“The speed of the political is not that of the scientific”: on the time of development in an agricultural technology transfer program

Abstract In this article I seek to present certain problematics related to the ProSAVANA agricultural development program, highlighting a mismatch between a political sphere and a scientific sphere, which allowed me to reflect on some effects of the technical discourse that has guided the implementation of this international cooperation project. From research that sought to do an ethnography on the operationalization of this program, I intend to present the manner in which such technopolitical breakdowns in the proposed “technologies transfer” have produced a composition of different temporalities, which conferred a particular pace to the effectiveness of ProSAVANA. In order to describe this strange relation between different forms of knowledge that are expressed in the time of accomplishing a development project - unfolding at different speeds -, I follow the idea of Mbembe (2011) that in the postcolony, time is constantly emerging. In this sense, throughout this article I seek to describe how, by decomposing these different speeds, it is possible to understand the temporalities that emerge from the particular entanglement of technopolitical relations that confer the materiality of this development project.摘要 本文旨在探讨与ProSAVANA农业发展项目（ProSAVANA）相关的若干议题，着重揭示政治场域与科学场域之间的错位现象，借此反思指导这一国际合作项目落地的技术话语所产生的多重影响。本研究以针对该项目操作化的民族志研究为基础，试图呈现这场以“技术转让”为核心的实践中，技术政治断裂如何催生了多重时间性的交织，进而为ProSAVANA的实施成效赋予了特定节奏。为描述发展项目推进过程中，以各异速率展开的不同知识形态之间的奇特关联，本文采纳了姆贝姆贝（Mbembe，2011）的观点：在后殖民境遇中，时间始终处于生成之中。基于此，本文力图阐明，通过拆解这些各异的推进速率，我们得以理解源自技术政治关系特定纠缠的时间性，而这一时间性正是赋予该发展项目物质性的核心逻辑。