A Political Institutional Approach to Scientific Innovation: The Case of Forecast-Based Knowledge in the Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia
Background
We often treat scientific investigation as though it operates separately from the social world, but the creation and application of science is inseparable from social life. In the Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia, whose recurrent droughts and flooding rank it among the highest unstable precipitation globally, scientists are developing novel forecast technologies to mitigate the stresses to local communities. Leveraging longstanding collaborations in Ethiopia, our scientists are developing water and crop yield forecasts that could dramatically decrease the water, energy and food insecurity in the Blue Nile Basin. Yet forecast adoption like all decisions surrounding water management, agriculture and energy is a social practice constrained by socio-political processes, relationships and inequalities that organize people’s control over scarce resources.
Objective
How do the relationships between scientists, farmers, water managers, and other authorities influence the production, dissemination, and outcome of new scientific knowledge? Our objective is to test a political-institutional model of science that challenges the assumption that innovation leads automatically to improved human security. Using ethnographic and survey methods, the team is tracing the ways that water becomes organized in social endeavors through formal institutions like public irrigation systems and reservoir operations to informal practices like indigenous forecasting to ultimately identify barriers to the effective development, dissemination and adoption of our improved forecast-based guidance.
Initial Results
In Summer 2017, the team conducted preliminary fieldwork on the current use of forecast-based guidance collecting 48 interviews with farmers and administrators. We found that planning for seed and fertilizer provision is highly regulated at the regional level, leaving small holder farmers with limited input. Meanwhile, regional planners do not rely significantly on forecasts. Reasons given for not using forecasts were largely instrumental in these preliminary interviews: their lack of specificity (timing, duration, and extent of weather events), lack of hydro-climatic data for making improvements, and limited dissemination range (only zones, cities and a few bigger towns). But other findings on the social organization of water reveal myriad small decisions though which small holder farmers mobilize autonomous knowledge and power albeit unequally, suggesting several interesting pathways through which forecasts could enter into everyday practices.