ABSTRACT
Community-based irrigation management has become popular because, amongst other things, it is a way to empower communities and involve them in global production. This chapter examines social learning and transformation in a community-based management scheme in Mozambique. In order to investigate potential transformative agency and praxis in this context, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) was combined with Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR). CHAT was used to surface activity systems within the socio-ecological physical/environmental and socio-economic irrigation context. DCR helped to expand understanding of the concept of contradiction and its categories as well the concept of emergence. In the tradition of critical realism it was assumed that a dialectics of change towards physical/environmental and socio-economic social-ecological well-being is fostered by generative mechanisms (individual and collective learning conditions – including absences/contradictions, truth, motivation). An absence or presence of these generative mechanisms may constrain or foster transformation in the learning process within the system. The CHAT activity systems identified were equivalent to 1M and 2E in the framework of DCR. By using the DCR concept of absence, it was possible to identify dialectical contradictions within and between the activity systems. Through the expansive learning of CHAT, it was possible to understand the activity systems and generate potential solutions within the system. Through the irrigation project’s development history and the change laboratory process, it was also possible to see absences removed and opportunities for transformation emerging.
