George Curry: Aligning innovation processes with livelihood and socio-cultural priorities

On 9 January, George Curry will deliver a talk on ‘Aligning innovation processes with livelihood and socio-cultural priorities: towards an understanding of the socio-cultural and economic factors that influence innovation adoption in farming households in Papua New Guinea’.

The low rate of technology adoption has long been recognised as a key constraint on improving productivity, income and yields in farming, particularly in developing countries where market-based systems of production are not well developed. While there is now a vast literature on the factors associated with innovation and technology adoption, most of this literature reports on correlations between propensity to adopt and household socio-demographic and economic characteristics such as age of household head, educational level, farm size and financial and capital assets. Much less studied is the role of socio-cultural factors and non-market values in adoption and innovation, that remain very much a black box in this field of research.  In this presentation, I will begin to open the black box to begin a preliminary investigation of adoption and innovation along several socio-cultural and economic dimensions such as intra-household relations; tensions between modern and traditional farming practices in how labour is mobilised and remunerated; land access and tenure; and the indigenous socio-economic and cultural values underpinning production, consumption and distribution.  This is not to deny the very real barriers to adoption and innovation posed by technical, financial and educational/knowledge constraints, but to highlight the value of investigating the less well understood factors of indigenous values, habits, and socio-cultural institutions that can influence social innovation and technology adoption.