Presently, there is strong evidence to support the position that development strategies focussing on sustainable agriculture, especially low external input cultivation, are rapidly increasing in influence. Investigating the dialectic of the evolution in ideas and practices for sustainable agricultural development is important for an understanding of how and whether this new “shift” will affect poverty and development. Without risky and poorly-understood investments in agrochemical inputs, many poor Cambodian farmers have been able to achieve increased yields over 100% whilst reducing water consumption by employing the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). The promotion of SRI, and its corollary sustainable initiatives, have been hailed as a major success and have seen full integration into national development schemes and international NGO work. Such technology or technique-oriented development programmes often expand into local organising, empowerment and private sector practice. This progression often involves increasingly strict normative prescriptions about how society should be transformed and how this promotes sustainability. Definitions of sustainability, however, tend to be fluid and are thus easily adaptable to new contexts, and easily appropriated to justify various measures. This thesis explores the pathways through which sustainable agricultural programming has transgressed the boundaries of strict ecological sustainability by highlighting the tensions and advantages of the evolving NGO-model of extension, participatory development practice, and socially responsible enterprise. By exploring the agricultural livelihoods of involved Cambodian farmers empirically, and in ethnographic detail, and by analysing the concomitant evolution of organisational discourse and practice, I will show how an initial focus on technical agricultural improvement and poverty-reduction has transformed into grand plans for widespread sustainable enterprise promotion in Cambodia. This has been marked by a shift in accountability that favours a passive, critical mass-based strategy for drawing in previously uninitiated farmers, rather than the grassroots-based micromanagement approach favoured since the inception of rural development programming. I argue that this is symptomatic of the larger convergence of promising sustainable agricultural initiatives upon the reformist, technocentrist and increasingly hegemonic ‘market sustainability’ or ‘developmentalist’ paradigm of sustainable development.