The promise of positive deviants: bridging divides between scientific research and local practices in smallholder agriculture

Abstract

Abstract Positive deviants challenge existing organisational structures and institutional set-ups, and promote alternative approaches to solving seemingly intractable social problems, either playing direct role of a boundary spanner or indirect role as activists. However, these roles of positive deviants have not yet been recognised to its potential in international development because the legacy of deviancy theory lies on negative deviants, such as addicts and criminals. This paper investigates the promise of positive deviants to bridging scientific research and local practices using empirical evidence from community-based participatory research of rice, a crucial subsistence crop in the Chitwan district of Nepal. Non-profit private and public stakeholders worked as boundary spanners, specifically to initiate stakeholder interaction with non-traditional partners, in spite of the lack of enabling environments to do so. Similarly, one of the members of a farmers' group developed a rice variety from a handful of seeds taken from a scientific experimental plot, initially without the knowledge of participating scientists. This research suggests that positive deviants have ingenuity to innovate, deviating from norms particularly when social and organisational environments limit stakeholder interaction for learning and innovation. This paper concludes that the collective intelligence of positive deviants can sustain or even stimulate innovation permitting people to survive, experiment new ways of doing things and even improve their living conditions under adverse social, political and agro-ecological circumstances. Acknowledgement The paper is based on research funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. An earlier version of this paper was presented in a National Research Forum held during the Annual General Assembly of the World University Services of Canada (WUSC), Ottawa, Canada from 7 to 9 November 2008. Notes 1. The implicit cause of conflict is identified as social inequality arising from disproportionate allocation of land and other resources (Joshi and Mason Citation2007). The dependency of peasants on landlords for livelihoods in rural Nepal enabled landed elites to influence peasants to vote for the right-wing parties in parliamentary elections leaving behind Maoists in minority, but insurgency weakened those ties, enabling Maoists to mobilise peasants on their support 2. Two working groups were formed (a) to revise crop variety registration and release procedure, and (b) to raise funds to scale up rice varieties selected and bred using participatory approaches, respectively. 3. A DVD entitled 'Farmers' Variety – Farmers' Right, the story of "DR Dhan"', is available through LI-BIRD (www.libird.org). 4. 'Mother trial' refers to multi-entry, single replicate participatory variety selection (PVS) trial, and 'baby trial' refers to PVS comparing one or two new varieties with existing ones – both are conducted under farmers' input and management (Joshi et al. Citation2005).