Governing a Collective Bad: Social Learning in the Management of Crop Diseases

Abstract

There has been strong research interest in designing and testing learning approaches for enhancing and sustaining the capacity of communities to manage collective action problems. Broadening the perspective from well-known social learning approaches in natural resource management, this study explores how social learning as a communicative process influences collective action in contagious crop disease management. A series of facilitated discussion and reflection sessions about late blight management created the social learning space for potato farmers in Ethiopia. Communicative utterances of participants in the sessions served as the units of analysis. The study demonstrates how and to what extent social learning, in the form of aligned new knowledge, relations and actions occurred and formed the basis for collective action in the management of late blight.

Communicative interventions for collective action in the management of potato late blight: evidence from a framed field game experiment in Ethiopia

“…Costello et al (2017) argued that knowing the spatial connectivity induced by the mobility of public bad resources influences private decisions, which collectively can have important consequences for control across a spatial domain. In our study context, farmers have very limited knowledge of the spreading feature of the late blight pathogen and the collective risk and benefit of individual management decisions (Damtew et al 2020;Tafesse et al 2018). In this regard, evidence from a systematic investigation of the role of such type of communicative intervention in collective action problems is sparse.…”

A Gender Perspective on Pest and Disease Management From the Cases of Roots, Tubers and Bananas in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa

“…To collectively address this issue at a community level, a social learning exercise was conducted as part of a broader joint research project of Wageningen University and CGIAR Research Program on RTB. A study conducted in this project shows an important gender aspect (Damtew et al, 2020). The farmers' group initiated a disease monitoring system for early diagnosis of late blight and a community by-law to ensure implementation of various management practices.…”

Institutional approaches for plant health provision as a collective action problem

“…In the extreme case where a single individual can bring collective benefits to zero by, for example, not taking measures to ensure plant health on their own property and thereby keeping open an avenue for disease spread that defeats the efforts of neighbors, then plant health can be considered a weakest-link public good, in which the level of overall provision would be determined by the least effective provider (Hennessy, 2008;Perrings, 2016). A few recent studies have advanced this conceptualization of provision of plant health as a public good, extending the scope of the collective action problem from the management of invasive pests and diseases to established plant diseases with great spread potential (Damtew et al, 2020;Sherman et al, 2019). The crucial question that remains is: how can individuals organize effectively to achieve desired levels of protection against disease?…”

“…Because coordinated treatments benefit the whole group, any grower may be tempted to rely on others' treatments and avoid the cost of spraying, but if a grower fails to coordinate, that property can sustain ACP and spread HLB to the rest (Bassanezi et al, 2013). Thus, like other plant diseases (Damtew et al, 2020;Sherman et al, 2019), the challenge for HLB is how to overcome a collective action problem to ensure citrus health provision (Singerman & Rogers, 2020).…”