Connecting Agriculture to better Nutrition in South Asia: Innovation as a process of socio-technical change
This paper explores the role of innovation in strengthening the linkages between agriculture and nutrition in South Asia. This paper eschews the common bias in discourse about ‘innovation’ towards eye-catching novelty and invention, which emphasises high-tech gadgets and devices, external inputs and industrially and/or commercially produced technologies. Instead, this paper adopts a broad conceptualisation of innovation as a change process, which involves a reconfiguration of technical and social components, and has material, economic and behavioural dimensions. Thus, the paper embraces practical and behavioural changes at farm- and household levels, such as the establishment of home gardens for improved nutrition, as well as more obvious technological novelties such as machines or the genetic engineering of biofortified crops.
