The crisis machine : moral panic, alliances, and agenda-setting in an agricultural non-formal education program

Abstract

This thesis is a case study an agricultural program for 25 extension workers from Sub- Saharan Africa called the Season Long Rice Training for Africa (SLRTA). SLRTA was training-of-trainers program teaching a curriculum that reaches in the form of Farmer Field Schools (FFSs). The training took place at the Philippines Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), at the behest of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), for the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) sub-network Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD). AGRA and CARD were part of a larger but impermanent coalition of institutions, donors, networks, and states called the Alliance in this thesis. After noting notable idiosyncrasies, this thesis answers why the curriculum took the form it did, why those countries and institutions, and why then? Critical theory, historiography, fieldwork interviews and observations, social network analysis, document analysis, media analysis, and publicly available ‘big data’ tools are used to answer the question and provide what is essentially a political explanation to these and other 'why' questions. It builds off and offers new insights to Cullather's history of agricultural development (2011). It also uses and synthesizes Scott's work on legibility (1998, 2009), Ferguson's anti-politics (1994), Tilly's politics of exclusion (1998, 2006), with Goode and Ben-Yahuda’s (2010) work om moral panics. The thesis argues that nearly everything about SLRTA, from the timing to the curriculum, is best explained through the political contexts and sequences in which it emerged. The most importance context and sequence was a moral panic surrounding the 2007-2008 Food Price Crisis. Malthusian fears found widespread appeal for the first time since Green Revolution legacy institutes like IRRI were founded. In comparison to years before and after, the moral panic cultivated a disproportionate attention and support for the Alliance. Pre-positioned to utilize the crisis, the Alliance was able to forge consensus within the international development community and mainstream media on what the problem was and ‘what [was] to be done’ (Ferguson, 1994). Through active processes of social closure 'socially flattened' discourses, plans, and curricula flowed. The volatile nature of moral panics is evident, with both funding and media attention collapsing after 2011-2012