Between ‘the Technical’ and ‘the Social’? The Case of Farm Ponds for Supplemental Irrigation in Burkina Faso and Mali

Abstract

Adopting the perspective of practitioners, we analyse the case of farm ponds for supplemental irrigation built in Burkina Faso and Mali. We reflect on the ways in which climate technologies can contribute to smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change, showing that in the different processes involved in the design and implementation of farm ponds as climate technologies, the distinction between infrastructure, equipment and machinery, on the one hand, and people, societies and communities, on the other, concealed the complexity of agricultural, agro-ecological and development practices. This ultimately hindered the potentially positive impacts of the technology and confirmed what the literature has already shown: that climate technologies should be approached as solutions that, regardless of their use of a particular piece of infrastructure or equipment, are always ‘socio-technical’.