El desafío de integrar investigación y extensión rural en procesos de innovación tecnológica orientados al desarrollo territorial

Abstract

This article starts from the premise that an integral perspective of sustainable development in rural territories, which is based on technological innovation as the axis to promote changes, must integrate in a systemic way both processes of research and rural extension. This premise is not new and is found in many of the institutional discourses related to Argentine rural development. But this integration in processes of territorial innovation as a scientific-technologic institutional culture associated with the rural environment is not verified. The aim of this article was to analyze the factors which may be limiting the systemic integration between research and rural extension, by blocking the possibilities of forging a social culture of transdisciplinary work, and then hindering processes of technological innovation that involve territorial development processes. To that end, we analyzed some imaginaries that underlie the institutional operating logics, as a means to identify some of the roots that would be modulating the conflict of this integration. The proposed institutional imaginaries of conflict refer to: i) the sociological approach in the agricultural sciences, ii) the dichotomy between rural and urban, iii) agricultural productivity versus socio-ecological resilience, iv) the disarticulation between rural extension and research, v) hierarchy of knowledge, and vi) tensions between individuation and cooperation. Finally, some axes of future work are discussed in order to overcome the identified limitations, in order to advance towards an integration of research and rural extension into technological innovation processes oriented to territorial development