Study title

These data were collected in Chennai, India, and Machakos, Kenya, using two-day workshops in each location. The aim of the workshops was to explore perspectives on pathways out of rural poverty, in ways that do justice to the complexity and uncertainty inherent to such pathways. Using the interactive appraisal method called Multicriteria Mapping (MCM, http://www.multicriteriamapping.com/about), the workshops afforded the participants to foreground pathways (out of poverty) that they consider to be relatively more effective than others.Global poverty looks radically different in the 21st century as climate-related events, political-religious conflicts and economic growth-inequality nexuses add to persistent forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In this uncertain and unpredictable context, we require new approaches to understand complex pathways into and out of poverty, directing attention to poor people's collective capacity to bring about transformative change i.e., their agency, as constituted by social networks and relations with nature, and mediated by science and technology. Our aim is to develop the concepts and methods of an innovative 'relational agency pathways approach', drawing on theories from Science, Technology and Society studies and the 'pathways approach' to poverty reduction and social justice, which emphasise interactions between social, technological and environmental change. We will develop this new approach to understand diverse pathways out of poverty for smallholders and the landless in agriculture, in two arenas. First, we will study how small farmers and farmworkers adapt new technologies on the farm, as their cultivation practices are transformed due to technological and environmental change. Second, we will study how farmers turn a harvested crop into a commodity for the market, negotiating their relationships with credit providers and traders. Both these arenas played out dramatically under the 'Green...