diversity-and-resilience

The chapter critiques the hegemonic high-modernist agricultural model that prioritized large-scale mechanization and monocropping, highlighting its failures due to abstraction and disregard for local contexts. It contrasts this with indigenous polyculture practices, particularly in tropical regions like West Africa and Guatemala, which embody sophisticated ecological knowledge, sustainability, and social embeddedness. The chapter emphasizes the ecological and social benefits of polyculture, its resilience, and the colonial and modernist dismissal of these systems based on superficial visual assessments rather than empirical understanding.

The chapter critiques high-modernist planning and authoritarian state schemes for prioritizing control and universalist rationalist knowledge over local, practical knowledge (mētis), leading to failures in social and agricultural engineering. It highlights the dangers of simplifying complex social and ecological systems into abstract, standardized models that ignore human diversity, unpredictability, and informal practices. The author advocates for institutions and interventions that embrace flexibility, incrementalism, diversity, and local knowledge to foster resilience, autonomy, and adaptive capacity.