Page 198 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

13 Working for Change: Reflections on the Issue of Sustainability and Social Change 175

policy support from the state for our initiatives. We time and again found that
creating supportive institutional, material, and policy conditions for sustainable
community ownership and management of common property resources was very
arduous, especially in villages where traditional communal institutions and prac-

tices have disappeared or weakened on account of centuries of British colonial-
ism and state neglect. The HSTP program too could not sustain itself the moment
the state government decided to withdraw institutional and policy-level support
to the initiative. Pretty (1999) in her study of sustainable agriculture projects
spread over 17 countries of Africa reached similar conclusions. According to her
analysis, “sustainable agriculture can deliver large increases in food production
in Africa. But spreading these to much larger numbers of farm households will
not be easy. It will require substantial policy, institutional and professional
reform” (p. 253).
Ecojustice initiatives, whether they pertain to agriculture, education, or in any
other field are generally vulnerable to failure as their resistance and adaptive
capacities are limited. As a young and naïve forestry worker, it was quite heart-
breaking for me to see years of hard work toward developing village-level institu-
tions turn to ashes in little time on account of events that we never expected to
matter, such as a change of personnel spearheading the initiative or failure to cor-
rectly gauge intra-village feuds and rivalries. Sustainable change is awfully

grueling and slow. As Tyack and Cuban (1995) pointed out in their study of school
reforms in America, many school reforms have floundered on account of burnout
among educational reformers. Thus, for an initiative to become sustainable, not
only must one be prepared for the long haul, but also some long-term efforts need
to be directed at creating supportive conditions at institutional, policy, as well as
material level.
2. Building horizontal and vertical linkages: I was much enthused to read in
Glasson’s chapter about how George Glasson and his colleagues were able to
improvise a direct linkage between Freedom Gardens with its rich experience
with sustainable agriculture to teachers in a distant school. Such linkages are
key to sustainability of reform efforts – a lesson that leaps out when one reads
about how Latin American farmers have been able to succeed in generating and
spreading sustainable agricultural practices that combine the best of local tradi-
tional practices and scientific agroecological know-how. According to Holt-
Gimenez (2006), development of extensive farmer-to-farmer knowledge networks
has been crucial for Latin American farming communities in their efforts to
counter-corporatized and globalized agriculture being thrust upon them by the
state as well as transnational corporations. Farmers in this network develop sus-
tainable agricultural practices, and then teach them to other farmers within their
community, across regions, and even across national borders. In about a quarter
century, this farmer movement has spread across Mexico, Central America and
Cuba. In terms of respect and sensitivity toward local people, agricultural knowl-
edge and practices, and also success, this horizontal dissemination of knowledge
and practices is in sharp contrast to conventional vertical flow of information