Where do skills reside? Do they dwell in people, in practices, in technologies? The question might seem abstract, but it helps us to think shrewdly about how changing skills can respond to new challenges and opportunities.
Skills are fundamentally about agency; they express what a person can do and be. That puts skills at the heart of ‘development’—at least if you believe that development is about enabling people to flourish.
Skills are also ingrained in our technological and economic systems. Those systems need to change if our global society is to become more sustainable. A technological transition implies letting go of current practices and learning new ways to make and consume.
Policy discussions about sustainability often invoke innovation, which celebrates the promise of new technologies. Embracing new technologies implies changes in skills and knowledge. But any change process involves losing some old skills while new skills are acquired.
People, technology and culture intersect in agriculture, where some scholars have argued that modern technologies have had a deskilling effect on farmers. Two types of concern are prominent in this debate.
One is that farmers’ skills and knowledge are degraded when their attention is refocused away from plants, pests and pollinators and onto devices, data and drones. The other is that farmers’ autonomy and control are undermined as decision-making passes from their hands into the hands of off-farm interests, such as agri-business companies.
A new special issue of the journal Outlook on Agriculture, entitled Skill and Deskilling in an uncertain agricultural world, offers a range of research-based perspectives on debates about agricultural deskilling. The contributors show that there is more to think about than just a net loss of skills. Instead, analysts should understand how technological change involves skilling and reskilling, as well as deskilling.
That language of skilling is important. Neoliberal economists and politicians tend to talk about skills as a stock of ‘human capital,’ like a commodity or a resource. But, as keynote author Glenn D. Stone argues, anthropologists understand skilling as a process of learning and decision-making, and reject the idea of skill as a static body of knowledge. Marcus Taylor and Suhas Bhasme draw out a similar point: ‘agrarian skilling’ is an evolving form of ‘knowledge practice,’ which is embedded in technical tasks, social and political relations, and economic systems that transcend farms.
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Expanding on this theme, Andrew Flachs and co-authors explain how distinct kinds of skills are socially produced within production systems, landscapes, class structures, and political economies. Trent Brown agrees that skills are situated and embodied agro-ecologically, socially, and culturally, and embedded within a wider political economy. Different kinds of production systems—for instance, capitalist plantations compared with small-scale family farms—constitute different kinds of ‘ecosystems’ that foster different kinds of skills. That context shapes how skills are valued and how power and control are distributed through society.
Thomas Daum picks up this thread in his paper about digital agriculture. He shows how agricultural skills may be enacted by networks of interconnected people and devices, which have different capacities to sense and analyse information, make decisions, and take action. When skills are distributed across a network that includes robots and algorithms, the pertinent questions to ask are about whether farmers and farm workers are being empowered or disempowered, and what are the implications for sustainability.
Daum’s paper draws attention to the design of technical systems, and the designers’ assumptions which they embed. Sarah Cramer’s paper sheds light on a common kind of bias, namely the designers’ assumption that farming practitioners lack knowledge and skills to make good decisions and become skilful farmers.
Cramer’s paper examines the case of an educational programme in a prison garden, where the incarcerated gardeners were initially assumed to have a deficit in knowledge and the outside experts were supposed to educate them. We (Glover and Sumberg) are more familiar with the case of agricultural extension programmes in low- and middle-income countries, where the disposition of educators has often been essentially the same, i.e., assuming that farmers lack relevant knowledge and skills, which the outside experts must bring.
Glenn Stone has called these off-farm experts ‘didacts,’ who try to influence farmers’ practices in ways that reflect the outsiders’ knowledge, interests and assumptions, not those of the farmers, their households and their communities.
Sarah Cramer draws this conclusion:
“Though the power differentials in a prison classroom are particularly extreme … there are numerous other contexts in which those of us with certain agricultural skills could stand to pause, take stock, and recalibrate before launching a skilling endeavor. After years of engagement with the prison program, I have noticed how my own teaching in non-carceral contexts (on the university campus, in extension/outreach settings, etc.) has evolved. I spend much more time interrogating my students’ previous lived experiences, asking them to take the lead on determining the direction of our learning, and teasing out what food-based skills they may possess already before diving into my lesson. I make few claims of expertise and rather see myself as a guide with access to specialized resources that may help them further their learning.”
In a similar vein, the final paper in the collection, by Timothy McLellan and Ben Eyre, raises the following question: Do skills reside within artefacts, such as survey instruments and the electronic devices used to capture research data? In one sense, yes, because these artefacts are inscribed with the knowledge and skills of their designers. Yet, a field survey still relies heavily on the competence of researchers, who navigate through social networks and spaces in order to gather reliable data that is truthful and contextualised.
Together, the papers challenge the mainstream view of skills as individualised units of human capital. In our introductory article, we infer that “Skill may be understood as a feature of production processes (i.e. techniques, tasks, operations, transformations, and production chains); of communities of practice (i.e. task groups, occupations, professions); or of technological cultures (i.e. social, political and economic institutions). In fact, it is linked to all three.”
Any technological change redistributes risks, opportunities, resources, and power. As development researchers, we should pay attention to who is trying to accomplish what with their technical novelties. What are the developers’ motivations and intentions, and how are these aims and goals being built into technical designs? What could be the likely outcomes for different people and groups, and for the wellbeing of ecosystems and nonhuman life? Are there plausible alternative designs, which could do more to empower skilful practice and navigate a better pathway to sustainability?
The contributions in the special issue undermine the simplistic view that new technologies lead to a net loss of skill. But skills do change as technology changes, and indeed some skills may be lost as new ones come into being. New technologies may have emancipatory or constraining effects depending on how they are designed, who owns and controls them, and how they are deployed and used.
