No abstract

Probabilistic thinking underpins a wide range of scientific claims, but effectively communicating probabilistic information across audiences is challenging. In this article, we present a political–institutional approach to science that harnesses the social relationships between the people working as scientists and the public using scientific innovations. First, we show how we learned to use games and local analogies to effectively communicate probabilistic seasonal forecasts of weather and crop yields with farmers, extension workers, and water managers in Ethiopia. Second, we show how workshops—the unglamorous institutional workhorse of international development and scientific enterprises—became warmhearted events when organized around the fundamental fact of social connections between researchers and the community members and between the community members themselves. Scientists in an international scientific collaboration may not be able to become longstanding members of every community, but our approach to workshopping—and to research networks—allowed us to be engidoch (in English, guests), to tap into rich social ties to harness the humor, goodwill, and commitment that is hard to muster when scientists engage with community members as unconnected, nameless “workshop participants.”

Global technology transfers reshape agriculture with profound influences on everyday life. Substantial research has documented broader constraints that influence technology transfer among farmers, yet existing theories give us a narrow view into how wider dynamics manifest in everyday life. Using tractor farming in Ethiopia as a case study with ethnographic and historical data, we contribute an account of the everyday social and ecological interactions that shape agricultural technology transfer as well as the wider historical context in which these practices play out. Historically, we find an uneven transition that faltered repeatedly over 50 years. Ethnographically, we identify three types of interplays between actors and the local ecology that shaped the ways that faltering technology transfer actually plays out on the ground: (1) socio-ecological frictions; (2) communicative frictions; and (3) status-based frictions. This study contributes a humanistic account of how farmers and local technology providers experience technology transfers.