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Angst, Agoras, and Academe:Reflections on an Experience inConscious EvolutionRichard Bawden aa Michigan State University , East Lansing, MichiganPublished online: 29 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Richard Bawden (2004) Angst, Agoras, and Academe: Reflectionson an Experience in Conscious Evolution, World Futures: The Journal of New ParadigmResearch, 60:1-2, 53-66

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World Futures, 60: 53–66, 2004

Copyright © Taylor & Francis, Inc.

ISSN 0260-4027 print

DOI: 10.1080/02604020390264560

ANGST, AGORAS, AND ACADEME:

REFLECTIONS ON AN EXPERIENCE IN CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION

RICHARD BAWDEN

Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

For more than a quarter of a century, academics at Hawkesbury Agricultural College have been committed to the development of a public discourse about the nature and scope of the development of rural Australia, and of the sustainability of the role of agriculture within that. In their work they have explicitly privileged systems theories and practices and experiential pedagogies, while embracing the notion of development through participation within an ethos of deliberative democracy. There are lessons to be learned from the Hawkesbury experience with respect to the role of the agora in global transformation writ large.

KEYWORDS: Systemic development, agora, learning, academe.

Agriculture is a compelling arena for inquiring into the nature, characteristics, and dynamics of globalization—and for investigating the role of agoras in the search for responsible judgments by the citizenry about the future “development” of the planet. As an activity that occurs at the essential interface between people and their environments, agriculture affects virtually the entire population of the world in one way or another, as well as nature itself. At fi rst glance at least, the development of agriculture across the globe to date represents a triumphal manifestation of the very process of modernization—the invention and application of techno-scientifi c artifacts as amplifi ers of the processes of nature to meet a whole plethora of human needs. Yet as any number of indicators would now attest there is an ever-growing angst across that global constituency, about the negative impacts that many agricultural practices with respect to concerns about health, security, and safety, as well as about the integrity of the planet itself.

The magnitude and pervasiveness of this growing “global culture of angst” are such that there are those who now argue that the alleviation of anxiety has become the primary motivation for an overwhelming majority of people in many different

Address correspondence to Richard Bawden, Visiting Distinguished Professor, Michigan State Universi-ty, 331c Natural Resource Building, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. E-mail: bawden@mail.rd.msu.edu

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circumstances throughout the world. We have come to live, so the argument goes, in a “risk society” (Beck, 1992)—in a culture characterized by a state of permanent social concern about the impact of the risks of our own actions as human beings at large on the well-being and ultimate survival of ourselves as a coherent species. And this is to say nothing of widespread anxiety about the impacts of our actions on the rest of the life-forms on earth. Where once public global concerns were essentially confi ned to the fl ow of “goods” across national borders, in a risk society, they must now extend to also embrace the fl ow of “bads” across the entire planet. We must now learn to concern ourselves with, and accept responsibility for, the costs, as it were, as well as the benefi ts of “the widening, deepening, and speeding up of the worldwide interconnectedness” (Held et al., 1999) that globalization represents.

Ironically, with agriculture, as with many other human endeavors, we ourselves are the source of much of our own anxiety. The more our human population grows, the greater the pressure for ever more food to be produced, yet the only way that proves possible is through the ever greater use of ever increasingly powerful technologies. The more intense the uses of agricultural technologies become, the greater the po-tential they have for doing damage as well as good, and the catalog of impacts that contribute to the anxiety ranges from the destructive effects that mechanization can have on the structure of soil and the loss of biodiversity, and that pesticide use can have on the pollution of food products as well as of waterways, and again on the loss of biodiversity, through to the fostering of pathogenic microbes that are dangerous to human health. Of enormous signifi cance in all of these cases is the fact that local practices can have truly global consequences. The growing sensitivity to this matter of the risks of local actions leading to global impacts is leading to public calls for greatly enhanced guarantees of safety with respect to the introduction of new agri-cultural technologies, and “bio-engineering” is a case in point. The positive potential for bio-engineered crops, for instance, ranges everywhere from endowing them with innate resistance to pests and pathogens, to producing them with specifi cally tailored dietary nutrient or pharmaceutical profi les. The spectrum of concerns about their use, however, is equally broad and eclectic, ranging from concerns about possible new risks to human health, through to enhanced threats to the diversity of life forms on the planet—and indeed to the entire nature of nature as we now encounter it: “Genetic engineering confronts us with a new medium by which to imagine a future nature, one very different to the nature we have known for millennia” (Hindmarsh and Lawrence, 2001). Here then we have a novel situation, with “culture” suddenly assuming the ability to transform “nature” using technologies, most especially those of recombinant DNA (rDNA), which themselves represent culturally transformed nature.

Such circumstances in agriculture clearly reinforce the observation, made in a generic context, that “[w]e are concerned no longer exclusively with making nature useful, or with releasing mankind from traditional constraints, but also and essentially with problems of techno-development itself. Modernization is itself becoming re-fl exive; it is becoming its own theme” (Beck, 1992). As it is the citizens of the world who will be impacted by future agricultural developments, it is imperative that the citizenry now has a voice in the determination of the nature of those developments. The call is for nothing less than the introduction of deliberative democracy across the entire globe.

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While the transnational fl ow of “bad news” has assured the effective diffusion of knowledge about contemporary anxiety-evoking events to the world’s citizenry, this has yet to be matched by equal opportunities for collective and timely debate and discussion and deliberation over the import or implications of such “news”—the World Wide Web and the Internet notwithstanding. It might be argued that it is not so much the absence of a medium for such a discourse (although the electronic me-dia are still far from universally accessible) but the lack of an inclusive, universally comprehensible discourse that impedes the construction and operation of agoras of the global village.

In essence, discourse is a process of collective learning that has as its purpose consensual action, and as learning is the business essentially of academe, then it might then be expected that the academy would be at the forefront of change; a major contributor to the construction of agoras and a key facilitator of a “critical discourse for systemic change.” This represents a very signifi cant issue, for “. . . few institu-tions are devoted to helping the public to form considered judgments, and the public is discouraged from doing the necessary hard work because there is little incentive to do so” (Yankelovich, 1991).

Although not setting out deliberately to foster public judgment about agricultural development, initiatives at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in Australia (which was incorporated into the University of Western Sydney in 1989) have indeed subsequently led to a very signifi cant engagement with this process, over a period that has now extended over more than a quarter of a century.

SYSTEMIC DEVELOPMENTS AT HAWKESBURY

Events and experiences at Hawkesbury have illustrated some of the ways by which systemic discourse about agricultural development can be facilitated in ways that include the active participation of “the citizenry” and of other institutions, as well as of academe itself (cf. Bawden, 2000). Although the focus at this particular institution has not been explicitly on the impacts of globalization on Australian agriculture, the initiatives that were launched back in the late 1970s were initially triggered by con-cerns for matters that have proved to be of direct relevance to it. Of great importance in this regard has been the nature of the development of the institution itself and of the development of the (learning) process by which that development has occurred! Of particular signifi cance in this context has been a prolonged commitment to what has recently been labeled (elsewhere) the “scholarship of engagement” (Boyer, 1996, p. 11)—a scholarly yet practical strategy by which the academy becomes a “vigorous partner in the search for answers to our most pressing social, civic, economic and moral problems.” Rather than becoming a mere “partner” with others in the community, how-ever, and concentrating solely on the “search for answers to problems,” Hawkesbury faculty and students alike have focused on embedding themselves and their institution as a whole, into a comprehensive network (or dispersed agora, as it were) of those concerned with the “systemic development” in and of rural Australia.

The starting point for the initiatives was the recognition that there was indeed a level of angst within rural Australia, that transcended the levels of anxiety that pervasively characterize agriculture. Farming in Australia has always been a particularly anxious

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business for those whose business it is: The climate is harsh and the weather variable, the soils are generally poor and surface water is scarce, and markets are often very remote and essentially uncertain. Yet for all this, agriculture has proved to be one of the most signifi cant foundations for the development of that nation’s prosperity through the relatively short period since the time of the fi rst European colonization in the 18th century. The development and adoption of a host of technological innovations have been an essential aspect of this development, and techno-scientifi c research and educational institutions have, in turn, played crucial roles in all of this.

For very many decades following its establishment in the late 19th century, Hawkes-bury Agriculture College was an institution that was committed to this techno-scientifi c paradigm, confi dent in its belief that such was the way of progress! And for much, if not the most of this time, little would seem to have challenged the soundness of such a perspective. By the beginning of the 1970s, however, doubts about the production paradigm—about the whole modernization project in rural Australia—were beginning to surface and to be articulated from a surprisingly broad spectrum of constituents. The level of anxiety about agricultural practices, and the paradigm that they refl ected, were beginning to surface, both within that academy and beyond.

Australian and international consumers alike were starting to voice their concerns about the possibility of the contamination of the food that they were buying from the chemical pesticides that they came to know were being used “down in the farm.” Tourists were starting to express disappointment at the widespread “die-back” of trees in the countryside, and the “rape” of the landscape through land clearance. Environ-mentalists were beginning to mount media campaigns drawing the public’s attention to the loss of biodiversity on the continent, to the misuse and abuse of the “water resources” of the nation, and to other matters environmental. Health professionals were starting to talk more urgently about the dangers associated with the extensive use of antibiotics and other “synthetic promotants” in animal production, wheras animal liberationists were beginning to grab media headlines with talk of the “cruelty” and lack of respect for “animal rights” in much of livestock production. And through all of this, voices of reason were also calling attention to the lack of rights to the land of their ancestors by the aboriginal population of the nation.

It was clear that the historic singular preoccupation of farmers with production as expressed eventually in terms of their own well being, was inadequate in the face of pressures for them to also assume increasing responsibility for the impacts of their practices on “nature” and “society” alike. From a unidimensional concern for the “economic viability” of their enterprises, farmers were beginning to face the fact that they now also needed to embrace concerns for “ecological harmonization” and “ethical realization.”

Such was their own anxiety about these growing challenges in rural Australia that the faculty at Hawkesbury committed themselves to signifi cant reforms in their own practices. Following a series of “internal fora” (micro-agora (!)) that were informed by personal experiences as well as by both scientifi c literature and popular press alike, the faculty took a decision that amounted to a commitment to a critical review of the entire “production paradigm” and of the techno-scientifi c development process of rural Australia. Although not recognizing the full signifi cance of what they were do-ing at the time, they were in fact establishing foundations for both a new (systemic)

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discourse about agriculture and rural development in Australia while concurrently contributing to the establishment of a new agora among rural people.

Over the ensuing years, the Hawkesbury community of scholar–practitioners has become so engaged with people who live and work in rural Australia, with “profes-sionals” in a range of service industries to agriculture, as well as with representatives of commercial industries, industry organizations, and even government departments, that they have become an intrinsic part of an extended and extensive agora. This embeddedness has assumed systemic qualities through the evolution—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—of mutually infl uential associations between actors across a network of systemic discourse. The agora-network itself has developed through the actions of many and varied actors, including those from Hawkesbury, and with this development have come profound changes in the way agriculture is both conceptual-ized and practiced on that continent.

In retrospect it is possible to recognize three inter-connected “critical realizations” that have characterized and infl uenced the Hawkesbury initiatives over the years: (1) the power of the systems idea, (2) the signifi cance of the process of learning, and (3) the importance of a focus on development. The word “realization” is used here in both senses of insight/understanding on the one hand and achievement or actualization on the other. It is vital to emphasize the dynamic and evolutionary character of each in terms of “its” own development, as well as the dynamics that together “they” have contributed to the development of the overall initiatives.

The Systems Idea

The wide acceptance of the term “global agri-food system” in current discourse about agricultural development refl ects a generally accepted sense of the global inter-con-nectedness that characterizes the entire enterprise. Typically, however, the phrase is employed in a somewhat naïve manner that falls somewhere between “loose metaphor” and “formal systemic entity.” Usually, the phrase is used with some appreciation at least of notions of inter-connectedness and “wholeness,” but not usually with an understanding of embeddedness and emergence. It was a similarly naïve position, with regard to a sense of the innate systematicity of agriculture and of the rural com-munities and environments in which it has to operate that provided one of the key motivations for Hawkesbury faculty to commit themselves to the formal development of systems approaches to agricultural and rural development at their college when the initiatives were fi rst launched.

Wide-ranging discussions among the faculty (held in a spirit of deliberate democ-racy within the institution itself) revealed mounting collective concerns about the negative impacts that the intensifi cation of agriculture was increasingly having on both the biophysical and sociocultural environments in rural Australia. They also al-lowed the observation that too few within the scientifi c and educational establishment of the country seemed to appreciate the complex inter-connectedness of most of the impacts that were being observed independently of each other. Many of the faculty agreed that the extant curriculum at the college was, at best, doing little to facilitate the development of capabilities that were appropriate for dealing with the complexities of the agriculture of the day. At worst, it was argued, it could even be contributing to

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the “damage” being imposed on the sector by inappropriate approaches to its devel-opment. This was occurring by infl exible policies and institutional strategies that set the developmental paradigm, or by technologies, the full ecological and sociocultural consequences of which, were either unknown or unacknowledged. As the discussions progressed, the feeling among the faculty grew, that the “systems approaches” of which some in the agricultural literature were writing about at that time, might have merit as a framework for pedagogical reform (Bawden et al., 1984).

The fi rst “critical realization” at Hawkesbury was the power of the systems idea, of “a bounded wholeness,” comprised of embedded and mutually associated sub-units, that displays properties that are emergent through the inter-actions of those “lower order wholes,” as well as those between the “whole” and the “higher order unit of wholeness” in which it is, in turn, embedded.

The development of this idea and its application in practice over the years can be envisaged as passing through three different developmental phases. Each phase has been characterized by particular theory sets and worldviews, by the nature and scope of the agora that was engaged, and by particular collective praxis and conduct of the learners involved.

The nature and development of the curricula, of research and “extension” projects, and of institutional organization have been recorded in considerable detail elsewhere (cf. Bawden, 1999). The emphasis here will be uniquely on the concept of the agora in the context of the “engagement” of the institution with the citizens of rural Aus-tralia—and beyond.

Phase 1: Researched Systems

The systems idea found initial application at Hawkesbury in the development of a systems-oriented undergraduate curriculum that, it was felt, would enable students to formally learn about the systemic nature of agriculture. A key design strategy was for the students to spend a full semester living and working on an established farm after three semesters on campus learning how to learn experientially and learning how to research farming from a systems perspective. A number of challenges immediately presented themselves, not the least of which was the realization that the scholarly foundations for such a “systems research” focus were weak, not only within the insti-tution itself, but virtually everywhere else. Indeed the claim has recently been made that, at least from a rural sociological point of view, still “no really satisfying social theories suggested have been able to grasp the complexity and special character of a farm entity” (Noe and Alrøe, 2002). And that is to say nothing of the controversies that continue to rage around claims about the systemic organization of both society and nature, or about the whole matter of the nature of reality and the nature of know-ing and knowledge with respect to reality, for that matter. Most signifi cantly during the fi rst phase of the Haweksbury initiatives, exposure to such systems studies did not seem to lead necessarily to the development of any profound sense of “systemic appreciation” beyond ideas of inter-connectivity, embeddedness, and the essential inter-relatedness of people with nature, within agriculture.

Two important appreciations did emerge from this phase, however. The fi rst was the conceptual signifi cance of “difference” as the source of emergence! A system

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gained its characteristics through associations between its different sub-systems, and from the environmental supra-system of different systems in which it was embedded, and from which it, in turn, differed. The second “emergent” learning was that by the very nature of their “systems language” and their focus explicitly on experiential learning, the students introduced a new “discourse” as well as new “process of in-quiry” to those with whom they interacted during their sojourn living and working with their rural hosts.

Phase 2: Researching Systems

The shift to the second phase of the application of the systems idea came, following exposure to the ideas of Checkland (1981), with a conscious shift in the focus of systemicity from the “world out there” to the process of inquiring into “real world” situations. Instead of studying “agricultural systems,” students (and faculty) would now engage with farmers and others in rural communities, as well as with professionals in a range of service organizations, in “real world” projects to which they would bring skills as soft systems methodologists (SSM). In this manner a network of collaborators was developed across the State, in the spirit of an agora: Literally hundreds of students at any given time were involved in a wide range of such collaborative projects. This phase of the initiative gained added momentum with the introduction of graduate programs and the turn to modes of “systemic action research” by faculty, in their support of both undergraduate and graduate projects. The use of SSM certainly did enhance some systemic capabilities while reinforcing the signifi cance (a) of a focus on methodology as a systemic learning process, (b) of the infl uence that different worldviews could have on perceptions and interpretations associated with such learning, and (c) of inter-relationships between “human activity systems” and “the environment” in which they had to operate. The development of a profound systemic appreciation, however, still remained elusive for an unacceptably high proportion of the student learners. Neither did this focus on “researching systems” apparently lead to any signifi cant increase in the level of critical awareness of the “essence of systemicity” or the adoption of capabilities at “being systemic” across the ever-burgeoning network.

Phase 3: Critical Learning/Researching Systems

This next shift in the application of the systems idea came with the adoption of the notion of learning itself as the essential systemic focus and thus a shift away from a “methodological imperative” to an emphasis on the process of learning and its signifi cance to “critical discourse.” The new phase was essentially initiated by a “critical turn” in the thinking and actions of many of those involved, with the increas-ing awareness both of the need to continually critique the process of learning itself as well as the “social conditions” in which such learning (and actions fl owing from it) was taking place. The emphasis was now on learning how to become systemic through involvement, as participants in, and facilitators of “critical learning systems.” The new focus was accompanied by major growth and further development of an extended agora—that would come to extend substantially beyond the State. It even began to establish international connections through the international activities of graduate students and faculty, and the enrollment of foreign students. The initiatives

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were also greatly enhanced by an amalgamation of a group of social ecologists into the faculty of the school who brought powerful new ideas, theories, philosophies, and practices, as well as widespread network connections of their own.

Research projects, as well as educational programs, began to explicitly privilege systemic conversations and critical discourse, through a wide variety of participative strategies. Faculty and students alike also became active in forums organized by vari-ous professional bodies concerned with rural matters, while every opportunity was also to taken to use the media to communicate systemic ideas and positions with the “general public” through whatever media opportunities presented themselves. And, in a formal attempt to reach executive decision makers in organizations in both the private and public sectors with the message and discourse methods of “systemic de-velopment,” a formal research, consultancy, and development center was established at the university with a special focus on “strategies for the future.”

Central to all of these endeavors was a focus on “development through learning,” and the signifi cance of this emphasis is probably best understood from the learning perspective that follows.

The Learning Process

The second “critical realization” at Hawkesbury was the signifi cance of learning as a process by which “concrete experiences, abstract conceptualizations, and innate insights are transformed into meaning as the foundations for the design and enact-ment of meaningful and ethically responsible developmental actions.”

As mentioned earlier, the different “phase changes” could be construed as being triggered by changes in events and experiences on the one hand and theories and philosophies on the other. Transformative development was thus both a product of learning as well as a characteristic of it. That notwithstanding, a number of particular conceptual models and “frameworks of ideas” did assume foundational characteris-tics. These included key ideas, theories, and practices concerned with (a) experiential learning as presented initially by Kolb (1984), (b) of the soft systems methodology as a learning process as proposed by Checkland (1981), (c) of levels of learning as posited by Bateson (1972), (d) of levels of cognitive processing as developed by Kitchener (1983), and (e) of epistemic/systemic connections as developed by Sal-ner (1986). Although theories, philosophies, and practices from a great many other scholars have informed subsequent developments, these fi ve models have proved foundational to the direction of endeavors. In essence they have together provided a framework for what might be referred to as “guided systemic discourse,” where the intention is to facilitate systemic understanding by people who might not normally take such a position, or even be aware of its nature and potential advantages. They therefore merit a little more explanation here.

Insights from Kolb”s work provided the key idea that experiential learning is the transformation of experience into knowledge for action. It is a process of both adap-tation and transformation involving relationships between people and the everyday world in which they live and act. Learning in this mode can lead to transformations of people, of the events that they experience, and of the relationship between the

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two—between the observer/learner and the observed/learned. Using Kolb”s notion of alternating dynamics between the concrete and the abstract and between refl ection and action (Kolb, 1984), faculty came to understand all empirical methods of inquiry from an experiential perspective. In this manner they developed what they saw as a “spiral of methodologies” (Bawden et al., 1984), each refl ecting experiential founda-tions, but each proceeding with different intentions and with different assumptions about the nature of nature (as ontology), the nature of knowledge (as epistemology), and the nature of human values (as axiology).

Checkland’s work on soft systems methodology (SSM; Checkland, 1981), empha-sized the nature of method as (experiential) inquiry, the signifi cance of the shift of systemicity from the world to the process if inquiry into issues relevant to that world, and the importance of worldview to the establishment of the desirability and feasi-bility of changes. Where Kolb envisioned learning as a cyclical process, Checkland provided the clue to the transformation of that idea to portray learning as a systemic process: Learning cycles are better construed as learning systems (Bawden, 1990). In this manner the inquiry system that is experiential learning has four interdependent sub-systems of “human activities”: (1) one focuses on observation through “immersion in concrete experiences,” (2) a second with the creation of theories in explanation, (3) a third with the design of theories into plans for action, and (4) a fourth with the application of such designs in adaptive or transformational action.

A vital insight is that knowledge and meaning (and meaningful action) are emer-gent properties of learning systems, and further structures therefore need to be added to learning systems to endow them with intrinsic capacities for “processing” those properties.

The work of Bateson (1972), Kitchener (1983), and Salner (1986) provided the basic logic for understanding how “learning systems” could be both self-refl ective and transformative. “Critical learning systems” could be designed such that would concern themselves concurrently with (a) learning about “matters to hand” (level one), (b) learning about how that learning occurred (as level two or meta learning) and, (c) learning about the nature of knowledge and the signifi cance of paradigmatic assumptions that frame the way learning is conducted and knowledge is created (as level three or epistemic learning). Learning could thus itself be construed as a nested hierarchy/holarchy of self-monitoring and self-organizing systems, where each level of system has the capacity to infl uence and be infl uenced by the others in which it is embedded. Each “level” therefore also provides a context for the operations of the others, as well as mechanisms for the monitoring, interrogation, and evaluation of them. Learning systems are thus inherently critical, and indeed developmental, for critique can serve as a trigger for change and development where and when the need is indicated.

They are also a very useful construct for the design of effective agoras the concerns of which lie with the complex, multifaceted challenges of contemporary life and with the design of “better futures” through “sustainable development.”

Development Focus

It is unusual for an academic community, at least within agricultural colleges, to adopt development as an explicit focus for any of their conventional missions of “teach-

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ing,” “research,” or “outreach.” Perhaps, within the empirical milieu that prevails within the academy, this is a function of discomfort with (or even dismissal of) the normative idea of “betterment” or improvements as contextual. A culture of technical control, after all, is founded on an axiomatic belief in the benefi ts of techno-science and of the clear superiority of instrumental rationality over other forms of knowing. With their adoption of the title Agriculture and Rural Development as the name of their school, the Hawkesbury faculty fl agged their deliberate commitment to assisting with processes aimed at “improvements” both in the well-being of rural Australians and in the “health” of the natural/cultural environments in which they worked and lived. They also signaled their intentions to move beyond the grasp of the dominant paradigm in committing themselves to the development of their own institution by “learning their way forward” in the quest for improvements.

The third “critical realization” at Hawkesbury was the signifi cance of cognitive/epistemic development of participants in the development process, as the essential foundations for systemic modes of agricultural development that embraced what would later be captured by the notion of “inclusive well-being.”

In essence, the systemic development of agriculture in the context of ethically responsible change is a function of the capacity of participants in the development process to transform themselves into “systemic beings.” In a Socratic echo, transfor-mative systemic development within the context of sustainable “agri-food systems,” must start with (or at least be concomitant with) systemic self-transformation.

The work of Salner (1986) would prove to be very important in indicating how “learning systems” themselves could develop. Building on ideas developed by Perry (1968), on the intellectual and ethical development of college students, and by Kitch-ener (1983) on cognitive processing, Salner suggested that the acquisition of systemic competencies by individuals came only with their epistemic development. Her ob-servations implied that teaching students theoretical systems propositions, and dem-onstrating and encouraging the use of systems methodologies and practices, did not necessarily result in them really learning to grasp the essence of “being systemic”—of being able to approach any sort of issue from a truly “lived systems perspective.” The real clue to systemic competencies, she suggested, came with “experiential shocks” that would lead, in turn, to epistemic transformation from a “dualist/objectivist” posi-tion to one of “contextual relativism.” Akin to the notion of paradigmatic revolutions in science as promoted by Kuhn (1962), students learn to pursue systems perspectives most effectively when they become experientially aware that their conventional ways of dealing with issues in the world, and the epistemic assumptions that frame them, prove inadequate to tasks focused on “situation improving.” The pedagogical key therefore is to provide opportunities for students (indeed all learning systems) to fi nd themselves in such problematic circumstances, while also facilitating their access to systems theories, philosophies, and practical methodologies, which they might fi nd helpful in their new situations. To be systemic, learners (learning systems) need to be able to engage with epistemic “levels” (third level) of knowing and learning, so that they can challenge and, when appropriate, change (develop) the paradigmatic assumptions from which they are operating. They also need to be able to engage in

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“meta-learning” as a focus both for shaping (developing) their practices in response to new epistemic assumptions, while refl ecting critically on the consequences of such changes on their “fi rst level” activities.

Critical learning systems are able to not only embrace different ways of knowing and different worldviews and perspectives associated with different paradigmatic assumptions but to use such differences “to inform each other.” In this manner, normative and empirical forms of inquiry, for instance, can be incorporated into an integrated systemic inquiry where the ethical and the instrumental can inform each other. The same idea of integration can be envisaged for experiential, inspirational, propositional, and practical learning modes. And so on: Where difference exists, it can be used to fuel emergence!

From all of this it becomes apparent that cognitive/epistemic development is an essential pre- or co-requisite to agricultural development if it is to assume a critical systemic consciousness and character. It is important to emphasize that the notion of “criticality“ should not be confi ned solely to the self-refl exive process of learning systems that involves all three “levels of learning.” As Midgley (2000) has recently explained, “the critical turn” in systems thinking calls attention to three other critical foci that include concern (a) for power relationships within systemic interventions (cf. Jackson, 1982, 1991), (b) for confl icts built into the structure of society (cf. Mingers, 1980), and (c) for the cultivation of emancipatory interests in the develop-ment process. Yet a further dimension can be added here with respect to the need for critical review of the potential consequences of development interventions on both cultures and nature alike.

Of key signifi cance to the “critical turn” is the focus on boundary critique and judg-ments, and Ulrich (1983, 1998) and Midgley are among those who have done much to explicate how these issues can and must be incorporated into systemic interventions. Both have identifi ed ethical considerations as vital to critical boundary judgments or boundary critiques that (must) involve the citizenry as active participants in communal discourse about issues that involve or affect them. Ulrich (1998) draws particularly on Kant in defense of his proposition that boundary judgments must be addressed from both “is” and “ought” perspectives. In Kantian language he also claims that the twelve critically heuristic boundary concepts that he recognizes “represent categories of relative a priori judgments” (Ulrich, 1998). These categories address social roles, role-specifi c concerns, and “key problems in dealing with the clash of different con-cerns that is characteristic of social reality” classed according to the four sources of (1) motivation, (2) power, (3) knowledge, and (4) legitimization. Here then are vital dimensions of a framework for effective systemic discourse, conducted across and by critical learning systems about circumstances that merit the search for improvement. Signifi cantly, given the present focus on agricultural development and the place in it for citizen participation, both of these two workers are concerned with “systems thinking as if people mattered” (Ulrich, 1998). The inference here is the need for a fi rm engagement of the academy (as a source of systemic scholar practitioners) with both the citizenry and with agents in other institutions including, crucially, those concerned with creating, enacting, and administrating public policy. Ulrich (2003) has himself recently further reinforced the signifi cance of “critical systems thinking as critically systemic discourse.”

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TOWARD A SCHOLARSHIP OF CRITICAL SYSTEMIC ENGAGEMENT

The Hawkesbury endeavors have been characterized by developmental changes that are of profound signifi cance to the next stages of the development of the global “agri-food system.” They illustrate changes of paradigmatic substance that were achieved, by and large, through a discursive process that had many of the characteristics of the “networks of democracy” for which Busch (2000) has argued as the basis for moral discourse. Of particular importance, perhaps, is the pattern and form of the systemic development of the institution itself, and of the changes in focus that were triggered through progressive developments (a) of “inside” scholarship, (b) of “outside” events and experiences, and (c) of systemic interactions between the two.

Every aspect of the circumstances outlined earlier in relation to sustainable agri-cultural development in the future is replete with “numerous normative propositions” that demand moral analysis. Similarly, the situation also reveals a host of techno-sci-entifi c issues that demand further empirical investigation. The submission here is that both forms of inquiry need to be included and integrated as vital sub-systems within critical learning systems. Each form of inquiry must inform the other in an ongoing dialectic that is interventionist in intent, within a context of sustainable improvements to nature and culture alike: An ethos of inclusive well being. From this dialectical perspective, the fact that the notion of sustainability is contested is actually an ad-vantage, for in such a manner, as Davison (2001) has recently observed, it prompts “open-ended questions that focus our attention on the nature of moral experience in our technological world.”

As outlined earlier, there are many challenges to the ideal of a sustainable devel-opment for agriculture achieved through systemic discourse. The challenge for the academy is particularly onerous as it includes the need to accept a responsibility for the development of a scholarship of what might now be called “critical systemic engagement.” This in itself is a daunting challenge—the Hawkesbury experiences notwithstanding—for the “culture of technical control” and the role of the expert in it (which includes the faculty of the academy) remains all-pervasive. There is no doubt that empirical techno-science has played a hugely benefi cial role in the development of agriculture worldwide to date, and agricultural faculty have been crucial players in that through their three missions of teaching, research, and “extension.” There is also no doubt that it will continue to do so. Yet, as agricultural development has become ever more technical, the divide between the “expert” and the “layperson” has threatened to become ever wider, at the very moment when, from the earlier ar-guments, it needs to travel in the absolutely opposite direction. Within the academy little has been done to encourage or facilitate public moral discourse with respect to future directions in agriculture. Rare indeed is the curriculum that encourages learn-ers to learn how to make moral judgments, let alone how to integrate that process with a techno-scientifi c rationality that has been privileged above all other ways of knowing. Indeed, academics have been prominent in their nurturing of the estab-lishment of a “deep-rooted cultural trend that elevates the specialized knowledge of the expert to a place of high honor, while denigrating the value of the public’s most important contribution—a high level of thoughtful and responsible public judgment” (Yankelovich, 1991).

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The moral imperative for the negative impacts that have come as the (unintended) consequences of past techno-scientifi c development now demands that past faults be rectifi ed, past damage be ameliorated, and future risks be explored from fresh, systemic perspectives. The emerging rDNA technologies, for instance, provide a clear focus for such systemic consideration, as does the whole process of globalization, within which they are deeply embedded. A crucial aspect of moral discourse is the development of a “communicative ethics” where “the emphasis is less on rational agreement but more on sustaining those normative practices and moral relationships within which reasoned agreement as a way of life can fl ourish” (Benhabib, 1990)—although both remain necessary from a systemic perspective. If deliberative democracy is really to allow citizens to come to responsible and defensible public judgments, emphasis must be placed on the reclamation of the lost art of moral reasoning. And as Busch (2000) posits, this will entail a refocus on social relations, for “moral responsibility lies not in individuals or society” but on such “networks of democracy” that can be established, shaped, and developed through participation.

A clear lesson from the Hawkesbury initiatives is that it is as vital to create a frame-work for systemic discourse across a domain that includes the citizenry, the academy, commercial organizations, service institutions, and institutions of governance, as it is diffi cult to achieve. Commercial, political, and public interests are rarely served by the same strategies, as the sheer discordancy of the discourses related to matters such as the sustainable development of agriculture, the introduction of rDNA technologies, and the super-marketization of the agri-food system clearly refl ect.

The developments at Hawkesbury have progressed through a period in Australia in which very signifi cant systemic discourse about relationships between production agriculture and land degradation and social inequities have been on both community and government agendas. Indeed, the emergence of the so-called Land care movement in that country, along with the development of water catchment initiatives, have both infl uenced and been infl uenced by the Hawkesbury initiatives over the years. The emphasis across all of these endeavours has been on the establishment of associa-tions between individuals, communities, and institutions of various kinds, including governance, service, and commerce—and this has been equivalent to the conscious evolution, development, and adoption of a new discourse for systemic development across an emerging, extensive agora.

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