Partnerships, platforms and power - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 173

Understand your philosophical underpinnings
It is important to remember that the CPWF was not conceived as an R4D
project. It was planned as a “new quality of partnership” with a non-Center-
dominated governance structure aimed at achieving the accepted objective of
“more crop per drop.” Even with this acceptable aim, there was resistance to
the new Challenge Programs. First, the Challenge Programs were perceived
as competing with the CGIAR Centers for funding. Despite this being shown
to be false, the perception continued to haunt the CPWF. Then there was
resistance to changing theme-oriented research to research based on BDCs,
although the change was in response to the criticism that the CPWF lacked
focus. Finally, there was the on-going constraint of fiducial dependence on the
host Center and limited managerial autonomy. Institutes set boundaries on
who defines the problems and what sort of problems they may define.
The predominant model in public agricultural research institutes remains
one of improving water productivity to increase the food supply to feed 9.6
billion people by 2050. Alternative views are not encouraged; for example,
the alternative view that there is currently enough food for everyone and the
problems are waste, poor distribution and self-interest policies (Moore-Lappe
et al., 1986; Thurow and Kilman, 2009).
An example is that the CPWF questioned the orthodoxy that water scarcity
is the defining crisis of the 21st century and that the solution is to increase
water productivity. Working with partners in ten basins, the CPWF found that
water scarcity is not strongly correlated with poverty. In doing so, CPWF
redefined addressing water scarcity as a means of achieving broader devel-
opment goals, including poverty reduction, rather than an end in itself
(Chapter 4). This was regarded by some as an unorthodox view, but it pales in
comparison to the far more serious break with conformity that R4D represents
to some others.
Shift or schism
Throughout this topic, we have described the evolution of the CPWF as “a
shift in our understanding of developmental processes and the role of research.”
Further consideration suggests that the shift was a schism between the
assumptions of theories of modernization and of participation.
Much development research is implicitly aligned with modernization theory.
Modernization theory emerged from post-Second World War concerns of
economists and policymakers, mainly in the USA, about unrest in newly
emancipated nations and the threat of Soviet expansionism. Theorists created a
category of nations they called “third world” or “developing,” and diagnosed
the underlying causes for why they were not yet developed. They proposed a
simple remedy: changes in ideas will transform their behavior (Waisbord, 2000).
Development researchers then embarked on a mission for several decades
to transmit information on modern values to modify behaviors according to