The management of institutional innovation: Lessons from transferring the land grant model to India
| Author | Arthur A. Goldsmith |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230080306 |
| Date | 01 July 1988 |
| Published date | 01 July 1988 |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL.
8,
317-330
(1988)
The management of institutional innovation:
lessons from transferring the land grant model to India
ARTHUR A. GOLDSMITH
University
of
Massachusetts at
Boston,
USA
SUMMARY
The
US
and India collaborated on a successful institution building programme in the
1950s
and
1960s
to develop capacity
for
agricultural education, research and extension. This
paper
analyses that process for lessons that might bear on efforts to build similar institutions in
other countries. India was an especially favourable environment due to the sophistication of
its scientific base, the openness
of
its leaders
to
institutional innovation, the presence
of
public sector enterpreneurs
to
mobilize support for reform, and a food crisis that made
it
urgent to
find
new technology. The
US
did not fund institutional changes that had little
demand in India, but it
did
influence Indian preferences over the long run by creating several
mechanisms to exchange information about the American land grant system. These
exchange mechanisms enhanced India’s capacity for agricultural science and, less often
noticed, contributed
to
the
political
support
essential
to
new institutions.
INTRODUCTION
India over the past
20
years has gone through what is popularly labelled a ‘Green
Revolution’. But the term
is
somewhat misleading, since that revolutionary
breakthrough in farm technology also rested on evolutionary improvements in
India’s organizational capacity for agricultural science. Agricultural productivity
leaped in the mid-1960s because India imported high-yielding varieties of wheat
and rice that had been developed within the international agricultural research
system. But the continued growth
of
productivity since that time is
due
to the
ability of India’s own national research institutions to adapt technology to local
conditions and modify it on a continuing basis to meet changing environmental and
economic circumstances.
India now possesses what most experts agree is one
of
the biggest and best
systems for farming research in the Third World (Ruttan, 1982, p. 95), a system
that borrows heavily from the model that proved successful in the earlier
modernization
of
American agriculture. India’s leaders laid the foundation for this
research system in the 1950s and early 1960s, well before they introduced high-
yielding strains
of
foodgrains. They got considerable technical assistance for this
task from the United States government, American universities, and private US-
based foundations.
The American model could never be fully transferred, of course, for Indians had
to mould these foreign institutions to suit their own national environment. Even in
Professor Goldsmith is Assistant Professor
of
Management at the University
of
Massachusetts
at
Boston,
Harbor
Campus,
Boston,
Mass.
02125,
USA.
0271-2075/88/0303
17-14$07.00
@
1988
by
John
Wiley
8~
Sons, Ltd.
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