Browsing by Person "Hidalgo Jaramillo, Francisco Javier"

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Digital agriculture: socio-technical-physical interactions and the transformation of the rural world(s)
(2024) Hidalgo Jaramillo, Francisco Javier; Regina, Birner
The social and environmental challenges that humanity faces today to produce food, fuel, and fibers in a sustainable and fair way call for a transformation. Digital agriculture has been embraced with much enthusiasm by many as the contour of such transformation. Proponents of these technologies, including international organizations as well as numerous researchers focused on innovations, describe this innovation as a paradigm shift. Associated with increased efficiencies and enhanced communication, digital agriculture is commonly depicted by these groups as the advent of a more sustainable and ‘smart’ future. Other groups, including grassroots organizations, socio-environmental activists, and critical scholars, on the other hand, see digital agriculture with skepticism and concern. They refer to the entrenchment of digital agriculture in productivist, capitalist, and extractivist forms of production, and a linkage with the consolidation of corporate power and state surveillance. Using a critical and systems approach, this thesis scrutinizes these arguments, examining the socio-technical transitions that emerge from agricultural digitalization, and discerns their societal and environmental consequences. This examination is relevant given that despite digital agriculture can transform the face of agricultural systems, it is not yet clear in what way. The emergent condition of digitalization requires this analysis to inform responsible governance of this innovation. Critical studies have made important contributions to this understanding. However, the complexity of digital agriculture calls for additional conceptual frameworks to be incorporated. The coffee production system has been selected as a case study in this thesis. This selection responds to the global scope of this system and the relevance that it represents for rural development. To set the picture: coffee is one of the most traded agricultural products in the world. Yet, more than 70% of it is produced by smallholder farmers who receive less than 10% of its final value. Meanwhile, coffee farmers experience manifold social and environmental challenges that threaten their livelihoods and the sustainability of the whole system. Poverty, power and information asymmetries, and climate change are among them. Against this background, this thesis takes the perspective of coffee as a crop, a cultural system, and a value chain. Following a qualitative research approach, the analysis is informed by a theoretical literature review and data from semi-structured interviews with developers and users of digital technologies. The thesis is divided into three studies (chapters 2, 3, and 4) which together present a critical analysis applied at three scales: 1) global, 2) value chain, and 3) local. Across these studies, three main socio-technical aspects of digital agriculture are addressed. First, global governance of digital agriculture and its consequences for farmers’ rights and capabilities. Second, the consequences of different technical assemblages for the sustainability of agricultural systems. Third, local forms of interaction with digital technologies. After presenting and introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 presents a literature review on the political dynamics of digital agriculture. Drawing upon an emancipatory conceptualization of agency and sovereignty, this chapter is focused on describing two main forms of governance: governance through and governance of digital technologies in the context of agriculture. This description is followed by an analysis of the multiple effects of these two forms of governance on farmer’s sovereignty and agency. The analysis revealed that the governance of digital agriculture is an assemblage of multiple agencies of human and cyber agents (smart devices, automated machines, algorithms). Socio-technical interactions in this assemblage result simultaneously in sovereignty and agency gains and losses for farmers - a complex set of power transactions in which farmers participate many times inadvertently. Together with oppressive forms of governance associated with corporate technological lock-in, data extractivism, and a surveilling state, there is evidence also of a democratic facet of digitalization. This facet is integrated by open-collaborative networks, data cooperatives, cyberactivism, and open-source software. With this analysis, the study aimed to understand how the political position of farmers is affected by digitalization, understanding that this process is occurring in a context of structural power imbalance. A socio-technical perspective is applied in Chapter 3 to explore 20 digital tools designed for the coffee value chain, examining the pathways toward sustainability (environmental, social, and economic) promoted by these tools. The socio-technical perspective mainly proposes that social and technical systems shape each other in reciprocal interactions. Building on this idea, the chapter examines the technical attributes of these tools (functionality, technologies included, operation rules, information flow). Subsequently, it analyzes the consequences of these attributes in terms of three broad social dynamics: 1) knowledge and value systems represented, 2) power structures, and 3) possibilities for using these tools effectively. The forms in which these social dynamics are shaped by these tools, in turn, yield specific sustainability outcomes. These include the kind of production systems that are endorsed - and not endorsed -, the access to these technologies and their benefits, and the way in which social inequalities and power asymmetries are addressed - or not addressed -. The data for this analysis comes from interviews with 15 developers of these tools and secondary information. The analysis shows that technical attributes play a fundamental role in directing the kinds of pathways toward sustainability that are made available for agricultural systems. Additionally, it shows that in some cases, rather than a revolution, digital agriculture can look like business as usual but tweaked. Chapter 4 presents a local perspective on digitalization. Using data from interviews with 73 households in two selected coffee growing communities in Colombia, this chapter explores how they engage with digital technologies. The study parts from the idea that important reality-design gaps in digital agriculture result from a lack of understanding and inclusion of local worldviews around digital technologies and farming. Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach was adopted as the conceptual framework for the analysis. This framework posits that resources only become assets when they can be used by individuals to accomplish the life they value. For that reason, the analysis in this chapter was focused on first, understanding the elements that configure a valuable life for these communities, and next, understanding how they use digital technologies to support the accomplishment of this life. The underlying values of this local process of technological appropriation were compared with the values represented by broader narratives of digital agriculture. This offered a picture of the negotiations and tensions that occur when contrasting visions of farming, digitalization, and a desirable future, interface. Drawing upon a relational perspective, the local appropriation process is characterized by multiple negotiations between farmers’ personal and collective goals, situated knowledge, institutional programs, and the agency of non-humans (e.g. land, plants, animals, machines). From these interactions emerge distinctive forms of digitalization and non-digitalization. This process of local appropriation revealed the critical view of farmers and agency, for example, by following a digitalization pathway that profoundly diverges from dominant imaginaries and discourses around digital agriculture. By applying a systems approach and by integrating three frameworks into critical scholarship - (1) emancipatory conceptualization of agency and sovereignty, (2) Sen´s capabilities approach, and (3) a relational approach - this thesis presents evidence of the complexity of socio-technical-physical interactions that lead to certain broad-mainstream and local-everyday digitalization pathways. These pathways, in turn, present particular societal consequences, such as the kind of agricultural worlds that are made possible, the interests that are represented in them, and the possibilities of participation for different social groups. More than a single trajectory, digital agriculture is a space of multiplicity and permanent emergence, also for reproducing current – not necessarily sustainable - models. For this reason, this thesis calls for abandoning notions of immutability, universality, and uniformity in development discourses, perspectives of rurality, and the generation of new technologies. Instead, it proposes to integrate a critical and systems-relational perspective into inclusionary innovation research and practice.