Abstract

Potato late blight remains a threat to food security and livelihood of millions of people in Ethiopia. Despite a rapid dispersal of the disease pathogen and farmers’ interdependency in managing it, the literature on agricultural extension and communication tends to frame the disease and its management as a problem of the individual farmer. This study appreciates late blight as a collective action problem whose management requires a corresponding re-configuration in information sharing and communicative practices. We employ a framed field game experiment with a mixed quantitative and qualitative method to explore how and to what extent different types and combinations of communicative interventions affect collective action in the management of the disease among farmers in Ethiopia. Interestingly, our quantitative findings revealed that the provision of technical information about interdependency involved in the management of the disease and social monitoring information about the management practices of other farmers negatively affected collective action. However, collective action performance significantly improved when farmers were given the opportunity to interactively communicate about their management strategies. Further qualitative investigation sheds light on how farmers used and made sense of the different communicative interventions to inform and adjust their individual decisions, coordinate collective strategies, pressure free-riders, and develop a shared identity. It is concluded that interventions that mainly promote the provision of technical and social information can be counterproductive in managing collective action problems such as late blight unless it is complemented with interactive communication and deliberation processes.

Highlights

  • Potato late blight, caused by Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary, is the major bottleneck in potato production, a crop that holds promise for food security and livelihood improvement to millions of people in Ethiopia (Demissie 2019; Tsedaley 2014)

  • We examined to what extent and how (1) technical information about interdependency, (2) social monitoring information with and without technical information about interdependency, and (3) interactive communication among farmers influenced their collective action in managing the disease

  • When farmers that were in groups with both technical information and social monitoring information were given a chance to interactively communicate, they performed significantly better (27%) than the farmer groups in the nonintervention condition and about 65% higher than farmers that were in the groups with both technical information and social monitoring information

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Potato late blight, caused by Phytophthora infestans (Mont.) de Bary, is the major bottleneck in potato production, a crop that holds promise for food security and livelihood improvement to millions of people in Ethiopia (Demissie 2019; Tsedaley 2014). Rooted in traditional agricultural extension and technology adoption model (Rogers 1995), communicative research and development interventions to deal with the problem of late blight tend to frame the disease as a problem of the individual farmer. Lack of control of the disease by any individual farmer imposes costs or losses on other nearby farmers and likewise, control efforts by one farmer can confer a benefit to other nearby farmers (Graham et al 2019) Because of this characteristic of the disease and its causing agent, the management of late blight is regarded as one among specific types of collective action problems in the domain of “public bads” (e.g., infectious and invasive species, microbial resistance to antimicrobial agents, global warming, air pollution) (Costello et al 2017)

Methods
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call