From transfer to translation: Using systemic understandings of technology to understand drip irrigation uptake

Drip irrigation is a technology with great potential for improving the efficiency of water use, and for increasing crop production and food security by enabling agriculture on marginal land. Yet drip irrigation’s uptake is patchy, with conspicuous successes in some locations and failures in others. In this paper we compare the history and circumstances of the mostly failed uptake of drip technology in sub-Saharan Africa with those of its deep and robust uptake in the Israeli context in which many of the failed African systems originated. We do this not only to throw light on the contextual dependence of this particular technology, and highlight strategies that have been attempted to protect it from this dependence, but also, more broadly, to use the notion of “technology translation” to consolidate several streams of socio-analytic thinking that offer improved understandings of how technologies evolve and travel.

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