Emerging Alternatives to Technology Transfer Extension Practice

The discourses of agricultural extension reveal how actors represent their scientific activities and goals. The 'transfer of technology" discourse developed with the professional U.S. extension service, reproducing its expert/lay power relations. Agroecology is emerging as a systems approach to prevent? ing agricultural pollution. Its theoreticians argue that agroecology cannot be transferred like technology but must be extended through networks of partic? ipatory social learning. In California, hundreds of actors and dozens of insti? tutions have cocreated agroecological partnerships using this alternative extension model. They have developed three alternative extension discourses to represent and explain their activities. Bruno Latour's "circulatory system of science" model provides a superior theoretical framework for interpreting the participation and discourses of diverse actors in this extension practice.