Actors, Power and Influence: Working With The Grain
The slow work of shifting systems
Across Dharwad, Haveri, and the surrounding districts in northern Karnataka, indigenous seed varieties, ragi, jowar, navane, saame, korle, along with dozens of local vegetable and oilseed varieties, have been disappearing for years, edged out as farmers shift to hybrid seed each season. A seed variety a household has sown for generations simply isn’t sown the following year, and once it isn’t saved, it is very hard to get back.
In 2019, Bibi Fatima, a woman from Tirtha village in Kundgol taluk who had been working on women’s empowerment, started collecting seeds herself, together with a group of girls from the neighbouring village of Tammur. (Source: “Success Story: Income Source of Sowing Seed Collection, United Nations Award Strength,” Umesh Bhatta Ph., Prajavani, 11 August 2026.)
Organisations working on agrarian distress or biodiversity loss often begin with the most visible tools first: awareness campaigns, seed fairs, one-off distribution drives. While these are important, they don’t explain why an indigenous variety survives in one village and not in the next. What sustains or erodes a seed system has less to do with any single campaign and more to do with who is doing what, and why it makes sense to them to keep doing it.
A systems practitioner approaches this by asking a different question: why is each actor doing exactly what they are doing, and what would have to change for a different behaviour to make sense to them? This piece uses the Tirtha seed collection story as a recurring reference point to surface a way of seeing that travels across other systems.
Viewing the picture as a whole
In development work, we tend to talk about stakeholders, but in systems practice the lens shifts slightly. An actor is any individual, group, organisation, or institution that has a relationship to the problem, whether through causing, experiencing, sustaining, or holding the potential to shift it. What matters is who they are and what they are responding to.
A first pass at the actor map for the Tirtha seed system might list the obvious ones: the farmers who still grow traditional cereals like ragi and jowar, the women’s self-help groups that have grown up around the seed collection work, and Bibi Fatima herself as the person who started it. A more thorough inventory finds actors whose names rarely appear in a short news report, but who are shaping the outcomes all the same. These include the girls and women across Tirtha, Tammur, and the neighbouring villages who do the actual work of collecting seed and negotiating prices with buyers; the 73 self-help groups that have since formed across villages, taluks, and districts, each with their own internal dynamics; the farmers who have already shifted to hybrid seed, whose reasons for doing so the source article does not examine but whose choices are the ones the whole effort is responding to; the Dharmasthala Rural Development Organisation and the Sahaja Samriddhi Foundation, both of which supported the work at different points; ICAR’s Indian Institute of Millets Research in Hyderabad, whose 2021 funding paid for the processing machinery; the state government’s Rural Livelihoods Department; and, more recently, Devadhanya, the farmer producer organisation formed in 2023 with 1,000 shareholders.
None of these may appear in a typical programme’s theory of change, and yet all of them shape whether an indigenous seed variety gets saved, sown, or lost.
The question before the intervention
Once we have a fuller picture of who the actors are, the next step is to understand what each of them is actually responding to. In systems practice, this means mapping motivators and incentives before designing any response.
A motivator is something an actor genuinely cares about, such as reputation, security, relationships, recognition, or the avoidance of loss. An incentive is a structural signal that shapes behaviour regardless of what an actor personally values, such as pricing structures, regulatory requirements, reporting deadline, or commission arrangement. Both operate simultaneously, and the interaction between them is often where the most important dynamics live.
Take Bibi Fatima herself. What motivates her is that indigenous seed will disappear entirely in what she calls “the hybrid era.” That fear, and her prior background in women’s empowerment work, seem to be what pulled her toward seed collection as a specific form of that work, one where women could hold something tangible and valuable. Her incentives shifted over time in ways the article traces: early support from the Sahaja Samriddhi Foundation, then financial assistance from ICAR-IIMR in 2021 that funded nine millet processing machines, and by 2023 a formal farmer producer organisation with 1,000 shareholders and a weekly market for value-added products. Each of these did not just fund the work; it changed what counted as success and what was possible to sustain.
Before you ask how to change what an actor does, ask why it makes sense for them to do it. The answer is almost always more interesting than you expect.
What the article does not tell us is just as important. It does not explain what makes hybrid seed attractive to the farmers who have moved away from indigenous varieties: whether it is yield, market demand, extension advice, input-dealer credit, or simply the absence of an easy alternative until Bibi Fatima’s group offered one. That is a real gap. Understanding the seed bank’s growth is only half the picture; understanding what it is competing against, and why that competition has been winning for years in most villages, is the other half.
The difference between power and influence
Most of us in the social sector use power and influence interchangeably, but in systems practice the distinction matters and has practical consequences.
Power, in this framework, is formal. It is the authority vested in a role, a position, or an institution. ICAR-IIMR has power because it is a national research institute that can direct funding toward the technologies it wants to see adopted. The state government’s Rural Livelihoods Department has power because it can channel support toward the groups and models it chooses to back. And Devadhanya itself, once registered as a farmer producer organisation with 1,000 shareholders, holds a kind of formal power that the informal seed-collecting group it grew out of did not.
Influence is informal. It is the capacity to shape decisions, behaviours, and beliefs through relationships, trust, information, and social standing, without any formal authority to do so. Bibi Fatima had no official agricultural title or advisory role when she started in 2019. What she had was credibility built through the work itself; the article describes her as someone for whom “information about seeds is right on the tip of her tongue,” and notes that people from well beyond her own district now seek her out for training. That is influence, not power, and it is what made the formal institution possible later, not the other way around.
In many systems, informal influence and formal power stay separate: the person with the trust of the village is not the person with the budget, and the two don’t always combine. Here, over roughly six years, informal influence gradually accumulated into something with formal standing, first a self-help group, then a network of 73, then a registered farmer producer organisation.
The role of champions when there are no obvious entry points
Sometimes, when we map actors and trace their motivators and incentives, we find that the overlap between their interests and the change we are trying to support is genuinely small. For a farmer already buying hybrid seed each season with no clear account of why in this case, there may be little reason to switch back to a variety with uncertain yield and no established market, however much biodiversity value it holds.
This is where champions matter. A champion, in this sense, is an actor who exists outside the current system but who provides live, credible proof that a different way of behaving is possible and that it works, not a theory, but a working example, close enough to be visible and successful in terms the resistant actor actually cares about.
Bibi Fatima’s group has become exactly this kind of champion, and notably, it now functions as one deliberately rather than by accident. The article notes that the initiative provides training on seed collection “not only in the districts of Uttar Karnataka, but also” to others who are interested, meaning the model has moved from something people heard about to something people are actively taught. The 2025 UNDP Equator Initiative Award for sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation, along with the roughly ₹9 lakh in award money that came with it, functions as a second, external layer on top of that: it is a credentialing signal that reaches actors, government departments, other NGOs, potential funders, who may never visit Tirtha village themselves but who now have reason to take the model seriously because an international body already has.
The association has collected around 300 seed varieties over seven years and reports an annual income of roughly ₹15 lakh across its network. What has changed is that an alternative now exists with a market, supply chain, and international recognition, where seven years ago there was none.
Being patient with the system and clear about direction
None of the above happens quickly. Bibi Fatima shares: “In seven years, we have even reached the stage of being recognized by the World Organization.” Seven years to go from a handful of women collecting seed in one village to a federation of 73 self-help groups, a processing unit, a farmer producer organisation, and an international award.
A systems practitioner working on a problem like seed loss does not arrive with a solution and implement it. She spends time understanding the system before designing anything: who is already doing something, what they are responding to, and what kind of support would actually compound rather than distort what is already working. In this case, the sequence of support, an NGO partner, then a research institute’s funding for processing infrastructure, then formal institution-building, followed something that had already found some traction on its own, rather than leading it from the outset.
This requires patience that is sometimes at odds with programme cycles, donor reporting, and the pressure to show early results. What can be offered, instead of a fast fix, is support that recognises where informal influence has already taken root and helps it accumulate into something with more staying power, without assuming that formal structure should have come first.
What the numbers don’t show
The numbers in this piece describe collection and production - seed varieties gathered, SHGs formed, income earned, shareholders enrolled, quintals sold each week. While these are real, they are supply-side numbers. None of them tell us whether the food itself has come back onto people’s plates.
This concern is also known to other millet-revival efforts in India, including work by organisations like WASSAN: acreage and procurement can scale up well ahead of the harder, slower shift of people actually choosing to cook and eat these grains regularly, rather than treating them as an occasional specialty. That shift depends on taste habituation, cooking time, and price competitiveness against polished rice and wheat, none of which move at the pace a seed bank or a processing unit can be built.
The Tirtha article does not tell us whether the households doing the collecting have themselves shifted their daily diets, whether the ragi dosa mix and multigrain flour are becoming staples or remain festival purchases, or whether the farmers who sell seed to the bank still grow hybrid varieties as their main crop, with seed collection as a side activity. Five quintals a week sold through Devadhanya, across a network spanning several districts, is real, but it’s still more of a well-supported niche than evidence of a wider dietary shift.
None of this diminishes the work done so far. A champion’s value lies in demonstrating what is possible, not in guaranteeing an outcome. Whether this becomes a durable shift in what people grow and eat, or stays a well-documented, well-supported pocket of activity, depends on variables the source material does not resolve, and it is the same open question that has trailed India’s wider millet revival.
Try it For Yourself
Reading about actors and influence is one thing, but mapping them for a system you are actually inside is something else. We have put together a worksheet which gives you space to list the actors in your system, mark where each sits on power and influence, and note how aligned they are with the change you are trying to see.
Pick a system you are currently working in. Start with the obvious actors, and then keep going. Once they are on the page, ask what each is responding to, and what would have to shift for a different behaviour to make sense to them.
If something in the worksheet raises a question, or if you want to think through your rich picture with us, write to us at info@centreforsystemspractice.org. We would love to hear what you are working on.
The Centre for Systems Practice is a SELCO Foundation initiative. If this piece was useful, our newsletter goes out every month with one piece of practical thinking from the field.
Comments