Leadership Practices that Enable Agricultural Transformation: The case of Ethiopian irrigated wheat initiative

Abstract

Agricultural innovations play a vital role in enhancing production and productivity. Under Ethiopian context, agricultural innovations are deployed in the form of integrated technological innovations. The elements of technological packages include varieties and associated management practices. The rate of adoption and the pace at which such innovations are disseminated is normally slow. Thus organizations involved in innovation development and dissemination activities need to be agile to cope with the fast changing production environment as well as the pressing need for increased production and productivity. Enabling leadership refers to leadership practices that enable the positioning of individual and organizational actors by creating adaptive spaces. An adaptive space is about the social arrangements of the innovation system actors in ways that enable the creation of adaptive processes which eventually lead to an adaptive organization. Thus, being acquainted with leadership practices that enable the creation of adaptive spaces and facilitation of the vitality of associated adaptive processes is crucial. Activities that stimulate adaptive processes eventually facilitate the creation of adaptive organizations. Knowledge of factors that enable the creation of adaptive spaces, and leadership practices that help expedite the creation of vibrant adaptive processes is vital to be able to deploy appropriate adaptive interventions. This further enables the design of a refined intervention for future implementation under varied contexts. At the policy level, knowledge of enabling leadership practices that affect the success of such adaptive interventions is important for policy-makers to rethink their innovative food production policies. Thus, it is important to document process-oriented and relational approaches that facilitate the creation of adaptive spaces in which agricultural innovations are generated, diffused and adopted in networks based on information gathered from field-level implementation experiences. The Ethiopian irrigated wheat production initiative was as the subject of study. Some of the project evaluation questions for the retrospective analysis from the perspective of an enabling leadership model were: who were the agents involved in the irrigated wheat project? What were their roles? What were the enabling leadership practices that facilitated the creation of the adaptive space vital for the sustainability of the project? To answer the above questions, a template analysis of existing irrigated wheat project documents was done. One of the key lessons from the current analysis is that is the fact that leadership is a co-creation. An additional lesson also is that we must understand that leadership and followership are a complex social phenomenon of interacting leaders and followers in ways that co-produce enabling leadership and its outcomes.