, thereafter, enabled the recruitment of farmers into
CEDAC’s Natural Agri-Product Marketing Program, which provides market assistance forpromoting organic agricultural products. After years of very rapid institutional growth underthese conditions, CEDAC highlighted at their 10th Year Anniversary celebration in Phnom
Penh on 1 August 2007 that it was moving toward a market-oriented approach to sustainableagricultural promotion.8

4

GRET is known as the Group for Research and Exchange of Technology.
Yi, 21 September 2007, personal communication
6
Ibid. personal communication
7
The convenience, scale and purpose of the loans being sought often determine where a person seeks out credit.
Structural differences between these three sources of rural credit mean that none will ever be the preferredalternative.
8
Yang Saing, 1 August 2007, personal communication
5

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Immediately after the anniversary, large-scale meetings were held to communicate therationale for this decision and initiate the so-called “business plan”. The plan, CEDAC
hoped, would enable a performance-oriented institutional culture and bypass some of thestructural constraints in promoting markets for sustainable agricultural products. By 2008,
CEDAC had divided itself into three “Core Programs”: (1) agriculture and social
development, (2) agri-based enterprises support and (3) the CEDAC Institute of Local
Development (CEDAC, February 2008). The first Program could be seen as the “original”
programme of CEDAC, focusing on SRI extension, ecological livestock raising and groupformation. And although only one of these Core Programs (number 2) explicitly deals withbusiness and enterprise, a private sector-like performance orientation has suffused
institutional practice in all three Programs. The implementation of the “business plan” hasthus become the third stage in CEDAC’s institutional history, following from its initial focus
on agricultural extension, and subsequent focus on group formation and empowerment
programming. Analysing the process through which CEDAC reached this juncture is criticalto understanding how organisations balance the evolving discourses of sustainable
development with the practical challenges inherent to operationalising them.

2.4.2

The System of Rice Intensification

This thesis primarily focuses on one product of agroecological research employed by
CEDAC, namely the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) developed in Madagascar by theJesuit missionary Henri de Laulanié (1993). Although involved in developing many
improvements to rice cultivation in conjunction with farmers since arriving in Madagascar in
1961, Laulanié and his students made a serendipitous discovery during a drought in 1983,
namely that transplanting young seedlings improved yield. Continued experimentation led
Laulanié and his teams to develop a set of principles that eventually became known as the

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System of Rice Intensification (Uphoff, 1999). Although originally composed of a few
practices, the range of cultivation techniques now subsumed under the framework of SRI has
grown considerably over the years. Its leading proponent, Norman Uphoff, now uses SRI as
an adjective rather than a noun (e.g., SRI rice, SRI practices). Laulanié’s original
formulation (according to Uphoff, 2005) is as follows: Transplanting younger seedlings (age 8-15 days)
 Transplanting individual seedlings with increased and regular spacing between hills(25cm or more) Maintaining a moist, not saturated, paddy
 Applying proportionately more organic matter, rather than chemical fertilizers
 Controlling weeds frequently, particularly with a mechanical weeder

Subsequent additions to the set have stipulated shallower transplanting, same-day
transplanting, additional ploughing and field levelling, elevated nurseries, and an enhanced
focus on seedling and seed selection. Critical to understanding the nature of SRI is that bothwholesale adoption of practices and strict conformity to the stipulated parameters is notnecessary to see improvement in productivity. Also important for a comprehensive analysis,
based on total factor productivity and environmental imperatives, are the potential seed-,water-, labour- and fertilizer-saving features accompanying some of the steps (Satyanarayana
et al., 2007; Uphoff, 2003, 2006b). Improvement in overall soil fertility is another potential
by-product.
In South and East Asia, SRI cultivation has spread rapidly and become popularamongst development organisations, yet it continues to be contested by certain members oflarge agronomic research institutions. In mainstream sustainable agricultural discourse, SRI
is considered one of many LEISA (low external-input and sustainable agriculture) techniques,

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which are held up as models of ecological sustainability and championed as agricultural
innovations that are particularly accessible to resource-poor farmers. In practice, LEISA
techniques such as SRI have often been criticised for producing low outputs (yields), notmaking good on adoption expectations, being only appropriate in limited circumstances, andnot even being theoretically possible (Dobermann, 2004; McDonald et al., 2006; Moser &Barrett, 2003; Sheehy et al., 2004; Sheehy et al., 2005). Rebuttals by SRI advocates point tospecific data and methodology problems with the critical assessments and are often quick topoint out the widespread civil society support and rapid proliferation amongst farmers inseveral countries (Stoop et al., 2002; Uphoff, 2006a). The controversy over SRI is far fromover and has been covered in Nature (Surridge, 2004) and the International Rice ResearchInstitute’s newsletter, Rice Today (Uphoff & Sinclair, 2004).

2.5

Applied Actor-Network Theory

The methodological suggestions arising from a conceptual understanding based on
actor-network theory are typically concerned with reassembling in full view the mechanics ofactor-worlds that have become obscured over time. As Michel Callon has written,“Successful translation quickly makes us forget its history” (1986b: 28). To a certain extent,
CEDAC’s vision of sustainable agricultural and rural development is being continuallypunctualised (Latour, 1987)—a situation in which a complex and historically-constructedsystem of research, extension, information sharing and institutional practice becomesincreasingly opaque whilst inputs into and outputs from the system remain visible. This is
not necessarily a deceptive process; it simply describes how complexity is masked in order topresent a comprehensible front, just as turning on a faucet does not reveal the enormous
complexity of the system of water delivery. The task of the academic, then, is to avoid taking
for granted those elements that are veiled by the intermediary ‘black box’ (Latour, 1988) by

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exploring and investigating actors that help elucidate how the and why a certain permutationof sustainable agriculture has arisen.
The nature of the actors and groups that perform the day-to-day work of translation isviewed more processually in ANT. Let me start with the ‘group’, as this idea is often
misunderstood within the conceptual space of ANT. A group is often seen as unitary, or atleast a collective unit. However, as Latour famously wrote, there is “no group, only groupformation” (Latour, 2005: 27). This is not to say that membership is fleeting, but that group
goals and make-up constantly evolve with enrolment and ‘displacement’ of functional roles.
Groups constantly reaffirm their existence, draw boundaries around themselves and othergroups, or even create anti-groups, which provide a competitive basis for functioning(Latour, 2005: 31-33). Groups also define themselves by their engagement with various‘matters of concern’ (controversies or discussions on which the group has taken a side). In
the end, however, it is member-actors who determine the group’s ideological and functional
evolution. These actors include the leadership and general membership, but also the nonhuman objects involved in the group functioning. These actors can have intermediary roles,in which they simply transport meaning without transformation, such as computers andnewsletters; actors can also be mediators, for which they transform, translate and distortmeaning (e.g. NGO leadership, extension staffs, or even a new agricultural technique). The
agency of non-human actors cannot be underestimated in this context—indeed just as
hammers ‘hit’ nails, and baskets ‘hold’ fruit (Latour, 2005: 71), SRI ‘provides’ rice for rural
farmers. Actor-network theory thus points to the dynamics of actor behaviour and groupformation as potential keyholes through which the ‘practical metaphysics’ of translation canbe unpacked and analysed.
To preface the empirical and ethnographic evidence I present below, I highlight a few
themes directly relevant to this case study. Foremost, interessement is one of the primarytranslation exercises employed in the development field in general. Organisations or leaders

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create practical or ideological incentives for joining concrete projects or activities that draw
on the moral resources of ideas such as ‘sustainable development’ and on the practical (i.e.,
financial) resources of the ‘field of development’. Before and after recruitment, ‘sustainable
development’ is problematised in such a way as to create a host of initiatives or activities(e.g., development projects, technological innovations, environmental awareness, etc.) thatare able to attract, retain and put to use a variety of human and non-human actors such as
field staffs, SRI techniques, farmers, agricultural inputs, offices and expatriate workers.
Certain projects, or technologies, such as the SRI, become gatekeepers, or obligatory pointsof passage, through which access to other initiatives, such as trainings, Farmers Associations,
women’s groups and organic markets, become available. Leaders, such as the president of
CEDAC, the director of the Cornell International Institute for Food and Agricultural
Development (CIIFAD), and the humble Farmers Association head become ‘translation
centres’ or ‘translation spokesmen’ which guide (and yet are guided by) translation in theactor-world (Callon, 1986b: 25). Activities such as writing reports, taking surveys, applying
to donors, organising producer group meetings and publishing research papers serve as
constant displacement (or “buzz”) that distracts actor-members from the controversies of
their work. These series of activities and their constituent interactive forces is summed up inactor-network theory as ‘practical metaphysics’ (Latour, 2005: 59-62), or the churn ofactivities that, inevitably, must head in some direction.

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3.0

ENCOUNTERING THE EXTENSION AND EMPOWERMENT SYSTEM

Although village life in the study area of Takeo province is marked by the gradualpermeation of development into rural areas, the pace at which change occurs is decidedly
quickened by NGO intervention. Without arguing for intervention-determinism, I haveobserved participating villagers and village chiefs reiterate that, to some degree, there is ‘life
before CEDAC’ and ‘life after CEDAC’.9 Along with migration, monetisation and politicalstabilisation, agricultural programming has become a significant feature of the social
landscape. Whilst testing SRI cultivation or joining an interest group under the umbrella ofthe local Farmers Association usually signifies involvement with CEDAC, there are
significant ways in which non-participants can be affected by rural development programmes.
In the following, I briefly discuss the historical context of agricultural production in
Cambodia and then describe programmatic components of CEDAC’s rural agriculturaldevelopment initiatives. Subsequently, I address how CEDAC staffs view rural people and,in turn, how rural people encounter the extension and empowerment programming. In
particular, I aim to critically evaluate the informal mental categories of farmers understoodby many CEDAC staffs. This typology includes the (a) “pioneers”, (b) “wait-and-sees”, andthe (c) “difficult group”.10 This informal typology is as much used to categorise farmers
based on their capability and willingness to attempt SRI as it is used to justify not addressing
the constraints facing these farmers. I conclude that a substantial portion of the non-pioneers
should be relabelled “strategic agents” because, far from being “difficult”, they havemeaningfully engaged with SRI and encountered constraints to adoption that cannot be
written off as character traits. To conclude, I discuss the perspectives of CEDAC staffs ontheir encounters with farmers, drawing particular attention to their stereotypes, sympathies
9

Vuhn (pseudonym), 24 August 2007, personal communication; Sosay (pseudonym), 29 August 2007, personalcommunication10
Yi, 21 September 2007, personal communication

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and frustrations. The purpose of this exercise, in addition to contextualising the dynamics ofextension and empowerment, is to explore the disparities between the representations and the“realities” of farmers encountering CEDAC programming for the first time.

3.1

Historical Context of Agricultural Production in Cambodia

In order to more deeply contextualise CEDAC’s experience, I now present thecontemporary history that has shaped agriculture and rural conditions in Cambodia. Moreprecisely, I wish to discuss the political history of Cambodia’s revolution in the 1970s and thesubsequent state-making carried out by the United Nations. There are a few residual effectsof Cambodia’s conflicted contemporary history that are useful in contextualising the current
situation. Firstly, the utopian agricultural communalism of the Khmer Rouge inspired a postregime backlash in farming practices in the 1980s that saw farmers embracing chemical
inputs previously banned categorically by the regime, and engaging in far moreindividualistic cultivation than previously (Ovesen et al., 1996).11 Secondly, during the
Khmer Rouge period, many people learned skills for organic farming and many small-scale
agricultural infrastructure features were built and are still in use. Thirdly, the isolationist
nature of Kampuchea under Pol Pot meant that Cambodia was largely left out of the earlier
schemes for the Green Revolution. AusAid/IRRI have made ushering in the ideals ofmodernist agriculture a prominent goal in Cambodia, but others see this as an opportunity to
avoid many of the Green Revolution’s blunders. Cambodia’s conflict-induced setback ineconomic development has also meant that other countries are well positioned to leverage
their agricultural models and products upon Cambodia. Indeed, donations of fertilizers andpesticides to Cambodia during the reconstruction in the 1980s led many rural people to gain a
11

Ovesen’s “every household an island”-thesis has been rightly criticised for missing and mischaracterisingmuch of communal life in the Cambodian countryside. However, insofar as individualisation was more
pronounced in the decades following the Khmer Rouge period, Ovesen’s thesis has some foundation.

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dependency on external inputs. Rural life in Cambodia, in general, is at a critical juncture
where market forces are radically changing the face of social interactions and agricultural
livelihoods (cf. Colletta & Cullen, 2000: 29; Krishnamurthy, 1999; Ledgerwood, 1998;
Ovesen et al., 1996; Sedara, 2001). It is precisely this rapid marketisation and the lingering
influences of the Khmer Rouge conflict that sustainable rural development will be compelled
to accommodate.
And finally, after the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)
supported elections in the 1990s, effectively opening Cambodia up to international
intervention for the first time since the Khmer Rouge era, an extraordinary amount of foreign
NGOs and development agencies began pouring into Cambodia with humanitarian aid(Vickery, 1992). As the acute humanitarian crisis was largely over due to the ouster of the
Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese a decade before, many re-organised rural communities wereconfronted with rich foreign entities that freely distribute food, livestock, equipment andconsumer goods (Chong, 2003).12 By the end of the 1990s, the Khmer word angkah (theorganisation), which had previously been used to reference the Khmer Rouge decision
makers, had quickly taken on the connotation of charity organisation, or “givingorganisation”.13 As a result, the conception of the ‘giving angkah’ has largely becomemonolithic in the countryside, with famine relief, charity and rural development projects all
being lumped together in the same conceptual space.

3.2

CEDAC Programming in Zone II

The Cambodian Center for Study and Development in Agriculture was established in
1997 and has since grown to encompass major agricultural research and rural development
12

Although famine relief in specific areas, such as refugee camps and urban areas, was coordinated by UNICEF
and the World Food Programme prior to UNTAC (i.e., during the Vietnamese occupation), the arrival of NGOs
and development agencies generally begins with the UNTAC period and also includes humanitarian assistance
implemented by UNTAC itself.
13
Teap (pseudonym), 12 July 2007, personal communication

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initiatives in 15 out of Cambodia’s 20 provinces. By their own report, country-wide they
directly supported over 65,000 families (~325,000 people) by 2007, which comprises about
4% of Cambodia’s farming population (CEDAC, 2007a). They exclusively target
smallholders and focus, in particular, on increasing food production, maintaining
environmental sustainability and promoting social cohesion and cooperation. Although
CEDAC is primarily donor-supported, they also derive income from service contracts,
membership fees, publications and sale of organic produce. Geographically, CEDAC has
split Cambodia’s rice-farming regions into four administrative Zones,14 each of which has acentral hub and operates in a semi-autonomous fashion that includes limited, but important,links to the headquarters in Phnom Penh. This thesis focuses on the southern lowlands ofZone II, specifically two districts, Samraung and Tramkok, in Takeo Province (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

14Additionally, there is one “Special Zone” in Ratanakiri province in northeast Cambodia, which has amarkedly different focus than work in CEDAC’s other Zones.

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Functionally, Zone II operates fairly autonomously from the Phnom Penh office, butthere are important backward linkages that help maintain its coherence within the overall
organisational framework of CEDAC. By and large, the activities of the Zone II office are
funded independently by individual donors. Only in rare cases should the Zone have to draw
on central funding for continuation of its programming. Mid-level staff members are also
primarily engaged at the Zonal level—typically they are attached to a specific donor-projectand see themselves chiefly as a member of that team and only secondarily as a member of the
CEDAC staff. In practice, the project leaders take up the day-to-day managerial duties whilst
the overall boss, the Zonal Coordinator, is charged with maintaining coherence within andbetween donor-projects, communicating with the headquarters in the capital and occasionallycontrolling the finances. The headquarters, in turn, conduct national-level research andimpact studies, produce publications for extension and sale, centralise the collection andmarketing of organic produce from the provinces, and serve as a training and inter-Zonal
forum. As shown in Figure 2, these activities are presided over by department heads (e.g.,
for research and development) and programme managers (e.g., for SRI extension). The
president and co-founder of CEDAC, Mr Koma Yang Saing, is an executive director,
researcher, charismatic figurehead, but also a colleague to most CEDAC staffs.

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Figure 2

In complementary fashion, analysing the forward linkages from the mid-level Zonal
staffs to the villages is important for understanding how CEDAC configures its system ofagricultural extension and network formation for long-term functionality. Generally, fulltime staffs and specially-trained part-time (or external) workers, employ a number of villagebased representatives to facilitate and perpetuate programming. Community Field Assistants
are villagers who receive compensation for coordinating and hosting events, communicatingwith local authorities and people, and conducting trainings. They are joined by Community
and Village-Based Animators, whose volunteer mandate is to promote group formation andfarmer-to-farmer agricultural extension at the commune and village levels. Farmers
Association and Commune Cluster leaders, unlike other self-selected facilitators, are electedto their positions and serve primarily to manage the day-to-day affairs of their umbrellaorganisations and promote their growth, although they often take on multiple roles. Over

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time, CEDAC staffs expect that village-level and commune-level agents will progressively
grow in capacity and sense of ownership, which should be accompanied by a parallel
disengagement by CEDAC staffs. Figure 3 describes how a group of interested farmers
selected at an introductory meeting eventually evolve into progressively more autonomous
Farmer Community Schools, Farmers Associations, and Commune Clusters. With each
institutional advancement, CEDAC staffs distance themselves more to save on resources and,ostensibly, in order to encourage greater self-sufficiency.

Figure 3

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Whilst CEDAC’s activities in Zone II are comprised of a diverse array of individual donorsupported projects, the region is particularly well-known for its high adoption rate of SRI.
Currently, nine projects are being carried out in Takeo province, four of which focus on the
promotion of SRI and local organising for empowerment. The other projects focus on issues
such as microcredit, school attendance, young farmers and local administrative reform (Bao,2007). Of these nine projects, two are of particular significance for this thesis, due to theirgeographical overlap with the fieldwork sites in Zone II: (1) the Sustainable Rice-Based
Livelihood (SRL) project, supported by the German Church Development Service (EED,
Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst) and (2) the Improving Livelihoods of Farmers project inTramkok district (ILFARM-TK), supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency(JICA). The latter project is arguably the most successful of CEDAC’s projects due to its
success in SRI extension and local organising for empowerment. Tramkok district has thus
become the flagship region for CEDAC and is one of the foremost areas toured by outside
observers, donors and politicians.

3.3

CEDAC’s Typology of Farmers

3.3.1

The “pioneers”

From CEDAC’s perspective, rural people who exhibit a high level of willingness toparticipate and adopt techniques are commonly referred to as pioneers. To some degree,
pioneers are self-selected—those with the confidence, entrepreneurial spirit and material
resources who come forward voluntarily. In other cases, pioneers are “made”, either bydirect payments for participation or through the reception of an official title. A pioneer’s
standing, or renown, in the “sustainable agricultural community” is largely determined by hisor her degree of penetration into various nested spheres of influence. Mey Som, the “first”

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pioneer of SRI in Cambodia, is a national-level figure who has contributed heavily to the
corpus of agricultural innovations, local organising practices and livelihood philosophies
promoted by CEDAC and academics. Prak Ches, a regional-level pioneer of SRI, multipurpose farms and environmental thought, is well-known in CEDAC’s Zone II. Teap Mom(pseudonym), a village head and SRI farmer, has become a leading figure at the communelevel for his leadership abilities and presence in local organisations. Dein Toin (pseudonym),
a village-level hero, achieved notoriety for his record-breaking SRI rice yield in 2004, but hasremained aloof of local organising. Lop T’neen (pseudonym) is a “pioneer” because hesimply tested SRI in the first year that CEDAC came to his village. Many others are
considered pioneers simply because they adopted SRI practices with “no questions asked”.
The liberal conditions by which one can become labelled a “pioneer” suggest that CEDAC
uses this label to honour these farmers for being so readily recruited. For CEDAC, pioneersof all types become critical leverage for promoting the success of agricultural programmes todonors and are indispensable agents for assisting in the diffusion and extension of new
agricultural techniques and group organising activities.
Contrary to the traditional connotations of the word “pioneer”, such as independence
and autonomy, pioneers in the context of CEDAC’s agricultural programming are “recruited”
actively. There are two primary routes for this recruitment. One route, which usually comeschronologically first, requires the purposeful selection of key local people, usually based on
their status as village head or renown for being a particularly talented farmer. These villagers
are either paid directly to field-test certain agricultural techniques15 or are ennobled by staff
members to be key facilitators in the ensuing programming. Very often, these people arecharged with organising the first village meeting or performing the first local-level field-testof SRI. These key individuals pave the way for a subsequent round of recruitment—the15

The practice of funding individual farmers has diminished markedly since the early years of CEDAC (perhaps
up to 2002). Now, CEDAC’s reputation and networks largely set the stage for early collaboration. Initially,
payment was provided to insure farmers against the risks of trying experimental cultivation practices and might
be seen as a ‘research partnership’. However, one cannot deny the utility of this practice in “making” pioneersof local individuals.

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soliciting of “interested farmers” during an introductory town hall meeting held in the village.
Attendees usually hear a participatory presentation by CEDAC staffs and are then asked, by ashow of hands, who is interested in testing SRI. In subsequent years, some of these interested
farmers will passively garner the title of “pioneer”—especially if they themselves become
promoters of SRI.
As the CEDAC-initiated programming becomes more established and grows in scale,
opportunities for upward mobility by pioneers become numerous. As the set of agricultural
techniques expands from SRI to vegetable intensification, sustainable livestock production
and to multi-purpose farming, pioneers feel continuously obliged to take part in more
activities. Usually this entails increasing involvement in Farmers Associations, producers’
groups, Commune Cluster organising, and eventually village enterprise activities. Drawing
pioneers into positions with more responsibility is a rather subtle process, and before theyknow it, many pioneers are “neck-deep” in CEDAC’s programming.
There is one boundary, however, that pioneers do not transgress—they do not become
official representatives of CEDAC. Whilst some titles, such as Community Field Assistant,come with a small stipend to defray travel costs and lost work time, and some farmers areseen as peer ‘researchers’, villagers are not seen as potential extension workers or staffs.
Pioneers are CEDAC’s insiders, their agents of change in the rural areas. In part, there is an
unspoken obligation of villagers to remain ‘humble’ and remain close to the fellow villagers
they are meant to instruct. In part, this is an expectation typical of mainstream institutional
development discourse, which sees development as sedentary, or about “enabling people tostay ‘home’” (Bakewell, 2007; DfID, 2007: 37). Um Mey, a famous national-level pioneer of
SRI and women’s empowerment from Prey Veng province, opened her statements at
CEDAC’s 10th anniversary celebration by saying, “I am a farmer, and illiterate.” She went on
to describe herself as thoroughly rural and restricted her aspirations to those possible within
the framework of her village of Ba Phnom. The imperative for a sedentary livelihood, or at

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least lack of out-migration, is widely agreed upon by CEDAC staffs, and this ideal istransmitted to local people.16 By avoiding direct employment, CEDAC (a) encourages
pioneers to maintain their insider status by remaining ‘humble villagers’, (b) retains pioneers
as crucial elements of local farmer-to-farmer extension systems and (c) uses them as
exemplars of “successful” development that has avoided out-migration.

3.3.2

The “wait-and-sees”

Particularly as SRI cultivation is usually the ‘entry point’ for broader agricultural
programming, there are many farmers who prefer to allow pioneers to take the initial
experimental risks. Although some farmers may have previously heard of SRI, they want tomake certain that the proposed cultivation changes are suitable for their local agro-ecosystem.
Generally, wait-and-sees are exposed to CEDAC through an introductory meeting or byword-of-mouth and have elected, for a variety of structural and personal reasons, not toexperiment in the initial year. The quotes below illustrate two typical outcomes of waiting:In 2005, I started SRI. Even though I saw people from previous years getting highyields, I just wanted to test it for myself. I tried it on 6 ares. That year we had a good
crop. But since then we have had bad weather and other problems unrelated to SRI –pests and accidents. But I know these did not cause the lower yield for SRI, so I did
half my field the next year [2006] and this year I did all SRI. (male, age 42, Samraung
district)

My parents trained with CEDAC the first year they came here [2004]. Whenever I
came over for a meal, they tried to convince me to join them but we wanted to wait.

16

Prak, 12 July 2007, personal communication

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They got a good yield that year, but it was hard to manage the water and they got lessstraw. We have bigger water problems and just enough straw for the cattle now. So
we decided not to try SRI. (female, age 26, Tramkok district)

Many farmers such as these are sceptical of CEDAC’s claims about high yield or they arerisk-averse and concerned that the new system may not be reliable or appropriate for theirfields. Others lack confidence in their ability to implement the system or feel sociallyawkward about trying something new. The experience of having one’s primary activity(farming) fundamentally transformed is rather unsettling to farmers and erodes theirconfidence.

I don’t want to learn anything from [CEDAC]. I think their training cannot be better
than what I know, since they cannot understand the water situation like I can. The
new generation always thinks they know better. It is disrespectful for [young people]
to tell me that I have been growing rice in a bad way for 40 years. (male, age 55,
Tramkok district)Whilst there are indeed formidable constraints to full adoption, the possibility ofapplying as many or as few SRI “steps” as desired and the relative ease of making a small test
plot mean that the costs and risks of trying SRI are low. The existence of so many wait-andsees (approximately one-third of my sample) suggests that complex social constraints affectthe propensity to experiment. I will explore these in detail later. However, these constraints
can serve as a rough filter for weeding out farmers who might not subsequently join
CEDAC’s broader organisational and empowerment activities. Once a village has received
its initial SRI training, the “wait-and-sees” are on their own in deciding whether to apply SRI
or not—they do not require intervention by CEDAC. That said, the personal initiative of

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many passionate field staffs often transcends this operating imperative, especially when it
comes to including socially important individuals and women.

Because Pisey [pseudonym] always came to compliment me and encourage me, I
worked harder on my field. And some days I went to the mountains to collect green
compost to impress her. Now my land is good and I hardly ever need to travel far tocollect green compost. (female, age 32, Tramkok district)

3.3.3

The “difficult group”

The “difficult group”, from the CEDAC’s perspective, are those farmers who, in spiteof agricultural training opportunities, elect not to take part in rural agricultural development
programming.17 For CEDAC, “difficult” means that the farmer exhibits a personality trait,such as conservatism, irrationality, or closed-mindedness that affects his or her ability tojudge SRI on its merits. This rather imbalanced representation lumps together those with andwithout legitimate constraints to participation because it presumes that SRI is objectively
superior in most, if not all, cases. However, within this group, the range of rationales for
abstaining varies enormously and could be disaggregated in order to determine whether afarmer is “difficult” (in terms of his or her character) or constrained in ways that (unfairly)
limit his or her capability to implement SRI.

I would likely not recommend SRI to many others, because I think those who canmanage to do SRI with their land have already started and know about it. A few more
people have started this year on small plots, but there are so many that just cannot doit because of their land. (male, age 36, Tramkok district)17

Yi, 21 September 2007, personal communication

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In a list generated by farmers and field staff at a workshop, “lack of agricultural techniques
and knowledge” and “laziness” were the top two reasons for why people are poor (field notes,
7 September 2007). The first reason effectively legitimises CEDAC’s role as purveyors ofagricultural techniques in the countryside, whilst the second reason summarily justifies why
some misguidedly do not take up these techniques. There are clearly individuals who might
be considered “difficult”, such as those holding a personal vendetta against a village head andthus unwilling to take part in any projects associated with him. But there are also many who
are facing intractable structural and social constraints or have inadequate information andencouragement.
Because CEDAC staffs (as a result of training and experience) believe that there is aclear answer to most reported constraints, they tend to underestimate the salience of somerather important ones for certain families. In many cases, “laziness” is likely a synonym of“constrained”. For instance, in theory, SRI cultivation can be performed with less labour;
however, most farmers require a few years of experience in order to reach this stage and arethus put off by overly optimistic claims during training. Many farmers expressed to me thatthey wished they had been told what problems they might encounter; they did not like beingcaught off guard!

I could tell that people were surprised about having less straw from doing SRI, andthey were worried about how they would feed their cow. And anyway the yield wasabout the same. That’s what I tell people when they ask me about SRI. (female, age
28, Samraung district)

The local rumour mill can magnify the salience of some constraints, which serves tobulwarks the position of many non-adopters. For example, the scientific fact that tall stalks

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and improved yield usually counteract the negative effect of lower planting density on straw
production is unable to compete with rumours circulating that SRI reduces straw output, andmay mean that the family’s cow will have less fodder to consume late in the dry season. The“difficult group”, as I have shown here, is comprised of a broad range of farmers with manyreasons for being unable or unwilling to implement SRI. I have also shown that CEDAC
portrays this group as “difficult” in order to rationalise the lack of emphasis made on
addressing their constraints. But the underlying reason for why such a heterogeneous groupare marginalised from CEDAC activities is because they not only require additional resources(i.e., personal attention, action research) for inclusion, but they have a lower propensity tojoin CEDAC’s other activities, which is essential for CEDAC’s growth.

3.4

The “strategic agents”

This final category of farmer families, which I have coined for this study, includes
those who have interacted openly (and willingly) with SRI techniques and have found thesystem wanting in their particular context. This group overlaps with many of those includedin CEDAC’s “difficult group” but I argue that they are strategic in their behaviour, rather
than “difficult”. This view prompts exploration rather than marginalisation of their adoption
constraints. Primarily, strategic agents include those struggling to overcome structural
constraints, those who have experiment with SRI and have abandoned it and those for whom
certain elements of the system—but not others—are viewed as unsuitable. The mostcommon strategic agents are those who have “disadopted” SRI. In my randomised sample of
70 farmer families, 30% of my respondents are disadopters.18 Although disadoption should
be seen in light of the “fairness” (or comprehensiveness) of the field-test(s) conducted by thefarmer (Moser & Barrett, 2003), I have deliberately chosen the strictest of definitions:18

This represents 22 farmers out of a sample of 70. Farmers who disadopted after scaling up (usually after at
least two years of testing) comprise 6 out of the sample (9% disadoption).

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farmers who have at least tested SRI and chosen not to continue. Some farmers might seen as
having “unfairly” disadopted due to an idiosyncratic shock, like poor weather in the testing
year, but I maintain that even this should be seen as disadoption because it reflects the lack of
warnings, preparation and over-optimism of agricultural extension.
Analysing the motivations and constraints of these strategic agents is particularly
gainful, as this sub-group represents farmers who have meaningfully engaged with ruraldevelopment programming, including SRI, and encountered important constraints. Veryoften, a farmer who disadopted would provide me a veritable laundry list of their constraints:

I stopped [doing SRI] after 2004. I got less yield, small clumps, and with poor soil
and bad water management it was very difficult to do. I also have less compost on myland and had to deal with a big problem of weed problem. Oh right! I also got lessstraw. (male, age 39, Samraung district)

Resolving the constraints of this sub-group is likely to be the most expedient means ofderiving feedback and reflexively evaluating the potential for broader reform andimprovement. I will discuss strategic agents and adoption constraints in-depth in Chapter 4.

3.5

Encountering the Farmer – Stereotypes, Sympathies and Frustrations

The experiences of field staffs are partly mediated by rural people’s expectations
about both charity organisations and local teachers, and partly by their own professional
conceptions of agricultural development (Desai, 2006: 177). Rural people’s expectations
have been strongly influenced by contemporary history and current government andeducational practices, whilst staffs’ expectations have been shaped by their internalised
discourses of development and the day-to-day ‘practical metaphysics’ of in-group logic.

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The expectations held by many rural people that NGOs are charity organisations or“giving organisations” (angkah), complicates initiatives to work in a joint manner with
farmers. Functionally, this makes CEDAC’s day-to-day work challenging, as staffs are
required not only to carry out their programmes, but also to proactively dispel the myth thatthey are a ‘giving organisation’. Although effective at creating a participatory (i.e., nongiving) identity in the long-run, staffs’ initial encounters with rural people are strongly
influenced by this expectation. With many respondents during field research, I personallyfound it difficult to shake their preconception that I was a representative of an angkah, whichis understandable as most white people roaming about with notebooks in the countryside aresuch people. The behavioural result of these expectations is fairly consistent: rural people
ingratiate and express enthusiasm, but exhibit poor follow-through unless material incentives
are forthcoming.
In addition to the power dynamics inherent to being seen as an angkah, field staffs
often encounter embedded behavioural patterns typically associated with the teaching andeducational system in Cambodia. Consider first the situation for teachers in the countryside.
Although they are nominally supported by the state, teachers often (have to) solicit additional
funds from their students to supplement their salary. In effect, this makes parents theircustomers. Parents, in turn, also have to forego potential sources of labour on the farm andaround the house and are also required to buy uniforms and perhaps a bicycle to enable theirchild to reach school in a timely fashion. Agricultural extensionists are often seen in a very
similar light:[The field staff member] is like a teacher, yes. We even call him teacher. Well, I cometo the classroom although I am often lazy to go. Some students are better than others.
They do better homework. And the new way is that he asks us to pay her for his

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services or at least food and gas because we have benefited from his training.
(female, age 39, Tramkok district)

The homework, in this case, is the practice of SRI and ecological livestock raisingtechniques. So although the “curriculum” used by CEDAC for training might be moreparticipatory in nature than traditional teacher-centred instruction, the atmosphere of the
trainings is viewed in the same way as school by many informants I spoke with. By viewing
field staff as teachers of adult farmers, it is possible to imagine why many people choose not
to take part even though there is widespread acknowledgment that improved agricultural
practices, like education, are “good for you”.
The notion that improved agricultural techniques are clearly beneficial in theory iswhat underlies the type of professionalism internalised by CEDAC staffs. Because history,
experience and theory have shown CEDAC that SRI practices increase yield and becausesavings groups provide a profitable solution to the lack of rural credit, staffs go out into thefield confident that the real work is simply to convince farmers to “participate”. The questionof whether SRI cultivation should be practiced at all (by certain farmers) is closed and the
new question becomes “how” to efficiently encourage people to adopt. In this way, ongoing
scientific disputes, such as those surrounding SRI, are seen by field staff as unanimous
findings (Desai, 2006: 174). Having committed, or sold themselves on SRI, field staffs
become defensive insiders rather than reflexive instructors and their pedagogy switches fromone of education to one of recruitment.
Following actor-network theory, CEDAC staffs thus launch into a type of translation
called interessement, which is focussed on recruiting people into the CEDAC system throughindirect incentivising, such as promising more yield and profits from savings and sharedproduction. Tentative recruits believe they are simply testing SRI cultivation, but are actuallyon their way towards induction into the broader range of CEDAC activities of which SRI is

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only the entry point. In order to sustain the translation, recruits are given titles (e.g., VillageBased Animator, Community-Based Animator, etc.) or given the chance to earn titles (e.g.,president of the Farmers Association, treasurer, etc.). Recruits are also generally kept busy
(displacement) organising their group activities, all of which serves to make the question ofwhether or not SRI serves their needs redundant.
However, whilst the recruits are caught up in the practical metaphysics of CEDAC
activities, the staffs themselves are indeed caught in a similar web. Because they generally
work with those who have been (easily) recruited, the lifeworlds of those who have not taken
up SRI become increasingly distant. The discomfort with the existence of such people is theimpetus for the three groupings: pioneers, wait-and-sees, and ‘difficult group. It is also thereason for the lack of a mental category called “strategic actors”. The source, then, of thesense of professionalism within CEDAC is not their educational status or achievements, butthat they are veteran members of an actor-world into which they are inducting new members
to the lower levels. Likewise, staffs themselves exist as inductees in the chain ofinteressement populated by their managers and bosses, donors, development academics, anddevelopment discourse itself.

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4.0

RESULTS: INVESTIGATING PAST AND FUTURE NARRATIVESThis thesis is concerned with the evolution of institutional practices of sustainable
development and addresses two primary issues. The first concerns the historical basis of theconvergence on a ‘market sustainability’ paradigm for sustainable development. The larger
question here is whether we have witnessed this in Cambodia as regards CEDAC and whatmight have brought this about. The second issue concerns how CEDAC is evolving and what
the potential might be for the new performance orientation to resolve the issues ofaccountability brought on by institutional changes over the past 10 years. In order to look atthese two separate issues, I will address the current situation looking backward, andsubsequently the current situation looking forward.

4.1

The Current Situation, Looking Backward

In the study area, which is a flagship area for their agricultural and rural development
initiatives, the view of many donors, development agencies and NGOs is that CEDAC
programmes have improved the agricultural production of many farmers in addition toempowering them to engage more thoughtfully with producer and credit markets.19 In
addition, farmers have internalised a set of important ecological concepts and many havesignificantly reduced or eliminated their use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Furthermore, this has been accomplished without risky or unnecessary investments into fossil
fuel-run farming equipment or external seed, and has enabled farmers to have more control
over cultural change in their communities. Empowerment programming, primarily utilisinggroup formation strategies, has activated networks that have led to enhanced farmer-to-farmer
extension, co-operative sales and purchasing groups, certified organic rice sales, improved
19

Although the list of CEDAC’s “fan club” is numerous, a fairly complete collection of outside views, reports
and assessments can be found at website of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, andDevelopment (CIIFAD). Web: http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/countries/cambodia/index.html#reports

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local governance and increased social capital. With the initiation of CEDAC’s business planin 2007, participant farmers now also engage in far more entrepreneurial activities, such as
shared investment in village shops, organic chicken sales, natural palm sugar production, ecotourism and all-organic catering. CEDAC’s activities are generally looked upon favourably
by government, and, in particular, SRI has received support from the Minister of Agriculture,
Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and SRI’s place in policy has been enshrined in the SRISecretariat, a governmental working group. Many development agencies and northerndonors see CEDAC as their darling organisation; indeed, one prominent manager at the Japan
International Cooperation Association (JICA) has called CEDAC “our hope”.20 Numerous
national NGOs approach CEDAC for advice, and many grassroots organisations haveallowed their operations to be subsumed into a local CEDAC Farmers Association. These
achievements and this recognition are indeed substantial in the realm of rural development,
where development programming in Cambodia has produced very little widespread success.
However, in the midst of this excitement, it is worthwhile to step back and investigate
what the extent of this success is—where is it justified and where might it be found wanting?
Although it is laudable to achieve any broad success in rural development in Cambodia, it isnevertheless helpful to look at the extent of participation, savings and livelihood
improvement with a qualitative and quantitative eye, including an evaluation of theassessment methodology used by CEDAC. In the following, I undertake a deconstruction of
CEDAC’s internal and external representation by independently assessing their works using
their own dimensions as well as a few determined by myself with advice from farmers. I
expand upon this deconstruction by using statistical methods to determine what associations
exist between income, rice cultivation practices, and yield. The conclusions and critiques
emerging from this analysis are for the purpose of adding some outside perspective andobjectivity to the impact assessment process currently used by CEDAC with an eye toward

20

Anonymous, 23 March 2008, personal communication

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improving programming and impact assessment methods. The questions to be answered here
are: how does CEDAC internally represent their impact and how has this affected their ability
to reflect constructively on their practices?

4.1.1

Asset-based Livelihood Assessment

For the quantitative data gathering, I largely used CEDAC’s own sustainable
livelihoods approach but I sampled randomly from target villages rather than from registered
CEDAC participants, and I employ additional field techniques for crosschecking results. In
addition, I use a factor analysis technique developed by Sahn and Stifel (2003) rather than thesubjective rubrics developed by CEDAC for income evaluation and cultivation technique
grading.
In this study, an asset-based measurement of wealth is used for two primary reasons.
First, recent research indicates that this method creates a more accurate ranking of wealthwhilst avoiding the many problems inherent to consumption-based income measurement(Sahn & Stifel, 2003). Second, an absolute value for income is unnecessary for making
inferences internal to the dataset. As noted by Judy Ledgerwood (1998), Cambodian villages
are rather homogeneous communities in which social forces exist that restrain individual
families from distinguishing themselves. Assets in Cambodia are typically fewer, easier tomeasure and, to a large degree, not prone to reporting bias because they are visible to theresearcher. Usually, durable assets such as radios, TVs, bicycles, motorbikes, and housingmaterials are used to construct such a the wealth index. The assets I used were carefully
screened for sufficient variance before being included in the factor analysis. For mostcomponents of index, it is straightforward to predict the effect on wealth. For instance, thelarger the amount of agricultural land and housing floor area, the wealthier the family is
expected to be ranked. It is somewhat more problematic, however, to value the quality of the

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housing materials. For this, each type of material (bamboo, wood, aluminium, concrete, etc.)
was separated into a group representing poor, medium, or high quality material, as outlined
by Krishnamurthy (1999) and Ebihara (1968). Dummy variables were created for the poorand high quality materials, whilst an absence of a value for both of these dummies indicates a
medium quality material. A delineation of this valuation system can be found in Appendix
2. Using the method developed by Sahn and Stifel (2003), and the assets determined bymyself (Feuer, 2004), as well as Krishnamurthy (1999) and Ebihara (1968) in their studies of
the Cambodian countryside, I factored a composite ranking of the relative wealth of eachhousehold in the cross-village sample. The factored weights for the individual components of
the wealth index can be found in Appendix 2. I verified the accuracy of the factored index
values for each household by confirming with qualitative evidence and personal judgment. I
confirmed that the poorest and most destitute villagers ranked the lowest in wealth index
whilst those ranking near the top held considerable sums of land, a motorbike, and owned alarge and well-built home.

4.1.2

Scalar Valuation of Rice Cultivation Practices and Yield

Due to the large variety of potential rice cultivation changes suggested by SRI, it ismore useful to view farmers’ practices on a continuum rather than defining a certain
threshold (Uphoff, 17 July 2007). Building on the work by Sras and Chuong (17 July 2007),
I developed a set of dummy, ordinal, and continuous variables representing rice cultivation
practices normally associated with, but not exclusive to, SRI. However, rather than making a
subjective judgment about the significance (or weight) of each cultivation practice for thequality of technique, as done by Sras and Chuong (17 July 2007), I allowed factor analysis todetermine the weights and, like with the asset-income, rank farmer families based on theircultivation practices.

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To gather accurate cultivation and yield data in interviews, I employed a number oftechniques to help confirm or triangulate the informant’s responses. In most cases, I
observed the fields directly to evaluate whether certain cultivation practices and field
conditions applied and thereafter questioned the respondent directly about other practices.
My priority was to reconstruct conditions from the season corresponding to the most recent,and best remembered, yield data. Additionally, I isolated individual plots from the total rice
area if the farmer applied different practices to those fields (such as partial SRI).
Determining rice yield required considerably more discretion and cross-referencing. Indeed,yield can be one of the most problematic elements to measure accurately in the Cambodian
countryside, but I employed a number of resourceful tactics to triangulate these values. In
many cases, the farmer simply remembered his previous yield in a certain unit, which I could
convert to tonnes/hectare. In other cases, the farmer might admit that the yield was a certain
proportion higher or lower than a season that he was familiar with. These values could becross-referenced with some reliability by asking the primary cook in the family how many“tins” of rice were served per day (adjusting for surplus or deficit, celebrations, and animalfeed) and extrapolating to the year. In other rare cases, I could measure the volume of therice storage vessel and determine the yield based on how high it was filled after harvest.

4.1.3

Through the Figures: Accomplishment and Build-Up

By and large, CEDAC reports on itself much as it reports to its donors—throughoptimistic brochures, reports and media. As such, my primary sources for this assessment are
impact evaluation reports, English-language brochures to celebrate CEDAC’s 10th
anniversary, and CEDAC’s self-representation at press conferences. For comparative
quantitative data, I primarily use two of the most recent impact assessments produced by the
now-defunct Research and Development Department at CEDAC: one focusing on country-

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level impacts (Suon, 2007a), and the other focusing on the area in which I conducted
fieldwork (Suon, 2007b). As an alternative angle, I also analysed individual Khmer-language
staff reports from Zone II, although these generally do not impact CEDAC’s official external
and internal representation. In a general sense, however, having in-built resources forgathering the type of data necessary for donor-funding, CEDAC has largely used these same
resources as a basis for its internal performance assessments. According to the CEDAC
president’s statement at a press conference 18 March 2008, 82,000 families, or 4.5% of rice
farming families, which engage 2% of rice land in Cambodia, are employing SRI techniques.
Overall, the latest impact evaluation from 2007 reports that average agricultural incomes ofparticipants have increased from 1.7 million Riel (~$425) to 2.2 million Riel (~$550) during
the period 2004-2007 (Suon, 2007a).
Within these figures, several quantitative and qualitative issues emerge concerning theabsolute and relative nature of the numbers, their significance overall, and the context they
obscure. Firstly, the increased agricultural income (30%) is not calculated using Purchasing
Power Parity and came at a time when inflation was hovering between 5-11% (nominal) per
annum and spiked to nearly 20% in the early months of 2008.21 Secondly, attributing all
income increases to project intervention during that time period ignores many exogenous
factors, the least of which is the fact that the Cambodian economy grew rapidly (5-13% real
GDP growth) in the evaluation years. Whilst poor subsistence farmers are somewhat
insulated from the effects of inflation and are not component to the tourism and garment
sector-driven GDP growth, the rural economy has not been stagnant and it relies increasingly
on consumer goods. CEDAC is not unaware of these statistical problems and also includes a
subjective assessment by respondents about their overall living standard (but not about the
project’s impact’s per se): 15.6% reported no increase in living standards, 37.2% reported aslight increase, 39.5% reported a medium increase, and 1.7% reported a high increase (Suon,21

See official figures at the National Institute of Statistics (Cambodia): http://www.nis.gov.kh/

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2007a). This follows my own results very closely, which is to say, it follows the trends of thevillagers in general because I sampled from participants and non-participants alike. In otherwords, many of the improvements observed in CEDAC’s impact evaluations could apply tofarmer families in areas without any CEDAC intervention. This is not a surprising result, as
one would expect even rural villages to improve their livelihoods in the context of a rapidly
growing economy.
This conclusion is not to say that CEDAC programmes are not improving livelihoods.
Indeed the reduction in chemical fertilizer usage, increases in social capital, microcredit
availability, and entrepreneurial training are positive externalities, but this does suggest that
ecological agriculture techniques are not being applied on a wide enough scale to besignificant. That 4.5% of rice farming families practice SRI whilst only 2% of land iscultivated suggests that farmers devote far less of their land to SRI; indeed, as shown in
Table 1, SRI farmers allocate on average 51% of their fields to SRI (CEDAC reports indicate
57-66%). To compound this, less than half of the overall field allocation for SRI receives‘good’ SRI treatment,22 which diminishes the yield-raising potential. All of the studies
presented in Table 1 find comparable per hectare yield increases from SRI ranging from 49122%, but this is contrasted by an increase of only 15-36% in overall yield, with the lowest
projections emerging from my figures.23

22

The question of what should be considered ‘good’ or ‘partial’ SRI is sharply debated. For statistical analyses,
I avoid this problem by employing factor analysis but for the sake of comparison with CEDAC figures, I
developed the following definition, suitable for this sample: a farmer is considered to apply partial (as opposed
to good) SRI if he or she fails any two of the following conditions: (1) transplanting the same day as pulling, (2)ageing seedlings less than 23 days and (3) spacing hills at least 20cm or more from one another.
23
Rice-related statistics are directly comparable between this survey and those carried out by CEDAC, as I
isolate (as seen in Table 1) the sub-group of SRI farmers.

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Table 1. Rice land and yield, 2007
Rice production in the sample (This study)
Quartile 1 Quartile 2 Quartile 3 Quartile 4
Total Rice Land (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields as a proportion of total
Total good SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total partial SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Overall rice yield (t/ha)
Rice yield excluding SRI (t/ha)Overall rice yield (t/ha) for SRI farmers
Rice yield excluding SRI (t/ha) for SRI farmers
SRI yield, good SRI fields (t/ha)
SRI yield, partial SRI fields (t/ha)

0.35
0.14
0.40
0.12
0.19
2.10
1.89
2.39
2.01
2.57
2.43

0.46
0.28
0.61
0.30
0.27
2.32
1.94
2.68
1.80
2.92
2.87

0.59
0.19
0.32
0.22
N/A
2.10
1.92
2.33
1.79
2.57
N/A

Overall

0.64
0.45
0.70
0.43
0.56
2.37
1.98
2.54
1.69
5.03
2.65

0.51
0.26
0.51
0.24
0.36
2.22
1.93
2.49
1.83
3.07
2.65

Rice production in the sample (Samraung Report, CEDAC)
Quartile 1 Quartile 2 Quartile 3 Quartile 4
Overall
Total Rice Land (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields as a proportion of total
Total good SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total partial SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Overall rice yield (t/ha)
Rice yield excluding SRI (t/ha)
SRI yield, good SRI fields (t/ha)
SRI yield, partial SRI fields (t/ha)

0.48
0.32
0.67
0.17
0.31
2.48
1.94
3.61
2.74

0.76
0.54
0.71
0.27
0.46
2.26
1.50
2.91
2.56

0.78
0.48
0.62
0.25
0.38
2.84
2.40
3.75
3.20

1.07
0.91
0.85
0.34
0.79
2.34
1.63
3.42
2.33

0.77
0.57
0.74
0.27
0.50
2.48
1.88
3.41
2.74

Rice production in the sample (Country Report, CEDAC)
Quartile 1 Quartile 2 Quartile 3 Quartile 4
Overall
Total Rice Land (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total SRI rice fields as a proportion of total
Total good SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Total partial SRI rice fields (ha/hh)
Overall rice yield (t/ha)
Rice yield excluding SRI (t/ha)
SRI yield, good SRI fields (t/ha)
SRI yield, partial SRI fields (t/ha)

0.83
0.43
0.52
0.21
0.45
1.78
1.45
3.10
2.10

1.21
0.64
0.53
0.28
0.62
1.84
1.41
3.10
2.20

1.38
0.62
0.45
0.26
0.61
1.85
1.41
3.30
2.40

1.89
0.91
0.48
0.34
0.96
1.86
1.51
3.20
2.20

1.33
0.66
0.50
0.28
0.67
1.83
1.44
3.20
2.20

The suggestions are based on descriptive statistics but they are also borne out by significancetests and econometric analysis. Firstly, a paired t-test indicates that SRI yields are
significantly higher non-SRI yields, on a per-hectare basis (see Appendix 3). However, two
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OLS models below indicate that SRI application is not found to be a significant factor in
explaining overall yield (see Table 2), when controlling for general cultivation practices, soil
characteristics and availability of organic matter. Furthermore, the OLS models displayed inTable 3 show that SRI cultivation is not significantly associated with wealth, controlling
average yield, literacy, non-agricultural jobs, dependents, soil characteristics, and availabilityof organic matter. The question of endogeneity between average yield and the SRI dummy
variable is a potential issue in these models, but correlation coefficients (found in Appendix
3) indicate that there is minimal direct interaction between the two variables.

Table 2. Regression output for two models explaining overall yieldcultivationsoil typeorganic mattergood SRI
partial SRI
any SRI
_cons
N

(1)
overall yield
0.174+-0.139
0.063
0.216
0.343
2.284*
70(1.75)(-1.23)(0.39)(1.06)(1.34)(9.03)(2)overall yield
0.180+-0.1260.064
0.254
2.261*
70(1.82)(-1.15)(0.40)(1.34)(9.12)

t statistics in parentheses+
p < 0.10, * p < 0.05

Table 3. Regression output for two models explaining wealthavg. yieldsoil typeliterate
high-paying job
low-paying job
organic matter
residents/hh
good SRI
partial SRI
any SRI
_cons
N

(1)
wealth
0.404*
0.228
0.581+
0.225-0.3390.502*
0.095-0.3250.049-2.414*70(2.21)(1.37)(1.90)(0.99)(-1.47)(2.19)(1.31)(-1.21)(0.15)(-3.45)(2)
wealth
0.407*
0.275+
0.522+
0.244-0.3150.501*
0.071-0.191-2.353*70(2.22)(1.72)(1.73)(1.08)(-1.37)(2.19)(1.03)(-0.81)(-3.37)t statistics in parentheses+
p < 0.10, * p < 0.05

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My overall conclusion is that whilst incremental improvement of SRI is positively
associated with (and likely causes) increased yield, its effect on livelihoods is statisticallyinsignificant due to a low commitment to SRI, as exhibited by poor technique and limited
land area devoted to SRI cultivation. My own fieldwork, and other adoption studies in
Cambodia (Rajpal, 2008), indicate that many of the reasons for the lack of commitment by
current SRI farmers, including social and structural constraints, can result in low adoption
rate, high disadoption rate, and difficulty for extension staffs in recruiting and incentivising
CEDAC’s programming. This reality is not addressed in CEDAC’s internal or externalreports because it is not in their interest to interpret quantitative results in a way that presents
them in discouraging light—for themselves and for their donors. As a result, the scale ofreflexive self-criticism at CEDAC is artificially lower, which diminishes the scope forrevisiting components of their field programmes.

4.1.4

From Dynamic Action Research to Holy Pedestal: The Birth and Adolescence of SRI

The challenges and goals of CEDAC were far simpler in its pioneering years,
particularly as agricultural research on SRI, multi-purpose farming, and ecological livestockraising were unencumbered by the organisational challenges of needy Farmers Associations,the “business plan”, and the complexities of the 70 donor-funded projects yet to come.
Although founded in 1997, the president of CEDAC often publicly regards 2001, the year
they began extending SRI, as the important foundational moment in its organisational
history.24 Yet, in spite of its pivotal role in recruitment lasting until this day, the technicalaspects of SRI have received dwindling focus over the years and now action researchconcerning how to best tailor and adapt SRI for Cambodia and Cambodians has diminishedconsiderably. As I have already addressed above in regards to re-examining “strategic

24

Field notes from 10th Anniversary Celebration, 1 August 2007

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actors”, this is a glaring oversight as there is yet considerable potential for additional
adoption and improvement of SRI practices, and thus more prospective recruits for thebroader CEDAC system. I chose to describe SRI as having reached adolescence in this subtitle, because, analogously, this is a time when parents begin to give their children
independence and it is also one of the most socially and developmentally challenging periods
for youth.
The following sections describe what these challenges are through a discussion of
adoption and uptake dynamics of SRI. The larger picture, however, is that although 34 out of
70 farmers interviewed nominally apply SRI, the large majority of these farmers apply very
few steps due to prevailing structural and social constraints. In fact, none of my informants
have been able to apply all of the SRI steps on all of his or her fields. Moreover, only ahandful of the SRI farmers I spoke with had any hopes of improving their practice of, andallocation of land to, SRI in the next few years. The challenges for new uptake and deeper
adoption of SRI are numerous and generally well-known, but CEDAC has not targetedresources at addressing these issues in recent years or, in the case of structural constraints,
admitted that there are intractable problems. Below, I will explore the structural constraints
and the social challenges of SRI adoption and conclude with a discussion of why adoption
barriers have not been overcome in more recent years.

4.1.5

Structural Constraints to the Adoption of SRI

The primary structural constraints, as I noted in numerous conversations with current
SRI farmers and strategic agents alike, concern water management, straw production andorganic matter resources.
Water management, as noted in Rajpal (2008), is the most pervasive amongst thesethree structural constraints as it affects both the ability to implement even the basic SRI steps

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and also the potential for optimising growth. Although some farmers could mitigate thisproblem by digging their own canals, they often lack experience to do so, require a mothercanal onto which they can connect their system, or are constrained because the fields they
inherited after the Khmer Rouge regime were simply too deep to allow for drainage by
gravity. In order to successfully initiate SRI, the window of opportunity for transplanting (820 days) is frequently missed because the paddies are either too dry to plough or the waterlevel is too high to transplant younger, shorter seedlings.

I know how to do one-stem, yes. I’ve talked about it with all of the other farmers who
do one-stem. But as you can see, our fields are lower than everyone else’s. This is aproblem since Pol Pot times. High water damages the young seedlings and makes
them more vulnerable to the worm [leaf grub] and anyway SRI needs less water,right? Unless someone drops a mountain of soil on my field, I cannot do SRI. (male,age 45, Tramkok district)

We don’t trust the skies these days. The weather is getting more strange. And wehave no canal nearby so if the rains stop early we cannot irrigate our fields. This is
why we keep all our water in our fields. (female, age 31, Samraung district)

As climate change incrementally makes rainfall more erratic, it becomes yet more difficult toplan for transplanting. Because of the relatively short nurserying period, it is possible tosimply stagger the nurseries so as to expand the window of opportunity, but the cost in termsof labour, seed and planning are considerable. This narrow window also complicatesploughing. For farmers lacking their own animal traction, it is difficult to hire others’
animals without advance notice and negotiation. For farmers wishing to expand SRI
production to their entire fields, there is the added challenge that they must organise skilled

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helpers on very short-notice. Those with smaller fields and adequate family labour canusually transplant on their own, but, lacking this, the family is forced to hire outside
labourers.

My hired hands agree to do one-stem, but their spacing is narrower and not regular.
If I tell them to use the line [for row-transplanting], they would refuse to work. The
hired workers always want to work mindlessly! [interviewer’s prompt] Yes, I could
hire people who know about SRI… but it’s hard enough to find people to work at allthese days! (female, age 34, Tramkok district)

In order to hire helpers during the height of the transplanting season, when demand is very
high, one must often plan for their arrival weeks in advance and have a large meal prepared.
Furthermore, ensuring that uninitiated labourers pull the seedlings gently, and transplant themskilfully is challenging, as is deciding how to compensate workers when the going system isbased on a per-40-bundle rate (SRI transplanting avoids bundling entirely). Perversely, many
hired labourers are encouraged to transplant more than one stem, as this exhausts the supplyof seedlings faster and allows them to return home earlier. Solving the water-related timing
dilemmas inherent to SRI transplanting depends on updating infrastructure and water control
regulations to such a degree that only very widespread adoption or strong social capital
amongst villagers would help in the absence of extant water resource management
infrastructure.
Once transplanting is carried out successfully, optimising water levels for SRI
throughout the growing period faces considerable obstacles. Although proponents of SRI
often refer to the water-saving feature of SRI as a boon, rain-fed rice farmers are often facedwith a contradictory set of conditions. During the rainy season, water is in such abundance
and flooding so prevalent that releasing water from the fields is generally difficult. Either

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neighbours do not allow it or the water table is so high there is no possibility for naturaldrainage. As the dry season approaches, these conditions reverse: as the farmer is unsure
when the rains will stop, he or she is encouraged to begin ponding as much water as possible
in the paddies so as to buffer him or herself from the effects of an extended dry spell leading
up to harvest. In my research, more than a third of my respondents had switched to midseason rice varieties because late-season droughts are becoming more frequent. For an SRI
farmer attempting to optimise water levels for growth, being caught in a late-season dry spellwith low water level spells disaster for the crop. Irrigating from a canal becomes increasingly
challenging as villagers compete for water from the canals. Farmers attempting to groworganic rice may also feel hesitant about irrigating with communal water as it likely contains
considerable chemical residue from others in the village. In general, almost all of myrespondents, including many veteran SRI farmers, referred to various aspects of water
management as problems for uptake or further adoption of SRI techniques.
After water management, straw production is the possibly most passionately debatedaspect of SRI production and is, amongst my informants, responsible for most disadoption in
addition to being a major factor in poor uptake. I admit that I overlooked this topic going
into fieldwork because it was scarcely covered in SRI literature and the issue simply did notseem salient enough on its surface. Furthermore, and as CEDAC staffs will fiercely assert, intheory, there is no problem with straw production from SRI. Because there are ways of
increasing straw output within the framework of SRI, this issue is often discounted.
However, doing so disregards the experiences of less skilled SRI farmers, usually those in
their first year(s), who have not yet found a way to balance straw output. Indeed, amongst
my informants, I found very few farmers who have reached the theoretical straw output
claimed by CEDAC. If straw was not such an important element in the farming system, thiswould not be such a critical concern.

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As it turns out, straw (called chambaogn) is indispensable for the Khmer farmer
family. It is the primary source of food for cattle when grazing resources diminish, kindlingfor fire starting, compost for subsequent soil preparation, mulch for improved cultivation, andeven packaging material for vegetable and fruit sales. In Cambodia, unlike in the fairy tale,straw truly is gold. Indeed, if straw supplies dwindle, the farmer is forced to travel far afield
to procure more or pay a market premium for substitute fodder. Travellers in urban areas inCambodia between June and October will frequently see farmers out under the sun
painstakingly cutting grass with machetes in order to feed their cattle at home. As it turns
out, the welfare of livestock, cattle more specifically, is more central to SRI adoption thanwould be readily apparent.
The role of the cow in farmer families in the southern lowlands of Cambodia cannot
be underestimated in any plans for agricultural development. Most importantly, they are a
store and open expression of the family’s wealth, much like a high quality house orownership of a fancy motorbike (Ferguson, 1985). Calves, in turn, are the hope of any farmer
family, and increasing their herd is more unambiguously desired than bearing children.
Secondarily, cattle, or usually bulls, are the source of animal traction and short-distancetransport. Thirdly, they are the source of an important compost source—manure. And last,
but not least, cattle are members of the family. In the dry season, Khmer people lovingly
wash their cattle daily and they feel a deep pity, or empathy, for cattle when they are forced
to plough, harrow, or pull an oxcart; in lowland Cambodia, cattle are not seen as beasts ofburden in the same sense as in the European tradition. For farmers, ensuring that there is anadequate source of fodder for their herd is a close second to ensuring that the household hasenough rice to eat.

But we should say that the issue of spacing and less stems makes less straw. Even withour 120 ares [1.2 hectares] in the family and extra short-season rice, we still don’t

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have enough straw to keep our three cows fat. This village, unlike in Samraung
district, doesn’t have as much grass for grazing. (female, age 60, Tramkok district)

Do you need more yield or rice stubble? Well you need both. You cannot let yourcow die just the same as you cannot let family die. (female, age 36, Tramkok district)

As a result, a cultivation system that produces, or threatens to produce, less straw output is
not favourably viewed if the family owns many mature cattle. Optimum SRI cultivation also
requires more intensive land preparation and levelling, which is additional strenuous work forthe bulls. Conversely however, the abundance of weeds, which is normally viewed as aproblem with SRI, is often less problematic for lowland farmers who are often indifferent toadditional weeding because this not only improves their fields but also provides a source offresh fodder for their cattle.
Does SRI, which increases yield, actually decrease straw output? The most accurate
answer is no, but experience on the ground nevertheless shows that many farmers require a
few years to reach this level. On the one hand, in the first year of SRI production, rice yield ishigher and it continues to increase in subsequent years, given consistent conditions (Uphoff,
2002b, 2006b). In discussion with informants, I have noticed that straw production, on theother hand, is decreased in the initial years for a variety of reasons associated with learningand transitioning one’s field. As skill and field conditions improve, stalks grow taller,
increased tillering produces more stalks and overall straw output begins to increase above andbeyond initial levels—with one caveat.25 The stalks produced by healthy SRI clumps areoften thick and robust, which is ideal for plant growth but less suitable as fodder.
Unsurprisingly, cattle prefer more tender food; dried SRI stalks are often too strong as a longterm substitute as they are either rejected by the cow or serve to degrade the cow’s teeth

25

Teap Mom (pseudonym), 21 August 2007; Bao, 13 July 2007, personal communication

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faster than normal. Both of these issues are a concern for the Khmer farmer family
stewarding the well-being of their cattle.
As a result of these dilemmas, preferring to transplant with narrower spacing (forhigher straw output) is quite rational, given the need for fodder and especially when one has
many cattle to feed. This type of behaviour is naturally viewed as irrational by field staffs,
who often joke that, “people are growing straw not rice!” The usual response, which was the
subject of one discussion in extension staff training, is that farmers can simply sell their“surplus” rice to buy fodder. This prospect faces two dilemmas. Firstly, after harvest thesale price of rice is low as is the price of straw, which has also been recently harvested. The
price of these two commodities increases in parallel as the wet season approaches, such that
there is no opportune time to exchange rice for straw. This is related to the second dilemma,
which is that farmers still do prioritise their family’s rice needs above fodder needs and thus
find it difficult to justify trading human food for cow food on a one-to-one basis. This iswhy, despite the suffering involved, they prefer to cut grass with a machete under the sunrather than give up rice. This is especially important for farmer families that do not produce
enough rice annually for their own consumption, which represents 47% of the farmer families
I interviewed.
The “survival algorithm” for cattle-rearing is similar to that for humans—even one
year with a deficit of fodder must avoided at all costs, as it can initiate a cycle of debt andrepayment, or, in the worst case, sale of a cow. This has profound implications for thewillingness to adopt SRI. Because straw output is, in theory, not a problem for SRI, it is not
generally mentioned as a potential risk during initial trainings.

Last year, CEDAC came many times to train people in SRI and luckily I could cometo one meeting. I was very impressed. I raised my hand and said I would do SRI on
half of my fields because I really believed their story. But why didn’t they tell me

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about the straw problem or the crabs? When I heard about these things from mysister, I decided only to test 10 ares [one eighth of her field]. (female, age 28,
Samraung district)

Information concerning the decrease in straw output usually finds its way to potential
adoptees through informal channels, especially rumours and reports from those who havetested SRI previously. More than half of the disadopters I spoke with commented that theyencountered at least one unexpected issue with SRI that they were not informed about prior to
the test. These issues include the difficulty with timing, vulnerability to certain pests (such as
crabs), effort creating straight rows, and, most commonly, decreased straw output. For manyof these respondents, these unanticipated experiences raised suspicions about the entire
system and contributed to disadoption and additional rumour making. Consequently, thesteep learning-curve for, and the rumours about, straw production are amongst the mostsalient reasons for disadoption and hesitant uptake of SRI.
Partially, the issue of straw production can be addressed by planning SRI cultivation
incrementally and investing in alternative sources of fodder. But perhaps more importantly,
it is necessary to admit that straw output is a potential problem with SRI, albeit solvable in
the long-term, in all trainings and information sessions. Doing so can help create support foraction research concerning how best to manage the straw dilemma. Unfortunately, even the
newly-released training video, Do you speak SRI?, fails to mention this issue or address
potential solutions to straw output and water management dilemmas.
The third structural constraint, lack of adequate resources for organic matter, issimilarly a matter that can be addressed in the long-term given proper notice and preparation,
but remains a potent barrier in the initial adoption and subsequent scaling-up of SRI
cultivation. CEDAC has a conflicting relationship with the issue of organic fertilizer vs.
inorganic fertilizer. One the one hand, CEDAC’s commitment to ecological agriculture

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implies that it does not support the use of inorganic fertilizers. On the other hand, CEDAC’s
commitment to diffusing SRI, which requires improvements to soil fertility, cannot often be
accomplished with the resources initially available on most of its target families’ farms.

Yes, I never know if I should say that it’s okay to use fertilizer or not. I want thefarmers to start learning about the environmental problems but I also want to makesure they get a good yield. If they start SRI on a field with really poor soil, the result
might be disappointing if they don’t use a little fertilizer, but it is against my training
to recommend it. (field staff, Zone II)

There is an historical precedent here that I have already mentioned: emerging from the forced
organic production of the Pol Pot era, Cambodian farmers embraced inorganic fertilizers witha vengeance. Over the past 20-25 years, fundamental soil fertility, which is based on
replenishment of organic material, microbial activity and sustainable cultivation, hasdecreased across the board in Cambodia (Kingdom of Cambodia, 2000). Part of the reason isthat inorganic fertilizers have replaced much of labour previously devoted to collecting
organic fertilizer. Additionally, applying inorganic fertilizers (especially nitrogen)unsustainably amplifies soil decomposition (Bot & Benites, 2005). Another part of thereason is that land consolidation and agricultural intensification have created such populationpressure in many lowland areas that the fertility of paddies has been progressively mined byover-tillage and dense, but not intensive,26 cropping. In order to commence a System of RiceIntensification that improves productivity significantly, soil quality must recover rapidly.
The contradiction is that rebuilding soil fertility is a long-term process, whilst SRI
adoption is expected to be a short-term process. Most farmers do not have the plant resourceson their lands to begin rebuilding soil fertility in a meaningful way and have thus consigned
26

By dense, I refer to the strategy of densely planting many seedlings to ostensibly shore up yield loss in small
paddies, whereas intensification refers to the strategy of applying rigorous management practices.

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themselves to the use of inorganic fertilizer and/or dense transplanting in order to produce anadequate yield of rice and straw. Breaking this cycle is challenging and requires a concerted
effort over a number of years to improve the capacity of one’s lands to produce organic
matter. In the meantime, it may very well be necessary to continue relying on inorganic
fertilizers to maintain food security. The problem for agricultural extension, much like withstraw output, is that the messaging in training can be incomplete or confusing. Some farmers
do come away understanding precisely which steps of SRI to apply, given their conditions.
However, many farmers come away believing that SRI and inorganic fertilizers areincommensurate, or farmers are confounded by the high expectation that they could produce
enough organic material to implement SRI effectively.

When people ask me if they can use fertilizers and do SRI at the same time, I always
say to them: It’s your field, so you can do what you want. I try to tell them that they
are the expert, they know their fields better than anyone else. But so many people are
confused! They think if they do not have enough compost that they cannot do SRI at
all. (male, Village-Based Animator, age 35, Samraung district)

Because of the confusion about the role of inorganic fertilizers, and the lack of organic matter
available initially on farmers’ land, the relationship between SRI and fertilizers must be
clearly communicated and strategies for the long-term improvement of soil fertility must be
explicated. The first suggestion is difficult for CEDAC, as its opposition to chemical inputs
is seen by the public as paired with the vigorous promotion of fertilizers and high-yielding
varieties by the AusAID-funded Cambodian Agricultural Research and Development
Institute (CARDI). The second suggestion, which involves trainings about how to increasenutrient recycling, will be difficult without significant action research exploring how to
improve organic fertilizer resources in each village or regional agroecosystem.

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4.1.6Social Constraints to the Adoption of SRI

A number of social constraints to adoption have been mentioned in the above section;
I will revisit some of these further and examine additional social constraints and theirimplications for SRI diffusion. Exploring these constraints and how they have been
negotiated by CEDAC and farmers is critical for understanding how the institutional systemfor extension has evolved, and will evolve in the future. This analysis is based on the same
premise as above: that, although the extension system and teaching pedagogy employed by
CEDAC has been very effective relative to many other rural agricultural development
projects in Cambodia, there are open questions as to whether these efforts are “effective
enough” (to ultimately reach a large enough and vulnerable enough cross-section of the
population) and whether CEDAC’s extension is improving in efficacy over time. Below, I
will focus on a few representative topics concerning extension pedagogy and the perspectiveof strategic agents. The topics highlight how SRI, as key programmatic element, has come tobe taken for granted and thus stagnated despite the fact that challenges to the extension model
continue to accumulate.
Looking at field staff first, I found that many problems with extension pedagogy stemfrom the practice of privileging an internal motivational functionality rather than an external
accountability functionality. Given limited resources for extension, CEDAC has adopted astrategy predicated on training a cadre of key farmers in each village to diffuse agricultural
techniques. Under these conditions, it is natural to select the most enthusiastic and willingtrainees, as these figures are more likely to be effective extension agents. In doing so,
however, CEDAC not only escapes directly training the more hesitant farmers, but also
misses the opportunity to learn about the constraints facing those farmers. As the director of
research and development commented to me, “we tell our staff to ‘look to the potential’”, to

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focus on, engage with, and learn from, successful participants and successful examples of
their work, rather than dwelling on difficult or intractable issues.27 Whilst this might
generally appear to be a good operational strategy, it becomes problematic if it results in field
staffs systematically escaping healthy confrontation with challenges to their model.
Surrounded by eager and encouraging Village-Based Animators, Interested Farmers, FA
leaders and Community Field Assistants, field staffs naturally feel that progress is swift andcommunities are progressing rapidly. Whilst this has a strong motivational influence on field
staffs, which cannot be underestimated when considering the challenges of human resource
management in rural development, the over-exposure to a self-selected group of willing
participants creates an artificial sense of achievement. Staffs are, in effect, preaching to thechoir. This effect only becomes more pronounced over time, because as Farmer Community
Schools become Farmers Associations, and FAs join with Commune Clusters, field staffs
incrementally withdraw to higher levels of organisation, and resultantly come in contact withthose who are even more enthusiastic than those at the village level.
Being disproportionately exposed to farmers who lack the structural constraints andshyness of the strategic actors paints a rosy picture of the landscape of SRI extension that,ironically, de-motivates field staffs to engage meaningfully with hesitant participants. By thislogic, because so many families in Takeo, and indeed Cambodia, have succeeded nominallyin applying SRI, it appears less and less rational for others not to apply. Because this occurs
both at the level of the individual staff member and at the organisational level, CEDAC views
overall have become less sympathetic to the challenges and constraints faced by strategic
agents.

Farmers always complain about the same problems. But I have met so many otherfarmers who also have those problems but they managed to overcome them. If you

27

Suon, 25 September 2007, personal communication

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ask me, I think it is better to teach the farmers with a good attitude. Maybe later they
will prove to the other farmers that the problems are not so hard to deal with. (field
staff, Zone II)

Admittedly, it was surprising to me the first time I encountered two neighbours, one
successfully applying SRI and another, not 100 metres away, blaming various structural
constraints. In some cases, the neighbour’s claims are justified and, in other cases, field
staffs could argue that the neighbour was simply “making excuses”. However, when“making excuses” becomes the overriding expectation, and ignoring hesitant farmers
becomes the overriding practice, many real constraints facing strategic agents are notinternalised. Describing a staff-training event at the headquarters, one field agent from Takeo
described this logic in the following way:

We discussed or concluded that we cannot control the work ethic of the farmer. If
s/he is a lazy farmer, than s/he won’t do some of the extra or new things. If s/he is a
hard-working farmer, it will be easier to teach. It is better for us to focus on thesefarmers. (field staff, Zone II)

Common amongst field staffs is the bipolar perception that farmers are either open or closed,
and by extension, worthy or unworthy of attention. Infrequently was the farmer’s degree of
openness understood as lying on a continuum, despite that fact that openness is highly
dependent on other factors. Indeed, openness to SRI is related with social and environmental
factors that must be factored into an examination of adoption behaviour. By privileging theinitially interested farmers, not only have the elderly, young and the ‘strategic agents’ often
been marginalised from early efforts to disseminate SRI, but there are few plans to learn from

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the dilemmas facing these groups and, thus, there is limited potential for their inclusion in the
future.
From the perspective of farmers encountering CEDAC extension efforts for the firsttime, there is considerable dissonance about how to conceive of SRI and how to situate it
within pre-existing social and environmental conditions. Prior to the arrival of CEDAC, it isuntrue that farmers were unaware of improved management practices (see Maddocks, 1994),
but they had thus far not chosen to implement intensification on a large scale. For example,
many farmers grow or live nearby farmers who grow a premier variety of rice called p’kahmalis. Although not strictly necessary, most farmers growing p’kah malis apply a more‘intensive’ set of practices for cultivating this variety in order to match its ‘premier’ status.
The fact that they do not apply the same resources to cultivating other varieties indicates thatthey have long-term reasons for not applying intensive practices on all of their fields. Many
farmers expressed considerable hostility towards NGOs because they feel that NGOs
unreasonably communicate the imperative to worker harder on all of their field area (i.e.,
more intensive cultivation practices) without properly understanding structural constraints
that have historically led to the current mixture of practices. To be fair, SRI differs fromp’kah malis cultivation. Labour expenditure can be lower with SRI and some of the preceptsof SRI cultivation are fundamentally different than any traditionally evolved intensification
practices. Many farmers do find something new to learn, but their initial encounter with SRI
can often be characterised with some antipathy because farmers feel they have already
decided against intensification at the suggested scale.
In order to prove that SRI should be seen in different light than traditional
intensification practices, farmers require forums for discussion (or gossip) and learning thatare not always available. Although timing conflicts and difficulties announcing various
formal training sessions invariably come into play, there are more intractable social barriers
to attending meetings and interfacing with the local SRI community. Firstly, although

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interest groups and Farmers Associations are open for membership, joining later comes at aslight risk of alienation. Secondly, there is no particular reason why anyone would
necessarily enjoy the social experience of learning and doing business with one’s neighbours.
Indeed, there are many divisions and social boundaries that discourage certain groups orfamilies from attending open meetings. Thirdly, many farmers are embarrassed to attend
training sessions because doing so implies that their current skills are inadequate.
Following off the third point above, the question of how meaningfully farmers
interact with the pedagogy of SRI extension is dependent upon how they construct theiridentity as a farmer. Farmers who feel well trained and prideful of their cultivation may see
SRI as “the competition”, and thus be resentful or at least highly suspicious of the newpractices. Others may see their role as a farmer as requiring and welcoming innovation andchange.

I am a farmer not an animal. Animals do everything the same each day, each year
because they cannot learn. I want to improve my techniques and increase my yield.
Luckily, there are people I can learn new things from! (male, Farmers Association
leader, 21 August 2007)

In addition to formal learning environments, gossip and critical masses are often very
important in technology dissemination, and particularly so in SRI, because they decrease thepressure on each individual to adapt his or her identity as a farmer. This issue is addressed in
the recently-released training and promotion video, Do you speak SRI?, which depicts afictional young farmer’s encounter with SRI. In the video, the main character rings themobile phones of fellow farmers to gloat about his high rice yield, only to find out that theiryields are higher than his and required less seed. The identity politics in the movie are
significant: elder farmers teach a vulnerable and disappointed young farmer about SRI using

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mobile phones, a magic television and animation. SRI is depicted as modern, but it is also
applied by traditional (i.e., more elderly) farmers. The focus on identity politics of SRI is
innovative, but approach and narratives were developed by a French production team, which
consulted with CEDAC only for technical assistance and not storyline.28
One final social constraint that has been weakly internalised by CEDAC concerns the“opportunity costs” SRI cultivation. Inherited from mainstream institutional discourse onrural development, CEDAC historically had a very static and sedentary view of development,
although this is being reviewed. The locale is of primary importance, and “enabling people
to stay at home” is an overriding concern (Bakewell, 2007). In fact, preventing migration andpreserving beneficiaries as “small farming households” is an integral part of their mission(CEDAC, 2007a). In reality, migration, off-farm work, cottage industries and other socialand economic aspirations are conspicuous elements of rural life. Indeed, 84% of sampled
farmer families are engaged in work outside of the farm, 54% of families have at least two
main occupations, and 46% of families have one member working a “high-paying” job.29
Some of these occupations conflict or compete with SRI in various ways. I have alreadyoutlined how a large herd of cattle conflicts with SRI. In addition, alcohol and palm sugar
production require large amounts of kindling and wood fuel that could otherwise be used forcompost. The more intensive weeding, stricter water management and the degree ofmonitoring required can also make it difficult for the entire family to slip away to weddings
and celebrations. Many other jobs can conflict as well if they tie up family labour, which isimportant (although not necessary) for SRI, in the cultivation season(s). CEDAC has
recently begun classifying farmers based on their commitment to cultivation (as opposed toother jobs) and tailoring their strategies different, but it is unclear how, or if, this will affect
SRI extension.
28

The video was officially released 18 March 2008 in Phnom Penh. It was funded by Oxfam America andreceived logistical and technical support from CEDAC. The content of the video was produced by the firm
Mind’s Eye Production.
29
What constitutes a low, medium or high-paying job is outlined in Appendix 4. High-paying, however, is arelative term that exists only within the context of rural agriculturally-based communities.

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4.1.7

Conclusion: How CEDAC arrived at its present state

In the preceding sections, I outlined a host of structural and social constraints in orderto show how the extension practice and institutional culture of CEDAC has evolved in waysthat have incrementally weakened SRI as an effective entry point to CEDAC’s programming.
Additionally, the manner in which CEDAC represents the outcomes of its work in ‘impact
assessments’ does not allow for critical self-reflection. Through statistical analysis and areview of data presentation, I show that the absolute improvements overlook a relational(statistical) insignificance and mask over exogenous factors affecting rural Cambodia as awhole. I also show that increasingly distant involvement by staffs in organisations has
resulted in a shift in accountability that increasingly favours a passive, demand-pull strategy
for drawing in previously uninitiated farmers, rather than the grassroots approach favoured
since the inception of rural development programming. This increasing distance from SRI, as
I have argued above, is responsible for decreased motivation to deal with hesitant farmers anda declining capacity to conduct action research in order to make SRI a more inclusive entrypoint. This conclusion is somewhat paradoxical, because whilst the technical aspects of SRI
extension are receiving less and less focus at CEDAC, SRI continues to remain theblockbuster entry point for most other programmatic activities. Limiting the effectiveness of
SRI extension limits the pool of potential participants—and clients—for CEDAC and, in thelong-term, lowers the chance that CEDAC will become accountable to more vulnerable
groups. Discussing why this is the case is the focus of the following section.

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4.2

The Current Situation, Looking Forward

Although in the works for a number of years, following the celebration of its 10th
anniversary, CEDAC officially kicked off a new and ambitious campaign to partially reform
its activities to conform to business and performance guidelines. To hear it being discussed
in meetings, one would get the feeling that the so-called “business plan” was a predestined
and inevitable summation of CEDAC’s activities in the non-profit sector. Althoughnominally split into three “Core Programs”, only one of which is exclusively focussed onenterprise, a business-like performance orientation has permeated into all areas ofprogramming (CEDAC, February 2008). As a result of these changes, CEDAC hopes to be
75% independent of donor funding by 2015.30 It hopes to do so through a combination of“performance extension”, microcredit, marketing and stores, eco-tourism, export assistanceand solar energy capacity building.31 By 2008, CEDAC already has eco-labelling and natural
production networks for rice, palm, and chicken; it has two natural food restaurants open in
Phnom Penh; and it has disseminated its business ethic to many rural partners, some of whom
have begun developed producers groups and begun investing in co-operatively run stores andtransportation capacity. In addition, following CEDAC’s new performance orientation, they
field staffs have begun soliciting donations from villagers for the extension “services” they
have rendered.
By internalising a performance orientation, CEDAC has fundamentally altered the
incentive structures for field staffs and changed the way staff members view participating
farmers. The president of CEDAC, Koma Yang Saing, frequently likens this new
performance orientation to the type of business conducted by beer girls:

30

The potential for reaching this goal of donor-independence may be reduced significantly if a $2 million Gates
Foundation grant is awarded to CEDAC and the Cornel International Institute for Food, Agriculture, andDevelopment (CIIFAD).
31
Bao, 13 July 2007, personal communication

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We are not like normal civil society here – we don’t simply wait for a salary.
Business is not difficult to do. Even beer girls at night restaurants are doing somekind of business by collecting beer caps to help their salary. It’s simple like thatsometimes. We expect all of you to conscientiously fill out reports – this is like abottle cap. You must prove that you did business. Why is it so difficult to get
performance reports from some of you? This is not a communist regime, where you
have to curry favour from the boss to increase your salary. In this regime, we have topresent our performance to make our salary. All CEDAC staffs must understand this.
(field notes, 8 August 2007)32

By distancing CEDAC from general “civil society”, Yang Saing diminishes the concerns ofaccountability and legitimacy usually applied to NGOs. Accountability is diminishedbecause Socially Responsible Enterprises, despite their social orientation, are primarily
accountable to their customers. The issue of legitimacy is evaded because instead of doing
normative ‘development’ in the village, CEDAC is now doing neutral business.
Filling out reports to document “business transactions”, as described by Yang Saing,
may threaten to objectify the participants as “clients”. Whilst staffs garner most of theirpersonal feedback subjectively from day-to-day encounters, report-writing can slowly alter
the nature of this experience. Over time, a reciprocal relationship between official reporting
requirements and one’s individual outlook builds. Staffs’ subjective views become
incrementally coloured by their exposure to impact assessment methodology and formulaic
report-writing (Desai, 2006: 178). One begins to “see” through reports more and more
(Scott, 1998: 24). For example, one master’s thesis written by a programme manager after a
few years of working at CEDAC reads like a long-term programme impact assessment rather
than an academic piece. Through my archival research in Zone II, I also discovered that32

In case it is not clear from the description, waitresses can make a side-income by collecting the crown caps
from beer bottles of various brands and returning them to the company as proof of sale.

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many field staffs have decoded the underlying demands of the CEDAC report monitoring
system. In their field reports, they recycle the same successful key words and ideas tomanipulate the representation of their work in the field (Desai, 2006: 177). Some of thisredundancy is also caused by the burden of report writing, which forces field staffs to adopt
economising strategies for report-writing. This burden is likely to increase in the future
because the central research and development unit disbanded at the conclusion of 200733 andnow more numerous programme-level impact evaluations are replacing the centralised
system.
Adopting a performance orientation inevitably involves trade-offs. It can “go right”
when it increases efficiency, allows for rapid growth and diffusion of benefits, profits all of
the stakeholders and remains ecologically sustainable. It can “go wrong” if it creates
perverse or artificial incentives for participation, brings about report-writing and data
gathering procedures that obscure rather than make assessment transparent, and fails to draw
in a wider constituency and spread the benefits of development.
There are many positive results of this change already apparent in the field. Followup in March 2008 (nine months after initial fieldwork) demonstrated that many CEDAC
staffs have become quickly converted to enterprise experts, and Farmers Associations havebecome very enthusiastic about the investment, marketing and other enterprise initiatives
provided by CEDAC.

When I work at CEDAC, sometimes I work as a ‘businessman’ and sometimes as a‘development practitioner’. But when I think about being a businessman, I realize I
have more motivation and capacity to work. (field staff, meeting in Phnom Penh)

33

This resignation of the director of the research and development unit was rather controversial at the time. The
director claims that research funding was being systematically diverted and impact evaluations, which wereoutside of his purview, were being disproportionately supported.

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Although grudgingly, there is a growing acceptance and understanding for CEDAC’s “payfor services” model of training and assistance. This strategy also challenges the
predominating expectation for handouts associated with classic angkah charity organisations.
In fact, some farmer families who had previously been uninvolved in CEDAC’sorganisational activities joined in order to take part in the new business opportunities. More
broadly, technical knowledge about organic standards and legislation are being more quickly
consolidated in Cambodia, which can help prevent an erosion of standards as large
agriculture concerns become interested in the natural sector (CEDAC, 2007b).34
There are also many negative outcomes of the shift to a performance orientation. The
primary problem stems from the fact that “enterprise” becomes the highest tier oforganisational activity and thus depends on the stability of the organisational structures“below” it. After evolving through Farmer Community Schools, Farmers Associations andCommune Clusters, business and enterprise are seen as the next steps. Farmers must be“groomed” for the CEDAC system in order to make them ideal partners within theframework of the national level business plan. To become partners, farmers and farmergroups must traverse the track laid by CEDAC, which involves following of theorganisational evolution described above. As a result, Farmers Associations, which wereoriginally conceived of as forums for community empowerment (Mishra et al., 2006) also
serve as channels leading towards engagement in specific CEDAC-coordinated activities
further down the line (Wright, 1994).
I argue that FAs, whilst theoretically open forums, are controlled by a hegemonic
relationship with CEDAC. The programme director in Zone II commented to me that FAs
are empowerment-oriented because CEDAC only sets up the structures for farmer-to-farmer
extension and then leaves the fate of the FA in the hands of its members. Indeed, members
do share agricultural knowledge, learn how to work together to develop statutes, elect leaders

34

Corroborated by Or, 17 July 2007 2007, personal communication

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and discuss important issues facing their village. Occasionally, the FA succeeds in providing
a forum for empowering village residents.

After CEDAC there was some solidarity and cooperation amongst people in thevillages that we never saw before. People convinced each other not to burn the rice
stubble. In addition, the infrastructure was improved by our own mobilisation. We
managed to build a road together. In the evenings, when people were finished withwork they would come and we would put on [karaoke] music and lights so people
could work after sunset. In this way, we finished the road and started on anotherroad. (male Commune Cluster treasurer, age 51, Tramkok district)More commonly, however, the formal activities and structures of the FA are generally thoseprescribed by CEDAC field staff. For instance, all Farmers Associations adopt more-or-lessthe same governing structure and most FAs feature the same interest groups and microcredit
activities. Moreover, FAs often lack non-traditional features and creative initiatives, likewedding assistance programmes, equipment rental, voluntary guidelines for cattle grazing
and village newspapers. FA members suggested all of these activities to me but felt that the
restrictive atmosphere made it uncomfortable for them to introduce such new activities to the
FA. Although there is nothing formally preventing FAs from becoming entirely farmerconceived, there exists a perception that the scope of activities viable for the FA is delimited
in nature, especially as enterprise ideas are promoted to the FAs.

A few years ago, my son-in-law said he just wanted to try SRI. The next year, hejoined the Farmers Association. The next year he was the treasurer and then hejoined the Commune Cluster committee. Next year he wants to do business with

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CEDAC. I think many people in this village followed this path. I guess I missed out.
(male, age 53, Tramkok district)

No, advocacy is not the point of this meeting. It is to organize activities of CEDAC
with the committee. Maybe they have another group with the village chief to discuss
advocacy, but not in the Farmers Association. (male CEDAC field staff, in Samraung
district)

Before today, I did not even think about doing business but now CEDAC has made it
clear that this will help us survive without being dependent on donors. But weunderstand this poorly, so we need CEDAC’s guidance. Just look at how many goodideas they brought us for helping with the brown plant hopper infestation. We need tofollow their good ideas. (male, Commune Cluster committee member, age 50,
Samraung district)

Farmers Associations can thus be seen as training grounds, in which “participatory”
techniques are used to produce potential rural partners for CEDAC. The FAs become, inother words, a pool of groomed candidates from which CEDAC can recruit into otheractivities. As a result of the strict track for group formation and the growing demands forbusiness associations with rural people, there is little room for altering the foundationalorganisational structures influencing accountability of CEDAC to more vulnerable groups.

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5.0

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

Evidence presented here concerning SRI adoption, group formation andorganisational evolution are intended to reveal the development apparatus of CEDAC as anactor-world engaged in translation (i.e. “network building”) in order to expand the scope of
its actor-world rather than to accomplish any particular goal, such as sustainable
development. Indeed, the concept of sustainability is self-referenced; it is constantly
redefined, usually in an additive manner, in order to portray organisational evolution simply
as strategic re-targeting of resources in order to better achieve sustainable development(Adams, 1995: 87). Originally defined as ecological and productive improvement in ricebased agriculture in Cambodia, sustainable development has been refashioned as the buildingof formal, often market-based networks of producers coordinated by CEDAC. Improving
rural livelihoods has thus become a by-product of system expansion rather than an activity
unto itself. The shift in accountability arising from the declining importance of agriculturalextension is symptomatic of an organisation seeing the betterment of livelihoods asconstitutive of its own performance, rather than a moral goal. This is not to say that CEDAC
wishes to have less participation in its programming, but to acknowledge that, in focusing on
its performance, the outreach system has less incentive to reach each marginal recruit, whose
cost of recruitment is progressively elevated by structural and social constraints. Farmers
facing social and structural constraints are informally seen as “difficult” in order to justify theinability and unwillingness to address their issues. Whilst the cost of recruitment and, byextension, the cost of increased accountability, can be reduced by addressing the social andstructural constraints I have outlined, I show that the growing rigidity of the organisational
apparatus as it evolves makes CEDAC increasingly unable to accommodate the adaptationnecessary to do so. In addition to organisational rigidity, the willingness to adapt to

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constraints affecting accountability is hampered by the punctualisation of the CEDAC actorworld over the past 10 years. The operating parameters of CEDAC in the early years, which
included action research and sensitivity to rural constraints, are increasingly crowded out orviewed as an uneconomical regression to “old” functionality in light of the new performanceorientation. Impact assessments and report-writing culture further serve to obscure the pastand prevent critical and reflexive analysis about where CEDAC is going. The newimperative emerging from the performance orientation is to ensure that extension (i.e.,
recruitment) is “effective enough” to provisionally maintain donor-funding and to supply the
CEDAC actor-world with sufficient and readily-drafted new recruits. It is clear from
CEDAC’s relative success with SRI extension and group formation that numerically it has astrong positive influence, but these figures obscure important exogenous factors and many
relative untruths about its influence in rural communities. It is my conclusion then, that
CEDAC is a recent convert to the growing community of developmentalist-orientedorganisations that have converged upon the reformist ‘market sustainability’ paradigm ofsustainable development (Adams, 1995). Whilst critiquing this paradigm is not within thescope of this work, in Prospects I shall conclude with a brief discussion of the prospects forthis paradigm to challenge traditional industrialist modes of agricultural development or fallin line with it.
The first issue to address in detail is the evolving definition of sustainable
development, which is used rather instrumentally to assert the necessity of current activities
and to incrementally justify expansion into further activities. Although CEDAC’s visionstatement, which focuses on increasing rural incomes, ecological sustainability and social
cooperation is fixed (CEDAC, 2007a), there is an unspoken definition of sustainable
development that lays out what must be done in order to achieve the vision statement. And
whilst this definition can be altered, it is generally augmented, or added on to, by viewing
new activities as essential supplements in the pursuit of achieving the vision statement. In

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this way, the focus on SRI diffusion has been incrementally extended to include Farmers
Associations, Commune Clusters and now business activities. Within actor-network theory
this process has been coined Problematisation, because it involves the guided expansion ofan actor-world through continuous redefinition of what problems must be solved.
I focus on SRI in this thesis because it is the original product of Problematisation, andhas since become a gatekeeper through which all other activities must flow and is thus a
critical element of accountability. For most farmers, learning SRI is the first step inbecoming a full-fledged member of the CEDAC system, which can variously include
ecological livestock raising, village microcredit, social interest groups, producers groups,
farmer-to-farmer extension, and business-related activities. The inability or unwillingness totake up SRI generally pre-empts a farmer from taking part in all of these other activities, thus
making SRI an ‘obligatory point of passage’ (Callon, 1986a: 26-27). I gave considerable
attention to the structural and social constraints which mediate whether or not a farmer family
is able to pass the SRI-gatekeeper because these constraints effectively predict whether or nota farmer will (be able to) join the wider CEDAC system.35 I thoroughly deconstructed theseadoption constraints in order to determine whether there is some rationale behind who “getsthrough” and who does not. I concluded that, given CEDAC’s historical ability to solve
constraints, as seen by its historical record of effective action research in agriculture, CEDAC
has allowed these adoption constraints to persist because they passively select suitablepartners. In other words, the constraints are a natural filter or screen, determining which
farmers are worth working with (i.e., easily recruited and willing to take part the broader
CEDAC system) and which farmers are unworthy (i.e., costly to include and potentiallyunenthusiastic about further engagement in organisational activities). This “unworthy” groupis defined within CEDAC’s informal typology as the “difficult group”,36 which are farmers

35

To pre-empt any direct criticism here, I should point out that there are always exceptions—non-SRI farmers
who join Farmers Associations and also SRI-farmers who do not join Farmers Associations. In generally,
however, the presence of these individuals does not upset my overall conclusion.
36
Yi, 21 September 2007, personal communication

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who are rather neutrally considered by CEDAC as ‘beyond their ability’ to include. The“worthy” group, conversely, is seen approvingly as the “pioneers”. A third group, the “waitand-sees”, includes farmers who have simply not yet joined the pioneers or the difficultgroup. My analysis of the social and structural constraints shows that, contrary to thistypology, there is a large group of “strategic agents” which includes many wait-and-sees and“difficult” group members, who have engaged with SRI and found it wanting, or faceconsiderable real constraints. The broader question for accountability is: should thesestrategic agents be left out of the larger CEDAC system as well as SRI cultivation?
I realise that discussing the rationales and motivations of CEDAC as a unitary entity
is somewhat artificial and have thus also sought in this thesis to explore how CEDAC staffs,
individually and in aggregate, contribute to the larger processes described above. I conclude
that membership in the ever-growing actor-world of CEDAC requires staffs to be constantly
engaged in activities that distance them from strategic agents, and thus limit their ability to
see and act upon challenges to accountability. There are three main activities that bring thisabout. Firstly, the imperative to upgrade their target villages to higher and higher levels oforganisational activity draws them away from the hesitant and constrained villagers.
Secondly, the constant demand to advance themselves (i.e., their human capital) to serve theemerging interests of CEDAC’s social organising and business elements distances them fromtheir original specialisation in agricultural extension and action research. And thirdly, there
are increasing demands on staffs to represent their work in a synthetic ‘impact assessment’format, which creates a competing, and increasingly dominant, lens through which to “see”
farmers. Described within actor-network theory is the concept of displacement, which
describes how the ‘buzz’ of roles, activities and documentation distracts those within an
actor-world from engaging in self-reflexive assessment (Latour, 2005: 59-62). CEDAC staffs
are so pre-occupied with the structural imperatives of their work and the adaptation required
to maintain their position that only the horizon remains in view. In this case, displacement-

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activities provide for the progressive expansion of the CEDAC actor-world by securing focus
on future activities at the cost of the past. Adaptive rural programming and action research,
once prominent features of CEDAC’s activities for broadening the access of agricultural
innovations such as SRI to more people, are subtly supplanted by the operational necessitiesof the business plan.
The incremental convergence upon a market sustainability and performance-oriented
model for sustainable development presents many risks and opportunities for an organisationsuch as CEDAC. The way in which CEDAC responds and adapts to the challenges andconstraints of this new operational paradigm are broadly instructive for analysing and guiding
the evolution of many other promising sustainability initiatives that may yet go down thispath. CEDAC has already shown remarkable capability to succeed within the new
performance-oriented framework, as shown by the rising sales of organic products,
increasingly entrepreneurial cadre of farmer families and governmental support for marketing
initiatives. But these successes have also arrived with significant tradeoffs in its
accountability and its declining ability to sensitively document the experiences of its current
participants and solve the constraints of its potential participants. As CEDAC continues todifferentiate and grow, the newest activities and focuses gain in priority and, to the extent thatthe new activities require a consistent organisational foundation on which to operate, theactivities of the past become more marginalised and more crystallised. The assumption
emerges that as long as the new activities (the business plan, performance orientation) are
moving forward and donors are continually attracted, past activities will be “dragged
forward” with the new. In contrary, I have documented a large and increasing distance
between the achievements of CEDAC under its new operational paradigm and its
achievements under the previous paradigm. CEDAC’s focus on its own achievements andnot on those of the rural people who make its success possible highlights the limited degree to

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which rural livelihoods and poverty reduction can accountably be addressed with marketsustainability based development activities.

5.1

Prospects and Research Recommendations

In this section, I would like to address very briefly two burning issues implied by theconclusions of this thesis. The first issue concerns whether CEDAC can take control of thissituation by revitalizing its inclusiveness and accountability within the current operating
framework. The second issue is concerned with the prospects for a market-sustainability
model such as CEDAC’s to supplant the industrialist modes of production and consumption
inherent to the capitalist market system.
My discussions with upper-level management at CEDAC have indicated that whilst
management is aware of the lapse in focus on adaptive agricultural extension, they feel as if
they are on treadmill that prevents them for revisiting old issues. Rather, they hoped that thedilemmas I raised could be solved with new projects. Management all the way down to field
staffs are aware of the structural constraints and many of the social constraints that I haveoutlined but are themselves constrained by time and the imperatives of their new activities.
In discussion, the programme manager in Zone II, agreed overwhelmingly that revisiting
strategic actors’ experiences and resuming action research would be an ideal way to address
their accountability concerns, but did not offer any plans for this.37 The president of CEDAC
pins the hopes for improved accountability in the long-term on their new young trainees fromthe countryside (so-called RDTs) who can act as embedded extension agents in accessible
villages as well as in the hinterlands.38 Whilst these two initiatives may facilitate diffusion of
SRI and ecological livestock raising techniques to strategic agents on the margin, these ideas
still do not address the widening gap betweens staffs and farmers and the lack of action37
38

Yi, 17 March 2008, personal communication
Yang Saing, 24 September 2007, personal communication

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research for solving adoption constraints. It is still an open question whether the CEDAC
system, like Fairtrade, can hope to challenge the underlying social relations of capitalist
production inherent in the adoption of a performance orientation (Friddel, 2006; Meiksins
Wood, 1997).
In regards to whether models for sustainable development such as CEDAC’s cancompete with the whims of industrial agricultural concerns and modern consumption
patterns, there is much evidence that Cambodia is making remarkable headway in thisrespect. The domestic demand for natural and organic products is high for a poor country
and continues to grow, and CEDAC has shown that there is little difficulty transitioning from“traditional” to “organic” production. Although it is yet unknown why, natural andtraditional products resonate very strongly for Cambodian urbanites; CEDAC’s president hascommented to me that Cambodian people have picked up the ideas of ‘organic’ faster than in
Thailand and Vietnam. He envisions Cambodia entirely skipping the phase of “modern”
consumption and moving directly to postmodern consumption—something akin to what has
happened in small progressive niches in the Global North. However, it is well-documented
that agro concerns and the research agenda set by agronomists often pre-empt novel forms ofagricultural production from emerging with the proper support (Uquillas, 1994). The “openmarket” can be ruthless to emerging market forms. Seed peddlers, livestock traders, andfertilizer and pesticide companies are hegemonic forces in development and have many tools
at their disposal to disrupt or co-opt the slow process of niche branching that often
perpetuates alternative agricultural production and consumption patterns. Brazil’s aggressive
marketing of surplus pesticides and the precipitous decline in the Cambodian pork market
due to competition from Vietnam are examples of the vulnerability of alternative markets.

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Appendix 1 – Research Methods and Methodology

1.0

INTRODUCTION

The methodological demands of conducting an empirical and ethnographic study
concerning sustainable agricultural development are considerable, given the need to merge
multinational discourse analysis with organisational ethnography and embedded farm-level
fieldwork. Historically, studies of this nature have simply narrowed their methodologicallens by focussing on either positivist assessments of specific rural livelihood dimensions or
on a contextually-situated, anthropological approach (see contrasting styles in these works:
Brosius et al., 1986; Marten, 1986; Prill-Brett, 1986; Uphoff, 2002c). The methods employed
for this study are intended to bridge this divide. I collected hard data when it seemed toreliably reflect conditions and otherwise employed mixed qualitative methods, includingsemi-structured and open interviews, as well as probing archival research. This set ofpriorities is not without precedent however, as much of the contemporary research within theemerging field of agroecology has the stated goal of integrating well-worn agronomical(often statistical) methods with ethnographic evidence. The feedback from this researchmethodology has reverberated back to agronomy, where assessments have increasingly cometo embrace concepts such as total factor productivity and “local culture” (Dawe & Doberman,
1998). Adaptive methods are even more necessary in studies of sustainable agriculture, as
paradigms for extension and assessment are more complicated, rapidly changing, often
experimental (Bamberger, 2000). It is with these concerns in mind, as well as the intention to
study “through” the NGO, that I developed a hybrid qualitative and quantitative assessment
methodology based nominally on the ‘sustainable livelihoods’ framework used by the target
NGO. There is also the growing awareness that there exist important relationships of power
between the researcher and the researched, and between various targets of research, and that

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these power dynamics must be self-consciously factored into fieldwork plans (Rose, 1997).
Where I depart from a ‘sustainable livelihoods’ perspective, then, is in the application ofactor network theory to accommodate the increased focus on the role of power and discourseof non-governmental organisations in agricultural extension and the ideological moulding ofsustainable development. In the following, I will describe the theoretical and practicalrationale for each methodological tool, making reference to their relevance within theframework of ‘sustainable livelihoods’ or actor-network theory.

2.0

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY?

Foremost, this is a study of rural farmers in Cambodia and their interactions with thelarger world of sustainable agricultural development, as mediated by the Cambodian Center
for Study and Development in Agriculture (CEDAC). The primary concern, then, is
elucidating the farmers’ experiences with agricultural change and the concomitantinstitutional dynamics contributing to that change. The immediate dilemma becomes: which
farmers’ experiences are representative, and illustrative, of this change, and which subsection of CEDAC’s programming would demonstrate the range of outcomes andinstitutional ideas connected to broader ideas concerning sustainable agriculturaldevelopment? I had two additional selection priorities: to focus on areas particularly targeted
for extension of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI, one of the low external input
cultivation schemes becoming popular within the field of sustainable agriculture) and tochoose an area with “typical” lowland, rain-fed paddy agriculture, as this agroecologicalsystem is the most representative of Cambodia and many other paddy rice growing areas in
the world. I also decided to allow CEDAC to “put its best foot forward” by electing to studyin Zone II, which is mostly comprised of Takeo province, and includes the villages and

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programmes that CEDAC is the most proud of, and has been most successful in.39 However,
because CEDAC’s penetration into villages in this Zone is uneven, a randomised sample ofvillages in which CEDAC works enabled me to mitigate some (but not all) of the potential
internal selection bias. I further mitigated this by randomly selecting amongst landed
households within each village using the most recent list kept by the village chief. Before
embarking on interviews, I invited the coordinator of Zone II to review the lists and offer any
criticism as to its fairness and representativeness; he had none. I thus became based out of
Angtasaom, a byway town in Takeo province that contains the Zone II headquarters.
The decision about where and with whom to conduct the study was strongly
influenced by my preconception that CEDAC—and its programmes—were promising,unique and thus merited closer scrutiny. The literatures on sustainable agriculture and ruraldevelopment are not rife with examples of success, and I wished to explore a case that many
people in Cambodia consider uniquely successful. This partiality also drew me to Zone II, as
the flagship example of CEDAC’s success. But after satisfying these personal preferences
for location—the prerogatives of the academic one could say—I resigned to following thestrictest quantitative measures (i.e., randomisation) for objectively selecting which villages
and which villagers to study. Root (1993: 243) points out that, in many cases, it is preferable
to acknowledge one’s “conscious partiality” rather than develop artificial ‘value-free’
justifications for one’s methodological decisions. Rubin and Rubin (2005) also remark that
attempting to be neutral or dispassionate about one’s interests can be problematic because
one cannot empathise with interviewees. In this case, I empathised with the farmers’situation from the outset, as they were the primary subjects of study, but also with the workof CEDAC, which I respected enough to study about in the first place.

39

Zone II might be considered the flagship region for CEDAC, as most international NGOs, foreign dignitaries,
and Cambodian politicians are toured through this area. Indeed, on the occasion of the organisation’s 10th
anniversary celebration, a large majority of participating farmers invited from project areas were from Zone II.
In addition, much of CEDAC’s own data suggesting the success of its programmes originates disproportionatelyfrom Zone II.

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Whilst farmer household interviews represented the core livelihood structure aroundwhich I studied other aspects of sustainability and institutional discourse, there were four
additional sources of information that I drew upon: archival records from Zone II, interviews
with CEDAC staffs at all levels in the organisational hierarchy, attendance at rural meetingsand participation in CEDAC workshops. The choice to investigate these avenues was basedon my interpretation of the sustainable livelihoods framework, which focuses the contexts oflivelihoods (policy setting, history, agroecology, socio-economic conditions), includingwhich combination of livelihood resources (human, physical, and social capital) result in thecapability to follow various livelihood strategies (new cultivation practices, diversification,
migration, etc.) and to what extent these strategies produce sustainable outcomes (Scoones,
1998). Observing meetings of Farmers Associations, Commune Cluster committees, andtown hall meetings called by local politicians was critical for understanding the way in which
the local social context was being influenced by NGO efforts. Participating in CEDAC
workshops for staffs and farmers allowed me to gain access to the pedagogical style,participatory practices, extension paradigms and the institutional dynamics, goals, andstruggles of CEDAC. Archival research, in turn, provided a unique historical window into
the fast-changing evolution of CEDAC, in addition to the history of successes andcontradictions of project implementation in the villages I studied. Finally, interviews with
CEDAC staffs ranging from the president to the newly-initiated trainees gave further insight
into the broader ideological foundations and priorities of CEDAC, as well as the stark
realities of carrying out the work of a grassroots NGO engaged in rural development. As aresult of my significant exposure in interviews and at workshops, meetings, and social events
during the course of the three-month period of fieldwork, there were, and are, constantquestions of positionality and communication.

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2.1

A Note on Positionality and Communication

The challenges in communicating and negotiating the power dynamics presented by amulti-part study on an organisation and on rural actors are immense. Foremost,communicating with farmers and most field staff necessitated employing an interpreter who
could dynamically interact with a range of figures, stretching from high-level government
officials to the most impoverished of farmers in the countryside. Although power
asymmetries will exist despite my best efforts to reflexively and proactively deal with them, I
spent considerable effort selecting, training and mindfully working with my interpreter(England, 1994). Although the pitfalls and problems with interpreters have been heavily
discussed (Temple & Edwards, 2002), I had no other choice and thus sought ways to mitigate
the problems, or even turn them into opportunities. My strategy was to seek out aninterpreter who, most importantly, could connect with rural families and, at a minimum,
maintain a clean and professional appearance during elite interviews whilst relying on myprofessional/academic status to narrow the power differential with interviewees. In the end, I
selected a young university student who grew up in a farming family in the region in which
we worked, but could assume a well-groomed and composed stature for interviews outside of
the rural areas. I spent considerable time training my interpreter to have a large degree of
autonomy in how we navigated through various topics and interviewee personalities.
However, by virtue of my knowledge of Khmer, I could follow along and would intervene in
the course of discussion as needed. The benefit of this strategy, in addition to giving myinterpreter a sense of ownership over our work, was that our conversations were efficient andmore engaging to the interviewees.40 The drawback was that I likely overlooked someemotional cues and potential avenues of investigation.

40

Given the everyday nature of the topic of rice cultivation for farmers, building an interview experience that
did not cause interview-fatigue or antipathy towards the questions was of critical concern (Chapman, 2001).

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Although my interpreter was the pillar of my attempts to adapt to the power dynamics
inherent to our varied interview milieux, the requirements of studying “up, through, down,
and over” an organisation necessitated negotiating positionality in many more direct ways
(Wedel, 2004). Studying through involves exploring the source of policies being projected“down” (Shore & Wright, 1997). This entailed looking at the structures of CEDAC,
including its bureaucratic culture, data gathering imperatives, development goals and donor
relations (Escobar, 1995: 39). Studying up refers to interactions with elite figures (Nader,1972). This meant being constantly aware of my position relative to interviewees andengaging in appropriate courtesy, such as business card trading, in order to establish rapport.
I often had to consider whether I wished to be viewed as a professional student studying at anelite Western university (a position of high status) or being a modest and embedded
anthropologist in the field (a position of relatively lower status). Particularly when “studyingover”—interacting with mid-level CEDAC staffs—I wished to decrease my status and be
more companionable (Markowitz, 2001). Sometimes I accomplished this too well.
Occasionally, mid-level staffs viewed my work as being slanted towards the perspective of
farmers, which they felt could often be misleading or simply mistaken. Our familiarity with
CEDAC staff, in turn, created challenges for “studying down” to the community-level.
Indeed, this often impinged on our ability to represent ourselves to farmers as independent
students without an agenda other than research.41
Let me focus on the two most challenging concerns regarding positionality: being
viewed by local people as staff member of CEDAC or another charity organisation, and being
seen by CEDAC as either monolithically a friend or foe. As regards the latter, it is clear that
CEDAC is an NGOs that is very interested in studying its own processes; discourses ofreflexivity and independent research have suffused their organisational ideology (Mosse,

41

This is commonly referred to as the “insider/outsider dilemma” and refers particularly to the trade-off
between proximity and privileged access to the NGO and the objectivity of a researcher (Beynon, 1988),(Mosse, 2005: 12). It is ultimately a dilemma, and not a problem, because it involves a strategic decision on thepart of the researcher regarding how he or she prioritises data gathering.

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2001: 165). Indeed, in one staff meeting, the president of CEDAC proposed welcoming
researchers and foreigners to their countryside projects as a type of academic eco-tourism(field notes, 8 August 2007). However, there is a limit to CEDAC’s reflexivity. In general,“development organizations which exist in a nexus of information, evaluation, and externalfunding – are, amongst other things, systems for the production and control of information”(Mosse, 2001: 176). My presence in the field and future publications could potentially castnegative light on CEDAC’s programmes, and indeed suspicion of this was aroused by amiscommunication mid-way through fieldwork. Fortunately, the resulting discussions andnegotiations regarding CEDAC’s concerns laid the foundations for a far more trusting andmutually transparent research experience. In particular, I was driven to make inroads with
mid-level CEDAC staffs in order to re-establish trust. This was unproblematic, and evenenjoyable, as it was clear that we shared the same lifestyle: countryside work and urban
existence. Many staff members thus became key informants for me.
Another challenging task was distancing myself from other development
organisations during village visits. Farmers occasionally believed my interpreter was a
CEDAC staff member and I was merely an observer, or they saw me as a representative of acharity organisation who was merely scouting the area for opportunities to “give”. The factthat we were concerned with SRI, which is predominately linked to CEDAC, and that we
focused on basic livelihood characteristics, which are typical concerns of charity
organisations, it was occasionally challenging to communicate that we were “nothing more”
than students. This problem was occasionally confirmed when villagers made use of various
honorifics (such as “teacher” – lo kru) when referring to me, or petitioned for various gifts
commonly distributed by NGOs (such as toilets, cattle, wells, etc.) Although my identity as a
student usually became obvious due to the increasingly probing and analytical nature of the
discussions, it clearly affected segments of my discussions with a number of interviewees.
After the first few interviews, I was much more able to balance the need to elicit information

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with the need to establish rapport and trust (Oakley, 1990). In many cases, I was openly
playful (i.e., climbing trees, demonstrating my coconut-opening skills, gossiping in Khmer,etc.) in order to defuse tense interview situations.

3.0

DATA GATHERING AND METHODOLOGY

3.1

Wellbeing and Rice Cultivation: Empirical Valuation, Semi-Structured
Substantiation

Based on prior experience in Cambodia (see Feuer, 2004) and consensus acrossdisciplines and fields, I have chosen to empirically measure well-being using an asset-based
livelihood assessment. To investigate the rice cultivation practices of each farmer household,I elected to carry out a hybrid survey allowing quantitative variables for each “practice”,
whilst exploring the reasoning behind each one sequentially in a semi-structured interview
fashion. In addition, I followed up each interview with an open-ended dialogue used toconfirm responses, explore certain ideas more deeply, and discuss specific sub-themes, suchas environmental awareness, family labour, group affiliation and aspirations. Between thesethree practices, I carried out 70 semi-structured and annotated survey-interviews with farmer
households during the nursery and transplanting seasons (June – August 2007). Each survey
required around 35 minutes of response time, which allowed 15 minutes for clarifications and
30 minutes of additional semi-structured and open-ended interviewing. A numerical list offormal farmer interviews can be found in Appendix 5.
In addition to quantitative scores, the Khmer survey instrument also included spacefor clarification and explication and for rationales and explanations. Indeed, sections
describing the status of the family, their landholdings, and their access to water resources
typically elicited long stories. The section outlining rice cultivation practices also includes

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space for asking “why?” next to each practice. In addition to these direct survey prompts,
questions themselves often led to various follow-up questions, which could be posed
immediately or following the survey portion of the interview. This allowed for theinterviewee to develop certain ideas that were important to them and gave me a sense of whatissues to follow-up in the open-ended interview. In some cases, follow-up questions werealso used to triangulate certain information, such as the rationales behind certain cultivation
practices or information I could use to establish a more comprehensive picture of householdproductivity (Alrøe & Kristensen, 2002).42 There were also more specific sub-themes that I
generally tried to touch upon in a semi-structured manner if the topic was appropriate for thehousehold, such as labour, group affiliation, ecological literacy and family cultivation history.
Most often, however, follow-up was based on specific issues raised by the respondent(s) or
provoked by a certain answer to a survey question.

3.2

Open-Ended Interviews and Archival Research: Actors and Networks

Because the core topic around which this thesis revolves is the socio-technical models
for agriculture and the extension of the System of Rice Intensification, it is particularly suited
to the material-semiotic constructivist lens of actor-network theory (ANT). Developed in theworks of Michael Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law, ANT presents a set of theoretical
tools for understanding the interactions of actors and nonhuman entities (such as agricultural
cultivation systems) by seamlessly reconciling the semiotic and material exchanges occurringat the intersection of institutional practice, agroecological system, and rural livelihoods.
Central to the understanding of ANT is the concept of ‘translation’, which is a mode ofmutual collaboration between actors within an actor-world that enables the actor-world topersist and be continually reinforced. For the sake of this thesis, that actor-world is the42

Total factor productivity, in the context of rice cultivation, is a metric theoretically intended to consider many
additional inputs in a non-linear fashion, including machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, weather, and child labour(Dawe and Doberman, 1998).

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narrowly-prescribed vision of sustainable agriculture and rural development emanating from
CEDAC, and that includes non-human actors such as SRI, as well as CEDAC staffs, farmers
and rural participants, Cambodian politicians and the interested international agriculturalresearch community.
The methodological issues arising from a conceptual understanding based on actornetwork theory are typically concerned with unpacking the mechanics of an actor-world thathas, over time, obscured its past. In actor-network theory, punctualisation refers to the active
and passive processes which allow past functionality and concerns to be become invisible inorder to better focus on the horizon (Latour, 1987). The task of the researcher is to focus on
the topics that help elucidate how and why changes to rural development projects anddevelopment mentality have arisen. To that end, I interviewed actors from across theorganisational spectrum and poured through archives containing history of a less matureactor-world.

3.2.1

Open-Ended Interviews

Many of my purely open-ended interviews took place toward the end of fieldwork, as
I was then more prepared to discuss authoritatively and analytically the issues emerging fromfarmer family interviews and my experiences in the field. Indeed, my interview with thepresident of CEDAC occurred the evening before my departure from Cambodia, when I
could speak holistically and in general terms with an elite strategist and privileged source ofhistorical and discursive knowledge of the domain of sustainable agricultural development in
Cambodia. This strategy served me very well, as my accumulated knowledge of the
intricacies of CEDAC’s agricultural extension system led me to the most salient and relevant
questions (Lockwood, 1992: 170). Informants also included specialists in certain areas of
CEDAC, such as local organising, farmer training and extension, and research. In order to

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understand the routine mechanics in CEDAC, I also interviewed with many mid-level staffs,
and particularly those working in and around my regions. Many of these people were friends
as well as informants and these ‘after hours’ relationships often transgressed from‘interviews’ to participant observation (Gellner & Hirsch, 2001), which facilitated access tothe mundane, but otherwise important day-to-day activities of CEDAC staffs. Open-ended
interviews also took place with local village leaders, national and local politicians,charismatic individuals such as famous SRI farmers or women leaders and staffs frominternational NGOs. Functionally, many of these interviews outside the countryside werecarried out in English (with minimal intervention by my interpreter) and many were ongoing
conversations throughout the last month with no discrete interview scheduled. A numericallist of open-ended interviews can be found in Appendix 5.

3.2.2

Archival Research

Like many such collections, the CEDAC archives include a measure of organised andwell-maintained set of official documents, routine reports and donor updates in addition to ameasure of messy and unsorted equivalents. And probably like many such researchers, I was
the first to unearth many of these documents since they were filed away. My general
strategy, given the immensity of the task, was to work from the present to the past, most
relevant to least relevant. Thus I began by translating and analysing the most recent
documents concerning the villages included in my study. Determining relevance was aquestion of linking documents to informants or acquaintances in the field, or reading
documents prepared by CEDAC staffs whose work and/or personalities were familiar to me.
In many cases, I presented specific documents to staffs as ‘nostalgic memorabilia’, which
often elicited excited discussions of the particular training session or meeting in question.
Whilst serving as examples of how the past is officially represented, or made ‘legible’ by

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staffs (Scott, 1998: 24), many documents were indispensable in cuing forgotten memories
and leading towards discussions about how things have changed over the years. This wasinvaluable in reconstructing an historical narrative (i.e., opening the ‘black box’) concerning
extension work and the evolving nature of official discourses on sustainable agriculture andrural development (Nauta, 2006).

4.0

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONSThe study concerns a period of profound social and ecological change in rural
Cambodia that is being mediated by institutional processes and, to a large degree, by changes
in the global discourse concerning sustainability and rural development. The broader ethicalconcern for me stems from my own concerns about ecological sustainability, and how
research should buttress the legitimacy of the environmental movement whilst trying toremain objectively critical and analytical in nature (Root, 1993: 243; Rose, 1997). This
broader ethical concern is complemented by many direct ethical dilemmas inherent in the
study of organisations, and in the interviewing of elites and vulnerable respondents.

4.1

Accessing and Interviewing Farmers and Rural Figures

Negotiating access to a Cambodian village is generally unproblematic, but one does
have to pass a gatekeeper—usually the village chief. It is not uncommon for village chiefs todirect much of the benefits from external sources (such as development NGOs) to those
closer into his kinship network. As a student with no obvious gifts, I avoided this potential
problem. Indeed, when I presented a pre-printed randomised number list for selecting
villagers, most village chiefs became instantly at ease knowing that I was not choosing any

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particular families over others. In most cases, the village chief informally communicatedwith the families who had been selected, which forewarned them, in a general sense, that aforeign student interested in their family and agriculture would stop by within the next few
months. Village chiefs often became an invaluable source of directions and advice
concerning village politics and upcoming events and meetings. Out of custom, and my own
sense of gratitude for the immense assistance provided me, I sponsored modest celebrations
with a few particularly helpful village chiefs and provided farewell gifts (usually
photographs) at the conclusion of fieldwork.
To a degree, the researcher in the Cambodian countryside is operating underconstraints that preclude a polite and pre-arranged visitation. Communication in rural areas isdifficult, and scheduling interviews is logistically problematic. Fortunately, local customs
regarding hospitality to spontaneous strangers and the general curiosity about whiteforeigners allows for a rather comfortable unannounced visit. My interpreter and I always
introduced ourselves, explained, in general terms, our purpose in the countryside and quickly
clarified how we received the family’s name (randomly from the village chief’s roster). We
would then ask if the respondent(s) could be bothered for a bit more than an hour of theirtime. In this way, we would usually be invited to have a seat. Before proceeding withanything more research-related than idle chatter, we would seek oral confirmation of
informed consent and describe how their responses would be anonymous43 and contribute to
the publication of a “book” about agriculture in Cambodia. If the respondent(s) agreed, wewould begin the interview with a census of the family, which was always an enjoyable andcomfortable transition into the topics of household assets and rice-cultivation practices. At
the conclusion of the interview, consent would be re-confirmed and then the primary
respondent would be asked to sign the consent form if they were comfortable doing so. This
allowed multiple chances to deal deliberately with the issue of informed consent (Gellner &43

In this thesis, pseudonyms are used for all farmer interviewees and for CEDAC field staffs in order to protect
them from any recriminations that might result from the publication of this thesis.

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Hirsch, 2001: 5). If the respondent felt that something compromising had emerged during thediscussion, he or she had the option to take the survey and either destroy it or keep it. Thisoccurred only in one instance. As a token of appreciation, and polite Cambodian gesture, I
always presented the primary respondent with a small Cambodian scarf (kromah). I chose
this gift because it is unlikely to cause jealousy amongst villagers due to its ubiquity in
Cambodian society at all levels.

4.2

Access and Representation in Organisations

Two particularly salient issues mediated my experience studying about CEDAC:
access to organisational facilities (including archives) and staffs, and the larger question of
how to represent CEDAC textually in the thesis. Gaining access and receiving widespreadconsent for interviewing were unproblematic. My initial contact with CEDAC was throughthe former director for research and development, who enthusiastically helped organise mypotential fieldwork site and, more generally, set the stage for a very open and hospitable
study experience. Historically, CEDAC has had considerable experience hosting students, aswell as journalists, international academics, and high-level politicians. My overall
impression is that they are proud of their work and thus very confident about their outward
representation. I asked and was told early on that I had permission to speak with any
members of the staff, but that I should respect their wishes regarding use of information andanonymity if the issue arose. Elite interviews were particularly unproblematic in this respect,as the figures I spoke with were quite accustomed to speaking with any type of interviewer(Shore, 2002). Mid-level staffs at CEDAC shared a friendly relationship with me, but for thesake of their job security often requested anonymity. In part, this was because much of theinformation I gained from mid-level staffs was usually ‘after hours’, spontaneous, and usuallyobservational in nature.

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Whilst accessing respondents was relatively unproblematic, the question of how I
might represent their observations and conclusions did draw some concern during thefieldwork period. Although I believe that CEDAC would willingly accept honest and wellformed criticism, they are justifiably concerned about their work being “misunderstood”. A
farmer who could be seen as having “disadopted SRI” by a researcher might be seen bystaffers as simply having “scaled down” SRI. A village struggling to take up SRI might beviewed by an outside researcher as a problem with agricultural extension, whereas CEDAC
management and staffs might see the same situation as a work-in-progress or a project that
simply has not yet borne fruit. Indeed, one of CEDAC’s mottos is: “we learn by doing”.44 In
these conditions, “success” or “failure” is not defined in such strict terms (Crewe & Harrison,
1998). In particular, the time-frame used to determine success is often seen as infinite (i.e.,there are no failures, there are only projects that are not “yet” successes). This, I suspect, is
why CEDAC fears being misunderstood. Nevertheless, as Mosse (2006: 944) contends,
social research must preserve its honour and its ideals for interpretation, and this includes
differences of opinion. The researcher’s duty is to present his or her findings because, “theinterests and rights of those studied should come first” (ASA, 1999). In this case, if farmer
families stand to benefit from the exposure of certain information, and CEDAC might
improve itself by internalising certain critiques (which are both big assumptions), then theinterests of “those studied” have been served. In the end, representation might involverecasting ‘criticisms’ as ‘lessons to be learned’ or ‘suggestions for improved practices’. In
order to be sure of my representation of CEDAC, I allowed the president to review my finald
drafts and offer comments. Although we differed in opinion on a few points, many others
were reconcilable and, additionally, some errors were corrected. But it is not only my respect
for CEDAC that drives me to represent their work constructively. As have alreadymentioned, CEDAC is embedded within the environmental movement and—which I support

44

That, 13 August 2007, personal communication

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ideologically. Constructive representation can allow the horizons of the movement forsustainable development to be pushed forward rather than held back.

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Appendix 2
Rubrics and Factor Analysis Weights
Housing Material Valuation
Outer Wall, Inner Wall, and Roof
Poor Quality:
Bamboo, Thatch, None
Medium Quality:
Wood, Metal, Fibrous Cement
High Quality:
Concrete, Ceramic Tile
Flooring
Poor Quality:
Medium Quality:
High Quality:

Earth, Bamboo
Low-grade or used wood
High-grade wood, Cement

Wealth Index, factored weights

Cultivation Index, factored weights*

Component
livestock value
livestock sales
ploughradio
tv
motorbikephone
bicyclegenerator
gas pump
rice millfloor area per resident
low quality floor
high quality floor
low quality roof
high quality roof
low quality outer wallhigh quality outer wall
low quality inner wallhigh quality inner wall
painted housebattery
toiletbucket well
pumped wellcharcoal fuelbuy wood
wet rice field
dry rice fieldorchard landgarden land
residential property
pond area

Componentage of seedlingstems per hill
depth (shallow)
delay (days)
spacing (cm)field level (flat)water level (<5cm)line (straight rows)
nursery (elevated)seedling selection
weeding (frequency)
fertilizer (bag/ha)
compost resources
seed separation windseed separation waterseed separation salt
pulling (gently)
shaving (uncut stems)

Feuer

Weight0.107650.07479
0.09283
0.02669
0.054220.09769
0.027250.017220.018540.07974
0.01758
0.05241-0.14809
0.08893-0.04481
0.09174-0.11717
0.06205-0.11907
0.06266
0.109480.04656
0.021610.00806
0.01226
0.02484
0.02158
0.044900.01433
0.01161
0.02857
0.01158
0.01580

Weight-0.17812-0.27214
0.05827-0.11005
0.059160.02737
0.03883
0.09856
0.03749
0.08504
0.01493-0.03771
0.032050.051400.04661
0.037460.18637
0.13485* Contents of parenthesis
indicate value of 1 for dummy,
unless otherwise noted100Appendix 3
Secondary Statistics Results
Correlation Coefficients
resident
wealth avgyield soiltype literate jobhigh joblow compost floorarea
wealthavg. yieldsoil typeliteratejobhighjoblow
compostresidents
SRI

1.00000.1755 1.0000
0.2352 -0.2930 1.0000
0.1939 -0.0825 0.1429 1.0000
0.2337 -0.0094 0.1826 0.0833 1.0000-0.1183 0.0005 -0.1029 0.0126 0.1382 1.0000
0.2349 0.1427 -0.0770 -0.1448 0.1448 0.0746
0.1467 -0.1539 0.1066 0.0781 0.2379 0.0824-0.0608 0.2428 -0.3635 -0.0934 -0.0934 -0.1038

1.00000.0452 1.0000
0.2738 -0.0109

SRI

1.0000

Paired t-test
Ho: mean(yieldnosri - yieldsri) = mean(diff) = 0
Ha: mean(diff) < 0
t = -3.7951
P < t =
0.0003Feuer

Ha: mean(diff) ∫ 0
t = -3.7951
P > |t| =0.0006

Ha: mean(diff) > 0
t = -3.7951
P > t =
0.9997101

Appendix 4

Occupations listed by salary classification

High
Truck Driver
Textile Production
Factory Worker
Big Livestock
GoldsmithBlacksmith
TraderFeuer

MediumCarpenter
Construction
Alcohol Production
Teacher
Palm Handicrafts
Policeman
Local Authority
Musician
Palm Sugar
Rice Milling
Motorbike Mechanic

Low
Student
Unemployed
Ice Cream
Wise Man
Vegetables
OrchardFish
Handicap102

Appendix 5Interview List
This list includes anonymous and named interviewees. Named interviewees also appear in
the bibliography.
Interview Type
Formal farmer family interviews

Number ofInterviews
70

Chrei Tnot, Tramkok District

11

Tropang Kabas, Tramkok District

12

Tropang Ampil, Tramkok District

12

Hong Heng, Samraung District

11

Vaspors, Samraung District

12

Damnak Troyung, Samraung District

12

Open-ended interviews with farmers

19

Open-ended interviews with CEDAC staff

14

Open-ended interviews with academics, expatriate NGO staff,
development agencies, etc.

9

Feuer

103

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