Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the interactions between human and natural resource ecologies in adopt successful agricultural innovations. We propose an bottom up approach that locates ethics in the everyday interactions of local households, using examples from the sphere of watershed management.

Paper long abstract:

The inability of mainstream economic methodologies to explain the many different responses to introduced innovations into rural development (often portrayed as irrational behaviour) has led to alternative theories of innovation that focus on innovative that arises out of local and repeated agricultural practice. For example, innovation is a central element in the development of livelihoods, underlining the dynamic and multi-dimensional aspects of rural development (Ellis, 2000). The broadening of the livelihoods framework by interlinking human and natural resource ecologies to understand the dynamics of livelihood systems and decisions to adopt new technologies has more recently been adopted in the natural resource management (NRM) literature (Vermuellen et. al. 2010)

This paper takes the literature of bottom up rural development forward by drawing on the recent work on energy justice and its relationship to Kantian ethics, which regards each person as an end (Sovacool and Dworkin, 2016). We take up their argument that it is important to identify realistic utopias (Rawls, 1999) to understand the goals of development as set out by participants in the development process. The rationale for devising our project is that vulnerability should not be located at the level of a single household but rather within a socio-cultural-political context of the rural community (Fennell, 2010). We use primary data collected on from rural households to examine the role of water users associations management, a local institutional form, to examine whether farmers regard bottom up sharing mechanisms as ethical practices for increasing the capability of small farmers and increasing the sustainability of rural development.