“The speed of the political is not that of the scientific”: on the time of development in an agricultural technology transfer program

Abstract

In this article I seek to present certain problematics related to the ProSAVANA agricultural development program, highlighting a mismatch between a political sphere and a scientific sphere, which allowed me to reflect on some effects of the technical discourse that has guided the implementation of this international cooperation project. From research that sought to do an ethnography on the operationalization of this program, I intend to present the manner in which such technopolitical breakdowns in the proposed “technologies transfer” have produced a composition of different temporalities, which conferred a particular pace to the effectiveness of ProSAVANA. In order to describe this strange relation between different forms of knowledge that are expressed in the time of accomplishing a development project - unfolding at different speeds -, I follow the idea of Mbembe (2011) that in the postcolony, time is constantly emerging. In this sense, throughout this article I seek to describe how, by decomposing these different speeds, it is possible to understand the temporalities that emerge from the particular entanglement of technopolitical relations that confer the materiality of this development project.