25/04/2025

Collective Agency and Agricultural Development: Evidence from Southern India

Our recently published NISD policy brief on barriers to doubling farmers’ income in Southern India offers valuable insights into why well-intentioned agricultural policies often fail to achieve their intended outcomes. This blog post reflects on some of the broader implications of our findings that complement the specific evidence presented in the brief.

Bridging Policy and Practice

The stark contrasts we observed between Mysore and Wayanad districts reveal how similar policy frameworks can produce dramatically different outcomes depending on local social and institutional contexts. While our brief documents these differences through empirical evidence, the underlying message extends beyond these specific cases: agricultural development is fundamentally a socio-institutional process, not merely a technical one.

This insight challenges conventional development approaches that prioritize technological solutions and market integration without adequately addressing the social structures that mediate how these interventions are accessed and implemented. The DFI mission exemplifies this tendency, focusing primarily on productivity enhancements and market linkages while underestimating the importance of social inclusion and institutional capacity.

The Role of Collective Action

Perhaps the most striking finding from our comparative analysis is the transformative potential of collective action. In Wayanad, community-based approaches have enabled marginalized farmers to overcome structural barriers through shared resources, knowledge, and market power. These collective institutions serve multiple functions simultaneously:

They provide accessible channels for information and resource flows
They create platforms for adapting external interventions to local contexts
They build social capital that enhances resilience to climate and market shocks
They generate political agency to influence policy implementation

These functions are largely invisible in conventional agricultural development frameworks, which tend to focus on individual farmer behaviour and technical adoption rates. Our research suggests that strengthening collective institutions may be a prerequisite for, rather than a byproduct of, successful agricultural development interventions.

Implications for Development Practice

For practitioners working in agricultural development, our findings suggest several practical considerations:

First, interventions should begin with a thorough understanding of local social dynamics and institutional arrangements before introducing technical or market-based solutions. In contexts like Mysore, addressing social exclusion mechanisms may need to precede efforts to enhance productivity or market access.
Second, implementation strategies should actively leverage existing community institutions rather than creating parallel structures. The success of programs like Kudumbashree in Kerala demonstrates how formal interventions can amplify rather than replace indigenous institutional arrangements.
Third, measurement frameworks should capture institutional strengthening and social inclusion outcomes alongside conventional economic indicators. The tendency to focus exclusively on income metrics obscures critical enabling factors that determine sustainable success.

Moving the Conversation Forward

As climate change and market volatility intensify pressures on agricultural systems, the need for resilient, socially embedded development approaches becomes increasingly urgent. Our research contributes to an emerging body of evidence suggesting that successful agricultural transformation requires attention to both technical innovations and the social institutions through which they are deployed. By sharing these reflections alongside our policy brief, we hope to stimulate broader conversations about agricultural development pathways that recognize the centrality of social structures and institutional capacity in creating sustainable, equitable outcomes for all farmers.

This blog post complements our policy brief “Barriers to Doubling Farmers’ Income in Southern India,” published by the Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development (NISD Briefing Paper #3, April 2025).