For more than a quarter of a century, academics at Hawkesbury Agricultural College have been committed to the development of a public discourse about the nature and scope of the development of rural Australia, and of the sustainability of the role of agriculture within that. In their work they have explicitly privileged systems theories and practices and experiential pedagogies, while embracing the notion of development through participation within an ethos of deliberative democracy. There are lessons to be learned from the (...) Hawkesbury experience with respect to the role of the agora in global transformation writ large. (shrink)