sustainable agriculture research paper

• Research Article
• Open access
• Published: 19 August 2020

Participatory research for sustainable agriculture: the case of the Italian agroecological rice network

• Elena Pagliarino   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6140-3856 1 ,
• Francesca Orlando 2 ,
• Valentina Vaglia 2 ,
• Secondo Rolfo 1 &
• Stefano Bocchi 2  

European Journal of Futures Research volume  8 , Article number:  7 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Since the Green Revolution, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down approach. The degree of autonomy, creativity, and responsibility of farmers has been limited by the continuous external inputs of chemicals, machinery, advice, subsidies and knowledge.

The issue of sustainability has brought complexity and uncertainty to this mainly linear process of innovation, steering agriculture toward alternative models. Agroecology represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and the assets of the farm are greatly valued. Agroecological production relies on the farmers’ direct management of resources and on their active engagement in the agricultural knowledge and innovation system.

This paper focuses on the experience of a group of farmers, scientists, public officials, and managers of private companies who are experimenting with agroecology in rice production in one of the most intensively farmed, profitable and environmentally sensitive areas of Italy. The partnership regularly comes together to discuss agricultural techniques and results, needs, and paths of innovation; in addition, it stimulates and takes part in research projects, following a participatory process based on co-learning and mutual responsibility. By using ethnographic methods such as direct observations and in-depth interviews, our work may contribute to understanding the role of participatory research in sustainable agriculture and what makes for good participation.

Introduction

The traditional model of innovation and its failings.

From the so-called Green Revolution, started in the 1950s, to the current period of innovations based on digital devices, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down transfer of technology. In this pervasive paradigm, technology is developed in the controlled environment of universities and research stations, passed on to agricultural advisors and then to farmers, who consume and apply it ([ 18 ]: 67). Technology is perceived as a commodity delivered to farmers, who have little control over its development and management [ 22 ]. The transferred technologies are uniform, standardized, and mass-produced to work almost everywhere. Standardization is applied not only to physical technologies, such as seeds, pesticides, and machinery, but also to procedures and their sequencing, with the aim of routinizing the activities of farmers, thus promoting predictable and manageable changes in rural areas ([ 18 ]: 71). Some feedback is provided by the extension agents, who turn the problems of the farmers into researchable questions, then answered by research scientists. Nevertheless, the innovation pipeline is mainly linear and one-way [ 82 ].

This system has improved the availability and quality of food per capita, ensuring food security in many areas of the world [ 72 ], and it has been a powerful tool for the diffusion of industrial agriculture [ 81 ].

While this traditional model is still practiced in many areas, its shortcomings have long been acknowledged. The reliance of farmers on suppliers of technologies, capital to buy such technologies and experts’ knowledge to be able to use them has grown, limiting their margins of autonomy and creativity in farming decisions. They have also lost control over essential resources due to the concentration of power in the mechanical, seed, chemical, processing, and distribution industries. With the introduction of advanced techniques, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, precision agriculture, sensors, satellites, and robotics, innovation has become increasingly sophisticated and its development even more disconnected from farmers.

Chambers, Pretty and other practitioners of the “farmer first” discourse [ 16 , 17 , 77 , 78 ] have highlighted the failure of this model in developing countries and resource-poor areas, which are more risk-prone and characterized by more complex and less controllable local conditions than the areas where the technologies and practices were actually developed.

The challenge of sustainability, posed first by the Report of the Club of Rome in 1972 and then by the Brundtland Report in 1987 and the Rio Declaration in 1992, started to be perceived as an issue only at the end of the last century [ 91 ], when it brought complexity to intensive agriculture, practiced in more developed countries. The issue of sustainability has brought to the fore the concepts of risk and uncertainty also in European agriculture. Risk and uncertainty are critical matters in agriculture and, therefore, their impact on both learning and practice needs to be taken into account. Dealing with environmental risks and developing innovations to address these risks require more inclusive ways of knowing and doing, as noted by Pimbert ([ 75 ]: 22), who stated that “more inclusive ways of knowing are required to bring together the partial and incomplete perspectives of different actors faced with uncertainty, diversity and change”. This is the reason why the participatory research approach has been incorporated into European agricultural research, increasingly oriented toward the challenge of sustainability, albeit lagging behind other sectors (for example, ecosystem management, which started soon after the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, in 1992).

Criticism of the mechanistic process of innovation has extended to all farming systems, while a broad consensus has emerged on the links between conventional agriculture and its top–down innovation, on the one hand, and the environmental crisis, on the other hand.

The agroecological paradigm based on participation

Agroecology has been proposed as a radical alternative to the Green Revolution [ 1 , 2 , 38 , 87 , 94 ]. It represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and great value is attached to the internal resources of the farm and the territory. A systemic ecological approach is adopted in order to understand the relations between living organisms and their environment. This fosters the processes that move the agroecosystem closer to a natural, mature, relatively stable, and self-sustaining ecosystem, able to maintain productivity without external inputs [ 37 ].

Our work does not explore the issue of agroecology seen as a social movement but focuses exclusively on agroecology as a system of knowledge and innovation. In this meaning, agroecological production relies on the farmers’ direct management of resources and on their engagement in the governance of the agricultural knowledge and innovation system. Proponents of agroecology as an alternative development model argue that its potential can only be realized through participatory research and extension [ 16 , 83 , 84 , 94 , 96 ]. Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle-Collado [ 22 ] define agroecology as “the practice of science with people” and stress that participation is at the core of any single process. Agroecology implies the promotion of practices that (i) fit the local contexts in which they are implemented, (ii) foster the autonomy and skills of the communities involved (as is the case with the participatory research network discussed in our case study, whose learning and empowerment processes are presented in Section 3.2), (iii) profit from locally-produced resources, included local opinions regarding sustainability ( Ibidem ).

A young male farmer of our network explains: “It is a question of development model. So, if we choose a development model that favors indistinct, undifferentiated production—a commodity, as it is called—this leads to cost increases. The progressive increase in costs combines with stagnation in terms of value generated by the production. To deal with decreasing revenues, one must increase the surface area. This model breaks up the farming community because the land is a finite good. If ten farmers work this land today but the model forces me to expand, some farms will grow but some others will inevitably disappear. This is entrepreneurial desertification in farming. Conversely, the organic agriculture model restores the intrinsic value of what it produces because it qualifies it and, mind you, it is not a matter of profiting excessively, of setting prices that consumers can’t afford, the question is how to redistribute wealth along the production chain. Thanks to the organic system, I do this work and contribute to increasing the biodiversity of the local farming businesses.”

Agroecological research requires local-scale and action-oriented solutions to deal with technical and ecological aspects, as well as economic and sociocultural dimensions, adopting a holistic perspective on agricultural management. The research approach needs to integrate scientific and empirical knowledge throughout the process, achieving the co-production of new cross-cultural innovation [ 15 , 36 , 73 ].

A university professor of the network explains: “In traditional agronomic research, we are limited to comparing fertilizers and antiparasitic agents. We decontextualize, we only look at parcels, we compare in increasing doses, we add a witness, we add replications, we use well-documented and refined statistics, we publish, and then we entrust the best technique to the extension service. The best result obtained on the parcel must necessarily also be the best result on the farm. In case of failure, we put the blame on the farmer. This is the game. Impact is not assessed, indirect effects are not considered, especially on a territorial scale. But wasn’t agronomy born along with agriculture? Agronomy is life, creativity, the daily toil of those who work the land, it is not exclusively science. The real challenge lies in complexity. But all the actors have to be involved. It might seem like a longer path, but it is actually much shorter. It is the theory of interconnections, of evolution not based on competition but rather on cooperation.”

A male farmer says: “Farmers are researchers by nature, but with a great limitation: they don’t bother taking notes. They are not interested in writing, so they don’t bother publishing the discoveries coming from their ability to adapt during agronomy activities. In the network, instead, we had to do this. We had to take notes and then discuss them with the others, even the professors, on an equal footing.”

The European Commission has explicitly encouraged the transition to sustainable farming through interactive innovation and multi-actor approaches since 2012 [ 28 ], when the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) and its Operational Groups were launched within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Multi-actor projects and bottom-up thematic networks were also designed within the Horizon 2020 research and development (R&D) framework program. The common principle was to bring together innovation actors: farmers, advisers, researchers, businesses, NGOs, and others. The collaboration among them was supposed to make the best use of complementary types of knowledge, so as to achieve the co-creation and diffusion of solutions and opportunities that would be readily implementable in practice.

In Italy, the Ministry of Agricultural Policies [ 62 ] expressed its intention to support participatory and multi-actor projects in Action 10 of the National Strategic Plan for the Development of the Organic System, emphasising the importance of knowledge sharing, co-research and co-innovation through the involvement of various stakeholders, starting from the initial phases of research. In the call for R&D projects in organic agriculture at the end of 2018, these goals were actively pursued by requiring researchers who wished to receive financial support to include at least one farmer among their research partners and by rewarding those researchers who involved more than one farmer (Ministerial Decree no. 67374/2018).

Participatory networks have multiplied in recent years, activated as part of projects, on the basis of public co-financing. Their diffusion is strengthened by the supporting environment, that is, by the facilitation, coordination, and training processes implemented [ 34 ]. Yet, facilitating dialogue between researchers and farmers is still a priority, which will be pursued in European agricultural policy after 2020 [ 26 ].

Mansuri and Rao [ 55 ] warn that “induced” participation—that is, participation promoted through bureaucratically managed research and development interventions—requires a fundamentally different approach, one that is long-term, context sensitive, and committed to developing a culture of learning by doing. This is why it is particularly interesting to study the experience of a spontaneous, self-directed, and fairly informal, yet highly functional network that seems to be a unique case in the Italian agricultural sector.

What is true participation?

The term “participatory research” is used to refer to various approaches and methods, and it encompasses different types of participation. A systematic review of thirty-five experiences of participatory processes, with the involvement of farmers, concluded that farmers are too often considered a mere source of information to be used by researchers rather than active participants in the management and transformation of rural areas [ 57 ].

As for participatory methods, many authors stress the importance of research mechanisms and designs to bring together scientific and practical knowledge [ 22 , 35 , 50 , 56 , 65 , 99 ]. Successful participatory research, it is argued, can be achieved through a structured dialogue in which the dialectical process is encouraged by regular meetings, joint reflection, and the collective development of findings and conclusions. Nevertheless, the review by Menconi et al. [ 57 ] shows that there is no preferred scheme: every initiative has its own methods and practices and is tailor-made on the researchers’ preferences, resources, context, and project. However, simplicity of approach seems to be the best quality of any participatory activity ( Ibidem ).

As for the attitude and behavior of researchers regarding participation, the literature indicates a widespread lack of awareness, interest, time, incentives, and recognition by the current research system (e.g., [ 13 , 25 , 70 ]). Agricultural scientists have been put under growing pressure to undertake participatory research, but they do not have sufficient practice, skills, and competencies ( Ibidem ). Several authors have suggested blending various forms and intensities of stakeholders’ participation with formal agricultural research (e.g., [ 52 ]), “uniting science and participation” [ 76 ], into “compromised participation” [ 12 ], making things even more difficult in terms of designing, implementing, and monitoring participatory research.

Finally, in addition to the discussion around what participation is, some authors have questioned its very value, raising the issues of inclusion, power, and governance of participation [ 20 , 43 , 44 , 55 , 63 ].

Despite continuous attention paid to the topic, there is no consensus as to what participation means, how widespread it is, whether it is a sufficient goal in sustainable agriculture, and the extent to which it is actually inclusive.

Here, the experience of an Italian network for participatory research in agroecological rice production is presented with the aim to contribute to such ongoing debate. This paper focuses on the role of participatory research in the transition to sustainable agriculture, trying to shed light on if and why it is needed and what makes for good participation.

Study context: the difficult conversion to organic farming of the rice district in Northern Italy

Italy is the leading European producer of rice [ 31 ]. The crop is grown mainly in Northern Italy, mostly in the regions of Piedmont and Lombardy, where a rich, well-organized, and interconnected district comprises farms, processing and distribution businesses, research centers and extension services, and suppliers of chemicals, seeds, and machinery [ 14 ].

The cultivation is typically intensive monoculture, without crop rotation and with heavy chemical inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides. The impact of rice growing on the environment tends to be considered very high, especially in terms of quality of soil and surface and ground water, with risks to human health posed by drinking contaminated water [ 45 ]. The transition to organic rice farming is perceived as a solution to ensure environmental protection, economic sustainability of the farms, consumer safety, and as a measure to mitigate climate change [ 41 , 80 ].

In Italy, organic farming is regarded as the most advanced and efficient way to develop an agroecological approach [ 68 ], and the discipline of agroecology finds concrete application in organic production, regardless of whether it is certified and remunerated on the market [ 98 ]. Hence, in the remainder of this study, the concepts of agroecology and organic farming will be used interchangeably.

The principles and approaches that should be adopted to manage organic farming systems are shown in European Commission (EC) Regulation 848/2018 (art. 6 and Annex II) [ 29 ]: limiting the use of non-renewable resources and external inputs, prohibiting the use of any product for weeding purposes, also of natural origin, and minimizing the use of organic fertilizers and pesticides, through measures to enhance soil life and its natural fertility (i.e., nourishing plants primarily through the soil ecosystem) and to prevent damage by pests and weeds, choosing appropriate resistant genotypes and crop rotation, and mechanical or physical methods. Therefore, the principles and approaches underlying organic agriculture are in line with the agroecological view of farming systems, although agroecology involves a wider approach, not limited to agronomic aspects, that overcomes any labels and certification systems. Agroecology aims not only to realize low-input farming systems, based on the exploitation of natural processes, but it also focuses on social–economical aspects, such as those related to human value, knowledge sharing, and equality in power distribution among the actors of the food supply chain. It is also true that, besides their principles, the regulations for organic agriculture allow the use of external products (EC Regulation 889/2008 [ 27 ]), which should be useful during the first period of transition to achieve a balance within the agroecosystem. However, in the real life of farms, this is often interpreted in a misleading way, and organic farming could follow the “input substitution approach” by replacing inputs permitted in conventional farming with others permitted in organic farming, which are not always very eco-friendly [ 51 , 60 , 61 ], without changing the underlying crop management approach.

Nevertheless, in our case study, organic agriculture is the basis upon which agroecological systems are generated. The organic rice farmers involved in the network are also agroecological farmers. They follow agroecological principles in relation to both (i) agronomic aspects (i.e., soil fertilization based on leguminous species and crop rotation, plant protection based on resistant genotypes, and the management of field flooding, innovative strategies for weeding without herbicides, as explained in [ 69 ]) and (ii) social aspects (i.e., group experience of knowledge sharing and mutual learning).

With the elimination of chemicals, the production of rice must be pursued through a complex process of varieties selection, crop rotation, and agronomic techniques to enhance soil and water resources and control weeds and pathogens, while also respecting the specificities of the territory. This work requires sophisticated know-how, experience, and skills that the Italian rice growers have long lost because they have been completely dependent on technology suppliers. The traditional research and advisory system is committed to ecological intensification but, due to the lack of specific funding dedicated to organic production, it has carried out few experiments on organic rice farming, mainly at the research station level [ 85 ]. The high costs of the innovative technologies developed, (e.g., mulch films and transplanting techniques, and the extreme variability of cropping systems)—depending on pedo-climatic conditions, field characteristics, and the business organization of farms—have prevented the dissemination of innovations beyond few farms. The spread of organic methods has taken place rather slowly, and organic rice production has remained niche, pursued only by a handful of pioneer farmers who, in the absence of prior knowledge, test innovative practices with a self-help and trial-and-error approach, as in Padel [ 71 ]. Organic rice cultivation was first adopted by farmers whose approach was seen as an “alternative” by the local agricultural community, i.e., biodynamic, macrobiotic, radical farmers motivated by strong environmental commitment, especially women. These farmers were initially treated with skepticism by their colleagues (as reported by [ 69 ]), sometimes even with suspicion and derision. However, their innovations were then taken up by a few pioneer farmers whose opinions are influential within the rice community, so that skepticism has now decreased, but it has not disappeared completely. This information derives from personal experiences reported by the farmers of the network. A female farmer of the network, for instance, explains that: “When the locals saw me do this work [Authors’ Note: manual work to avoid the use of herbicides], under the sun, with mosquitos all around… they thought me odd, they said: ‘that one has no brain’. That was another problem I had to deal with, being seen as a bit of an outsider. (…) It was very difficult. I struggled for many years. (…) I was heavily criticized because they saw that my business was earning much less than conventional farms—at the time, conventional farms were making good money—but I didn’t want to maximize profit, I wanted to maximize my personal expectations...”

In this context of difficult transition to organic farming, the multi-actor agroecological network analyzed here is carrying out participatory research and innovation to enhance organic methods. Exploring the values, motivations, processes, and relations of this Italian agroecological rice network is useful to understand if and how experiences of participatory research can change the trajectory of development in areas of intensive agriculture.

Our research explored the role and mechanisms of a participatory research network for the conversion to organic agriculture. We identified the following research goals:

To investigate learning processes and enabling environments;

To identify limits and opportunities of participatory research networks.

The questions that guided this study include:

Why did the farmers, researchers, and other actors join the participatory research network?

What and how do they learn within the participatory network?

Which are the limits and opportunities for the future of the network?

Methodology

This article draws on fieldwork investigating the partnership created by a group of farmers, scientists, government officials, and business managers in Northern Italy, between Lombardy and Piedmont, to research agroecological rice farming.

We integrate case study research and grounded theory, as in Andrade [ 4 ], choosing an interpretive approach [ 33 , 42 , 79 , 90 ]. We use qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews and participant observations, constantly acknowledging the pedagogical model provided by Tracy [ 92 ] for quality issues. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted, from January to November 2018, with the members of the network, using a biographical approach [ 66 , 89 ]. The interviews started by asking the respondents to tell their stories. They were invited to reflect on the origin and evolution of their professional experience, the moments of change and the time when they joined the network. They were also asked to say why they decided to participate in the network and to evaluate the consequences on their work and their expectations for the future. Spontaneous discussion, listening, and empathy were privileged throughout the process. The interviews were noted down, audio and video recorded with the interviewees’ permission, and later transcribed.

The functioning of the network and the relations among its members were directly observed during the partnership’s meetings, from September 2017 to December 2018. It was also possible to be involved in the informal exchange of messages among the participants via social networks and email.

Midgley [ 59 ] says that supporting evidence is often based on single case studies of intervention, and Meyer [ 54 ] points out the need to consider what is unique in each intervention. Our case study describes a small network of 28 people featuring farmers, researchers, and other actors. Other European networks have the same small number of participants, around thirty [ 40 ]. Therefore, the number of in-depth interviews (20), covering 70% of the network participants and integrated with the results of the observations made directly by the researchers during the network meetings over 16 months, appears reasonable and justifiable.

Objectives, methodologies, results, drivers of change, values, and visions were analyzed using grounded theory to develop an understanding of the processes of participation, assumption of responsibility, learning, and innovation. Grounded theory, in its latest evolution (e.g., [ 19 , 21 ]), is an interpretive method used to systematically analyze texts, such as interview transcripts and observation notes, in order to build theory concepts. This is done by reading the texts with specific questions in mind, extracting themes, and coding passages with keywords and quotes.

The narrative approach is used extensively in participatory social science, i.e., education, psychology, youth and childhood studies, geography, and land management science (for example, [ 86 ]). We found few applications in rural studies. In Phillips and Dickie [ 74 ], the narrative approach has been adopted to explore the rural future associated with climate change. Boxelaar et al. [ 10 ] explored how narrative approach can facilitate change in land management, demonstrating that this approach highlighted some of the ambiguities that existed within the project, but it did very little to change the course of the project. Kajamaa [ 47 ] shows that the narrative approach is appropriate to enrich participatory research when used in a complementary way to other ethnographic methods, such as in our case.

With the aim to explore which elements of the participatory research network support the transition to organic farming, the material was organized to fit into these categories:

Objectives, structure and functioning of the network;

Processes in the network;

Values shared;

Relations, power, and inclusion.

Results and discussion

The riso bio vero network.

The Riso Bio Vero (RBV) network brings together several organic rice farmers from the heart of the Italian rice district (provinces of Pavia, Vercelli, and Novara), as well as from outside this area. Scientists, public officials, and the managers of a company distributing organic products have also joined the network. The agricultural component of the group is not very representative of Italian farmers. According to the latest census of agriculture [ 46 ], in Italy, 30.7% of farmers are women, 2.5% are under 40, 6.2% are graduates, and only 0.8% have a degree in agriculture. In Europe [ 30 ], the first three figures are respectively: 28%, 11%, and 7.5%. In the RBV network, instead, women, young people, and graduates are well represented (respectively, 7 out of 17, 3 out of 17, and all) (Table 1 ).

The most recent data on the structure of European agriculture [ 30 ] suggest that, on average, 28% of farms across the EU are managed by women, with considerable differences among countries. In Lithuania and Latvia, nearly half of all the farms are managed by women; by contrast, in Finland, Malta, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the proportion of female farm managers does not exceed 10%. Many studies demonstrate that participatory and agroecological approaches can be gender-sensitive, i.e., able to address the issues of gender inequality and inclusion (see for example, [ 39 , 67 ]).

Only 11% of all farm holdings in the European Union (EU) are run by farmers under 40 (6.9% by farmers younger than 35 and just 4.9% by women under the age of 35) [ 30 ], and persuading more young people to begin farming is a major challenge [ 5 ]. The EU is encouraging young people to take up farming with start-up grants, income support, and benefits, such as additional training ( Ibidem ). Flament and Macias [ 32 ] highlight that a growing number of urban youths, often with a university degree, are deciding to become farmers. Described as “new peasants”, many of them choose agroecology as an alternative way to enter the food system, promoting both social and environmental sustainability. The idea of young farmers being “innovative” and turning away from traditionally intensive industrial farming models was already promoted by de Rooij in 2004 [ 23 ].

On average, only 7.5% of the current generation of European farmers have received full agricultural training, and 73.5% only have practical agricultural skills, coming from professional experience. Among farm managers, educational attainment is lower among women than men (5% versus 10% for full agricultural training and 79% versus 68% for only practical training) [ 30 ].

The RBV network was established in 2016 thanks to the coming together of a group of people who, despite knowing one another, until then had only occasionally collaborated. The intensification of their relations was linked to the opportunity, offered by the University of Milan, to organize the second international conference on Organic Rice Production (ORP 2) in Milan, on the occasion of EXPO 2015, the Universal Exposition hosted by Italy and focusing on food and agriculture. The conference was very successful; teamwork was stimulating; and the goal of continuing to work more steadily together was reinforced. The people who took part in the organization of the conference felt that they had a common vision of their work and that together they could defend and enhance their activities, even against the harsh attacks suffered by the sector. At the end of 2014, in fact, a television reportage ( Report on the national TV channel Rai3) had revealed the phenomenon of “falsi bio” (false organic producers), triggering a crisis that affected the entire rice industry, both organic and conventional, and still persists. Attacks on the image of organic rice farming played a crucial role in the decision to establish the group called “Riso Bio Vero” (True Organic Rice) to affirm the integrity of a portion of organic rice growers and their firm condemnation of fake organic producers.

A young farmer of the network explains the “false bio” phenomenon in Italy by saying:

“We are 100% organic, which is a very important choice to give the business credibility. In 2014, I was among those who fought the hardest against the issue of fake organic rice. When I started the conversion, I saw that some of my competitors basically produced in the traditional way, but then all their papers were in order to obtain the certification. This is damaging to honest organic producers, consumers, as well as to conventional producers, who choose to follow the rules and don’t give in to the golden opportunity of making easy money. Unfair competition swallows up other businesses. Both conventional and organic farmers are wiped out by those who do not comply with the rules. In 2014, together with other farmers, I decided to expose this unacceptable situation. We did it, for example, by collaborating with Report (there were many other initiatives, but Report achieved the greatest visibility). We were involved in writing the episode of the program about this issue, which became a sort of turning point in Italy’s organic rice production and, to an extent, in the organic production of other sectors too. Before that, there were thousands of hectares of organic rice cultivation that were actually farmed in the conventional way. There was no crop rotation, the embankments had no vegetation—and I have never seen land remaining bare without undergoing treatment. Since Report , the history of organic farming has changed. From then on, there has been much more attention from the institutions, from politics, born of our denunciation, of our raising awareness and rebelling, of our will to redeem the sector, especially on the part of young farmers who can’t tolerate living in such a… how can I put this… such an unfair world.”

The group’s original core included ten organic rice farmers (four from Lombardy, five from Piedmont and one from Tuscany), a professor from the University of Milan, an official from the Lombardy Region, and a representative of a company distributing organic products. Afterwards, a retired official of the Piedmont Region and a professor from the University of Pavia also joined. Both academics made available to the network their research groups, made up of technicians and young researchers.

Thanks to the participation of the University of Milan in the Riso-Biosystems national project (2017-2019), two scientists from two different public research institutions joined the network too. Furthermore, the research activity became a specific work package of the project. Although it would be very interesting to analyze the relationships between the RBV network and the rest of the partnership and the level of integration achieved, such a topic is not the subject of this study.

Subsequently, some organic rice growers became members of the network either permanently (two farmers from Piedmont) or occasionally (farmers from Veneto).

The group was founded with the aim to demonstrate that organic rice can be produced in a serious way, without circumventing the limits imposed by European regulations, which forbid the use of chemicals. The group of pioneer farmers have come together to promote their common interests, i.e., demonstrating the methods and best practices at the basis of professional organic rice production. They are all officially certified organic farmers. However, their views go beyond any labels, because they believe in the agroecological approach, which regards the farm as a living system that interacts with the environment and the socio-political structure of the territory. For these reasons, they do not consider organic farming a mere sustainable alternative to conventional farming and aim to avoid products that are permitted by organic farming regulations but not environmentally friendly. They have also focused on exposing the strategies of fake organic rice producers, which circumvent the limits imposed by the European regulations forbidding the use of chemicals. Indeed, the rice sector is particular prone to fraud since, differently from other productions, organic and conventional farms share the same irrigation system, based on a network of watercourses and channels that cross the valley of the river Po. Therefore, the auditing authorities cannot deem traces of banned chemicals in rice plants to be objective proof of forbidden treatments, since it is impossible to exclude accidental contamination through the sharing of irrigation water. Furthermore, the lack of chemical residues on the rice grain, despite repeated spraying of the plant, which is a good point for consumers, prevents the distinction between the production obtained with the organic method and that obtained with the conventional method, making organic cultivation susceptible to fraud.

Around this goal, the group began to collaborate by sharing previous knowledge and experiences. The partnership gathered latent discontent toward conventional rice cultivation and bitter frustration toward false organic farmers, channeling them into a participatory research system that would allow experimentation and innovation in agroecological rice cultivation.

Network’s role, activities, and structure

Participation in the group allows its members to share know-how and improve individual techniques, quickly adopting and adapting innovations successfully tested by others and, above all, starting a new research process “from below”. The exchange of individual experiences is very important for the site specificity of organic practices. Due to extreme variability in microclimate and soil conditions, as well as in farmers’ resources, capacities and organization, a good technique for one farm may not be feasible or suitable for another. Testing different techniques at the same time within a single context, as seen in parcel experimentation both at the farm and research station level, does not provide useful results in organic farming [ 8 , 48 , 88 ]. Vice versa, the application of the same technique to many different farms allows the growers to produce new insights and learn from one another. The first approach assumes a certain level of uniformity of cropping conditions across different farms. It transfers the results obtained from experimental trials, implying convergence of innovation through a standardized pattern of techniques, valid for different places and different times (the “funnel” scheme). Unfortunately, organic fields are unpredictably diverse, due to the reduction of external inputs that minimize possible sources of variability. Farmer-led trials reveal the constraints and benefits of different techniques by applying them to a wide range of field conditions and farm contexts and then selecting and adapting those that best respond to the specific characteristics of each farm (“folding fan” scheme). Bell and Bellon [ 6 ] explain the difference between the two approaches in terms of universalization versus generalization. The active involvement of the farmers in the research process makes it possible to experiment and adapt the same techniques to different farms, to achieve the quick and efficient generalization of best practices. Because of the extreme variability of environmental conditions among organic farms, even those where the same species are grown, the rapid dissemination of innovative results would not be feasible if the farmers were not involved—that is, if it were not supported by those who spend most of their time in the fields, carefully observing nature and its interactions with their own work, supervising the experiments and verifying their results year after year.

“Results come from individual experience, but experience comes from the exchanges among the farmers, who experiment with different techniques, each on their own land, each with their entrepreneurial approach. The mixing, discussion and reflection with the researchers and officials brings about improvements in the sector. Everyone has given and received much—this is the true strength of a network. We have become a network because we have done a lot of sharing, guided by mutual trust.” (Female farmer)

The activity of the network has allowed its members to improve existing agronomic techniques, increase and stabilize yields, and make actual discoveries, such as those regarding the allelopathic function of some species used as cover crop.

The research process is complemented by mutual assistance in the choice of machinery and suppliers, as well as in the management of the business, marketing strategies, information on regulations, and funding opportunities.

At first, discussion and collaboration among the members of the network concentrated on agronomic practices, the performance and constraints of little known agro-techniques, and issues of business administration and marketing. Then, the focus widened to include questions not strictly related to farming, e.g., measures to improve the transparency and integrity of the supply chain (critical issues and opportunities regarding both the improvement of the traditional organic certification system and alternative participative certification systems), practices to enhance plant biodiversity in the paddy fields, etc.

The governance of the network is very simple. A rice grower acts as leader of the farmer members, while a research fellow from the University of Milan serves as a bridge to the academic component and animates the entire network by taking care of overall communication. The group meets periodically, about once a month, preferably at the home of the farmers’ leader. The meetings last a whole day and include a shared lunch, for which everyone brings something that they have cooked. Regular attendance is supported by sharing meals and by common participation in other activities (e.g., training visits, trade fairs). The fact that all the participants invest a great deal of time in the network meetings and activities is not seen as a limit, but as a strength of the network.

The agenda of the meetings is set and shared by email. The researchers and farmers’ leader facilitate the discussion, which flows quite spontaneously, and use a projector to present data, results and videos, but no particular participatory method or approach is deliberately used. Sometimes, visits to one or more farms follow the discussion and help to verify the progress of the experiments undertaken directly in the field.

Outreach initiatives are carried out together with the research activity, including scientific publications authored by all the members of the network, seminars and conferences (i.e., ORP3 in Brazil in 2018 and a national conference open to all the actors of the supply chain, including the media, in Milan in 2019). The network is also preparing a manual for the identification of weeds in the paddy fields, a summary document on yields in organic rice cultivation and self-checking guidelines for the certification system.

Research process

The research process is managed through four cyclically repeating phases:

A phase of discussion concerning the issues detected in daily practice and possible experiments to investigate them.

A phase of experimentation conducted by the rice growers on their own farms but monitored by the farmers’ leader and the research fellow, who periodically visit the farmers and assist them with their technical needs, both directly in the fields and from a distance via social networks and email. At times, neighboring farmers also take part in the visits, to see the fields and give suggestions.

A collective phase of gathering, sharing, analyzing, and interpreting the results.

A phase of adoption of innovations at the farm level and identification of further critical issues.

Without knowing it, the growers are using the cycle learning process proposed by Kolb in his theory on experiential learning [ 49 ], in which concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation follow one another. Such an approach does not involve specific planning or the use of facilitating tools; rather, it centers around a reflexive, flexible, and iterative process. The action–reflection cycle helps establish a body of knowledge that is constructed and refined by the participants and represents a synthesis of the different skills brought to the partnership. A good example of this process is the research activity on plant biodiversity. During a conference, a farmer came into contact with some academics from the University of Pavia who were talking about a typical indigenous species found in the paddy fields ( Marsilea quadrifolia L.), which had been declared endangered due to massive herbicide use [ 11 ]. The farmer recognized the plant from having seen it in her fields and invited the incredulous scientists to visit her farm. The discovery triggered a research project, carried out on the land of all the farmers in the network and in the university lab, to verify the relationship between agronomic practices and plant biodiversity and enhance the ecological function of the paddy fields. It also offered the opportunity to design the brand “Marsilea rice”, to be used on the market to strengthen the identity of the group in opposition to false organic farmers. This example clearly shows how flexible the network is in its activities and scope, effectively combining a wide range of disciplines.

The members of the network are all at the same level and participate in the research and innovation process without a hierarchical approach. The academics provide their knowledge and stimulate the adoption of scientific procedures, but they are open to new forms of learning from cross-cultural exchange. They emphasize that their involvement in the network is driven by genuine interest in participatory research, curiosity about its functioning and fun and excitement in experimenting alternative forms of doing research. They admit that this research approach is not successful in terms of publications.

“Now I want to test this new approach, understand if it works, where it doesn’t work, why it works, with the clear and critical thinking of a researcher, without taking for granted that it will be a successful process. For instance, in terms of publications, it isn’t, but it is undoubtedly more interesting, fun, and exciting.” (Professor, male)

The scientists have backgrounds in agronomy, natural sciences, agricultural economy, and rural sociology, but they lack specific skills in participatory methodology. They share a commitment to participatory research that prioritizes respect, trust, and openness to experience, and their attitude is fundamental to ensure good relationships with the farmers and the other actors in the network. The researchers take the farmers’ skills very seriously to prioritize research aims and develop and validate agronomic practices. This trust is perceived by the farmers and reciprocated. Indeed, regular and direct contact between the researchers and the farmers allows them to strengthen the feeling of mutual trust that they have built.

The fact that a company distributing organic products has been present since the establishment of the network has meant that many of the farmers involved have signed a supply contract with this company. The agreement requires compliance with a set of strict cultivation guidelines deemed to be even more stringent than that required by the European organic certification regulations.

A female farmer explains: “It is an unbelievably strict contract. When you sign it, you accept being under constant monitoring, with two checks, one during the growth phase, when a rice sample is taken and analyzed, and another before the harvest—two multi-residual analyses—and then constant technical inspections. There is also a sort of protocol involving green manure or harrowing, so using cover crops or rotary tillers, but no support whatsoever.”

According to the producers, this seriousness is a guarantee for their image and is well remunerated by their buyers. So far, this economic relationship among many members of the network has not been considered an obstacle to the group’s research and innovation goals.

The network’s research activities have been funded through public and private tenders (e.g., bank foundations), and some members have supported them with their own funds. Although this is an example of bottom–up research funding, the extemporaneous and unorganized nature of such support prevents any assessment of this aspect.

Furthermore, the members have not yet taken into consideration issues of research ethics, such as confidentiality, property of innovations, and conflicts of interest.

Shared values

When the members of the network describe the values that they share, they mention a wide variety of topics, such as environmental commitment, responsible business ethics, economic rationality, aesthetics, and enhanced satisfaction in doing their job. Some common principles recur in the narratives collected through the interviews:

The members of the group are engaged in organic rice cultivation because they pursue not only economic profit, but also the protection of the environment in which they work and live, for themselves and for others.

“The radical decision of going organic, which I made a few years ago, was motivated, above all, by the situation of the market, which no longer offered any guarantee of profit or sustainability from any point of view. In my opinion, organic farming went instead in the direction of sustainability and business growth oriented toward the future. It means meeting the needs of aware consumers, producing a series of positive externalities besides the mere production of foodstuff. To me, being an organic rice producer today means being a business that yields a better type of food in many regards, provides a healthy environment, and is attentive to resources, which are not my private resources but common goods for the whole community, such as water and soil. Making this choice provides positive answers to all of these issues. This is what doing organic farming means.” (Young male farmer)

They believe that farmers must take responsibility for the environmental impact of agriculture.

They honor this commitment with courage.

They include ethics among the most important values of their activity.

“Climate change has forced us to face our responsibilities. Science is not neutral; it is not aseptic. Passion, ethics, values, ideals, and vision must be part of research. In organic farming, this is a viable path. It is not just a utopia; it is technically feasible too.” (Professor, male)

They believe that in organic farming, they can express their creativity, professionalism, and values, which were frustrated in conventional agriculture.

“Doing organic farming means doing varied and creative work. This is what organic farming requires. The seasons change every year and there is no fixed date for sowing, no fixed protocol, it changes from land to land. So, you need a lot of focus and a creative mind. Agriculture of this sort relies on everyone’s collaboration, intelligence and creativity. And everyone is important.” (Female farmer)

“The biggest difference between conventional farmers and organic farmers is that organic farmers feel peace of mind, they know that they’re doing the right thing. This is the underlying reason, they know that they are working at their best, that their cultivation methods are superior in quality, without compromises, and that there is no one to tell them what they should do, to give them chemicals. They know that they are working healthy fields, not sick fields constantly in need of chemicals for this and that.” (Female farmer)

Basing their work largely on their own abilities and resources, they feel more responsible, autonomous and free of constraints than when they used conventional methods and were highly dependent on external inputs.

“I decided to work the land with my own hands because I have always liked nature. As a child, I went to the countryside and I spent entire days observing the colors, the light, the shapes of nature. Being able to do a job that would bring me back to a place that was natural to me was the right choice. Obviously, it is not all bucolic and effortless. You are faced with all the problems of a much more difficult type of agriculture that puts you in direct correlation with nature, makes you use your brain. No technician comes along to tell you what to do. There are no technicians in organic rice farming. It’s all up to us. So, this also makes you more perceptive.” (Female farmer)

They believe that organic farming is a means of reducing costs and earning the right income for a decent life. When they practiced conventional cropping, most of their revenues were used to pay consultants and suppliers, and the margins to live with dignity were limited.

“I hope I’ll have a proud future, not a meagre one, not only in economic terms, but also from the point of view of the dignity of my work, which has something to give to everyone. I want to keep doing this with my head held high and I want those who will come after me to be able to do the same, with the same pride, the same determination, the same will to do it well.” (Young male farmer)

They find satisfaction working in contact with the land and aesthetic pleasure in the observation of nature: They believe that organic farming is the only way to preserve the beauty of nature and live in harmony with it.

“This is the land I got from my ancestors, my father and grandfather. I am proud to own it and I have always felt the responsibility of owning this land. The choice of going organic developed over many years, out of the awareness that we belong to nature and, as nature’s children, we are called upon to practice farming that respects nature, that loves it.” (Female farmer)

Their mission is to prove that organic rice cultivation can be carried out seriously and transparently.

They express their opinions and values with a very high level of emotional engagement. “Years ago, if I had had to imagine what my future business and my profession would be like, I would have never imagined, never even dreamed, that I could reach such a high level of satisfaction, creation of common work, collaboration with other farmers, with universities, with the Ministry. Not in my wildest dreams. I am so very happy.” (Female farmer)

In the network, they have created a physical, epistemic, and emotional space in which they meet and engage in shared knowledge production, free of power relations.

A young male farmer says: “During our meetings, it happens that at the start I have an opinion and, by the end, I have changed my mind completely. For someone like me, that is pretty strange. It’s not easy for me to admit that my ideas were not so good after all. This is what happens in our group. The discussions and sharing all together, each with their own opinions, allow us to come up with new, better ideas. This is possible since all points of view are equally important and no one is judged because of what they say.”

A female farmer adds: “We didn’t keep anything to ourselves, if one of us found out how to do something, they would tell the others: look, this is how you can do it. (…) I don’t necessarily say the right things. Someone else might see things differently and have the right intuition for that situation. Then, when all’s said and done, I will also agree that what that person said was right…”

Speaking about the professor who is a member of the network, another female farmer says: “He was very smart, he said: I have nothing to teach you from a technical point of view. It is you who should teach me. You know all the methods. We got on well with him, because he’s an intelligent person, he gets things right away. That’s how this participated research came about. He had twelve serious businesses to collaborate with.”

In such a space, practices and emotions are both valued and legitimated. Many of the members of the group state that they have become friends and that this has allowed them to overcome the sense of loneliness widespread among organic rice farmers, which continues to be one of the main motivations for participating in the activities of the group.

A female farmer says: “We’ve also become friends, because we have met very often, we have shared many things. We spend whole days together, so we socialize, we share our problems, the nice moments, our emotions too, like the storks on the electricity poles, the frogs hopping all around, some strange bird we saw for the first time, the selfies… (…) In my opinion, this is another step in participatory research. It counts too. It has been a big help because we don’t feel lonely… Otherwise, you know, they tell you you’re odd, you’re a fool, why should you bother when you can just spray something, since no one checks anyway… so you start feeling isolated, very much so. I think it is greatly appreciated and it is the right way forward.”

Emotions emerge as an important factor in the innovative learning process of the network, as described in Lund and Chemi [ 53 ] and Bellocchi et al. [ 7 ].

The fact that agronomic science and agricultural practice are very close has fostered their mutual understanding. They speak a common language, but what has truly brought them together is the sharing of a common mission, vision, and responsibility.

The peculiarity of the RBV network is that it is made up of people that have different degrees of authority and knowledge, and yet come together. Power differences (which inevitably exist between farmers, government officials, academics, etc.) are overcome and, although the more charismatic people act as leaders, the network is not hierarchical, since each member has put a collective goal (i.e., the research objectives) before their professional aims (i.e., profit, publications, etc.). This entails more relaxed interactions, as the spirit of collaboration seems to reduce the dynamics of power normally expressed in a competitive environment.

A young female researcher says: “I used to work in another university and I was very frustrated. The way of doing research was oriented toward competition and I didn’t like that, but I saw no alternative. That was how the system worked and I was a newcomer, I counted for nothing. Then, one day, I was at a congress, sitting next to the professor who was my thesis advisor. A colleague from our group was presenting some results, which came largely from my field work. I had worked so hard for my PhD. And this colleague was showing an article, bearing the names of all the people in the workgroup, except mine. I looked again, I thought I had to be wrong. I turned toward my professor and he said: ‘See how nasty we can be?’. I wanted to cry. But that moment made me understand that I had to change. I came here and I started working on this project, together with the farmers. I might never have a university career, but this work gives me satisfaction. I spend time in the fields with the farmers and I learn a great deal from them. We have published in international journals and we have put the names of all the farmers involved, specifically to acknowledge their contribution.”

Future of the network

The network defines itself as open and inclusive, but it has not established rules for the admission of new members, and applications to join made by other producers are assessed very carefully by the member farmers. The key requirement is to adhere to the principles of seriousness that characterize the network and, until now, this has been assessed through direct knowledge of the rice growers and their fields. During the process of inclusion of new farmers, the importance of relationships based on trust means that applicants are accepted only if they are considered “true organic”, beyond any official certification.

The network also features some public officials belonging to the institutions tasked with shaping policies for the transformation of rural areas, but so far, no initiative has been launched to stimulate a formal dialogue with these institutions.

The farmers are very directly involved in the network, appreciate the research activity and equal relationship with the researchers, and intend to formalize it in the near future. For their part, the researchers find this kind of work promising and engaging. The environmental outcomes of supporting a group of pioneering farmers involved in the difficult conversion to organic production justify the commitment of public personnel (researchers and officials), at least for now. In the future, the role of both researchers and officials will need to be redefined to avoid criticism for supporting a private group. The scaling-up of the research focus from mainly agronomic interests to the pursuit of sustainable development goals may also eventually motivate public participation. A workshop to understand if and how to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030 [ 93 ] into the network has been conducted, but it has not led to any concrete assumption of responsibility.

Conclusions

The RBV network is a group of diverse actors from the organic rice sector participating in collective, self-planned, and self-developed research. Farmers, scientists, extension agents, government officials, and business managers are co-learning and co-producing knowledge and innovation. This public–private partnership is a voluntary, multi-year relationship that addresses the needs of the organic rice farmers, as well as those of the territory and the community, i.e., environmental issues and integrity of the supply chain.

An effective process of scientific and local knowledge sharing is taking place within the network. Cooperation is based on mutual trust and a common concern, i.e., how to shift from high-input cropping to organic farming, with the ultimate goal of protecting the environment and human well-being. The members’ active participation is mainly due to the fact that the activities carried out originate from real needs and concrete research questions.

The network follows a loosely structured agenda that allows for the continuous inclusion of new matters related to organic rice farming. In contrast to traditional research projects, which are planned in advance and leave little room for changes in goals, activities and methods, the spontaneous nature of this group generates high variability in the issues addressed, constantly reorienting its approach toward the emerging research questions.

This is a self-building group, formed around existing social relations, but inclusive and flexible: the joining of new actors (i.e., additional farmers, researchers skilled in specific topics, supply chain operators, etc.) is actively pursued through dissemination activities.

The participants show a very high degree of commitment and responsibility. The most evident sign of this is the considerable amount of time dedicated to research, both on the farms and in the regular meetings. All the members of the network are equally involved in the process of (i) defining the research questions and the activities to answer such questions, (ii) managing the research activities and the network’s organization, (iii) finding the resources needed for the research, inside and outside the network, and (iv) interpreting and evaluating the results. Such engagement is what makes them responsible, which is further confirmed by their strong motivation to disseminate the research results among other stakeholders outside the network.

Their involvement in the research process is transformative for the participants, who clearly admit that, by joining the network, they have changed their practices but also their ideas and beliefs. Such learning can create further transformations both in the sector and in the territory. Thanks to their intense communication work, the project findings are shared with other farmers and stakeholders and the network’s perspectives are brought to the attention of the institutions tasked with decisions on the transformation of rural areas. It will be interesting to follow the evolution of this network, so as to understand if it will essentially remain a group of friends engaged in collaborative research activities or if it will be able to develop into a model of innovation for the sector and an interlocutor for public decision-makers. In order to become an actor in the scientific and political debate, the network will probably need a more organized structure and include other relevant stakeholders, such as consumers, rural dwellers, and environmental NGOs.

Home and Rump [ 40 ] analyze 17 European Learning and Innovation Networks in Sustainable Agriculture (LINSAs) as part of the EU transdisciplinary research project SOLINSA. LINSAs are defined as networks of producers, consumers, experts, NGOs, SMEs, local administrations, researchers, and/or extensionists who are mutually engaged in pursuing common goals for sustainable agriculture and rural development, cooperating, sharing resources, and co-producing new knowledge by creating the right conditions for communication. Our case fits this definition perfectly. Home and Rump ( Ibidem ) recognize a wide variety of network typologies: from local scale to national or transnational; from small, simple homogenous networks to large, complex and diverse networks with multiple actors and “networks of networks”; from incremental to radical innovation; from top–down to bottom-up origin; and with several action fields, including non-food oriented, food production oriented and consumer oriented. Their study shows that LINSAs may emerge from small groups of farmers or may be inspired by individuals; they may develop as the formalization of an existing diffuse network or grow through a progressive process of co-opting local groups. Their size can vary from small (about 30 members), as in our case study, to about 100,000 farmers and 2,500 facilitators. Compared with the case studies presented by the two authors, our network has the following key characteristics:

Trans-regional scale (several regions of northern Italy);

Small dimension and simple structure;

Heterogeneous participation in terms of gender and age, but more homogeneous participation in terms of experiences and values (e.g., all the members are oriented toward the production of organic rice) and categories involved (consumers and NGOs are not present);

Commitment to both radical innovations (transition from conventional to organic rice) and incremental innovations;

Spontaneous, bottom–up origin;

Various action fields, including food production oriented, non-food oriented (environmental impact) and consumer oriented;

Low degree of formality;

Loose network with closed boundaries (participation in the network is voluntary, but the inclusion of new members appears to be contingent on sharing the same values, i.e., conventional farmers not willing to change are not accepted).

Participatory network experiences, especially for organic production, can be improved by considering the results of our analysis. In particular, in line with evidence from other studies [ 34 ], the importance of a supporting environment that facilitates and coordinates the learning processes is confirmed. What our case study highlights is that this environment can also be hardly structured or formalized. Indeed, it appears that the informal nature of the network is one of the key factors in its success.

As in Mukute and Lotz-Sisitka [ 64 ], collective learning happens when a group of people with different experiences and perspectives work together on the same issues and seek to jointly develop new knowledge or tools to address problems. As in Benton and Craib [ 9 ], in the learning process there is an emancipatory intent that is committed to changing unsatisfactory and oppressive realities, such as the socioeconomic and ethical crisis in the rice sector that started in 2014.

As Von Münchhausen and Häring [ 95 ] conclude, farmer–university networks function effectively if all their participants are considered equal partners. The findings of our research confirm the results of Home and Rump [ 40 ] who analyzed 17 networks, concluding with the identification of common factors that contribute to successful collaboration. Among these is the need to identify and build a working relationship with key partners, based on mutual trust and commitment, to strike a balance between guidance and listening, interactions and freedom, and to pursue positive and critical reflection—a fragile equilibrium that is difficult and time consuming to establish.

As in Mendez et al. [ 58 ], mutual learning takes place thanks to reciprocated trust, commitment and responsibility by all actors. These processes are favored by shared values. As a professor in our network points out, “Science is not neutral; it is not aseptic. Passion, ethics, values, ideals, and vision must be part of research.”

Mutual understanding is fostered by the use of a common language, both technical and methodological. Although applied for the first time in the network, the participatory approach has been fully espoused by its members. Despite being no experts in participation techniques, the network members understand and approve the reasons for participation.

The farmers involved in the network are well educated, unlike most farmers, and this aspect may influence their ability to speak a common language, comprehended by both the researchers and the other farmers.

The conversion to organic is often seen as a matter of procedures codified by regulations for a given period of time. For farmers, however, as the case study shows, conversion does not restrict itself to these procedures, but entails transformations that transcend any legal period and definition and have to do with the learning process that occurs in the network.

Our study results contribute to the participatory research approach by showing that personal values and attitudes are crucial. These certainly originate in the professional and human paths of the people involved, but can be developed both in education and training courses and through coaching and tutoring initiatives by other farmers and researchers who have had similar positive experiences.

Agroecology is an alternative development model to the failure of the traditional top–down innovation approach. It is said to be a knowledge intensive—as opposed to input intensive—agricultural practice [ 3 , 24 ]. Agroecology is also defined as the integration of scientific disciplines, agricultural practices, and social movements [ 97 ]. Hence, it requires an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge and pluralism in the ways of knowing. Participatory research, that is a transdisciplinary process, can therefore be seen as the right approach for the transition to agroecology. However, participatory processes need skillful researchers and farmers who have the ability to implement them and are willing to engage in the collaboration themselves. If we look at the matter from a sectoral perspective, the development of human capital receives little attention in the CAP. As highlighted by several recent studies, reforms are needed in this respect. A key suggestion that can be drawn from our case study is that of investing in the development of human capital and in the education of farmers and researchers in an integrated and coordinated way, so that they can develop skills in both agroecology practice and participatory research, designing new curricula in technical schools and universities and promoting the exchange of experiences between networks. A strong push toward education in farming is needed. Initial training is of national competence and agricultural education systems vary widely throughout the EU. But better integration between school and academic education and lifelong training is planned for the future through the European Social Fund and the CAP’s second pillar on Rural Development [ 5 ]. The future of European Participatory Research Networks can benefit from this integration. At the same time, bringing together complementary types of knowledge in a transdisciplinary approach, they can support that integration in innovative ways.

Availability of data and materials

The data supporting the findings of this study (audio and video recordings of the interviews; direct observation notes) are not publicly available, as they contain information that may compromise the privacy of those participating in the research, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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The authors acknowledge with gratitude the active involvement of the Riso Bio Vero network members and their willingness to tell their stories and share their thoughts. The interpretations in this article remain the authors’ own.

This study was carried out as part of the Riso-Biosystems three-year project (2017-2019), funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policies to study and promote organic rice. The funding body does not have any role in the design of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data and in the writing of the manuscript.

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Pagliarino, E., Orlando, F., Vaglia, V. et al. Participatory research for sustainable agriculture: the case of the Italian agroecological rice network. Eur J Futures Res 8 , 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-020-00166-9

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A scoping review on incentives for adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and their outcomes

• Valeria Piñeiro   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4372-7141 1 ,
• Joaquín Arias   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6675-2139 2 ,
• Jochen Dürr 3 ,
• Pablo Elverdin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4500-7121 4 ,
• Ana María Ibáñez 5 ,
• Alison Kinengyere   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5341-3218 6 ,
• Cristian Morales Opazo 7 ,
• Nkechi Owoo 8 ,
• Jessica R. Page   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7686-8015 9 ,
• Steven D. Prager   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9830-7008 10 &
• Maximo Torero 7  

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The increasing pressure on agricultural production systems to achieve global food security and prevent environmental degradation necessitates a transition towards more sustainable practices. The purpose of this scoping review is to understand how the incentives offered to farmers motivate the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and, ultimately, how and whether they result in measurable outcomes. To this end, this scoping review examines the evidence of nearly 18,000 papers on whether incentive-based programmes lead to the adoption of sustainable practices and their effect on environmental, economic and productivity outcomes. We find that independent of the incentive type, programmes linked to short-term economic benefit have a higher adoption rate than those aimed solely at providing an ecological service. In the long run, one of the strongest motivations for farmers to adopt sustainable practices is perceived benefits for either their farms, the environment or both. Beyond this, the importance of technical assistance and extension services in promoting sustainable practices emerges strongly from this scoping review. Finally, we find that policy instruments are more effective if their design considers the characteristics of the target population, and the associated trade-offs between economic, environmental and social outcomes.

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The pressure on agricultural production systems to achieve global food security, in the context of growing demands and the degradation of natural resources, makes it necessary to rethink current production systems towards more sustainable models.

In agriculture, environmental sustainability means good stewardship of the natural systems and resources that farms rely on. Among other things, this involves rotating crops and embracing diversity, planting cover crops, no-till systems (or reduced till), integrated pest management, integration between livestock and crops, agroforestry practices and precision farming. The general aim of sustainable agricultural policies is that they ensure environmental sustainability while enhancing, or at least maintaining, farm productivity.

At present, competing uses for land and water resources contribute to the degradation of natural resource capital, a situation that may exacerbate present-day and intergenerational consequences for farmers, other users and the wider population. Sustainable agricultural practices protect the ecosystem through the more efficient use of natural resources and strengthened capacity for adaptation to climate change and climate variability 1 . Therefore, their adoption may have significant benefits for the environment. Moreover, the adoption of sustainable practices is likely to help achieve more resilient and productive food systems and enable sustainable production, which would serve to reduce poverty and advance food security 2 , 3 . Sustainable agriculture therefore has the potential to directly contribute to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, including those relating to poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), reducing inequalities (SDG 9), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12), climate action (SDG 13), life below water (SDG 14) and life on land (SDG 15).

The adoption of these sustainable practices usually requires concrete incentives, significant effort from farmers and the support of governments and public–private partnerships at national and local levels. However, the decision to adopt sustainable agricultural practices in response to incentive programmes is not a binary process. Adoption depends on many factors: the conditions of the programme and the incentives offered, as well as the farmers’ environmental preferences, economics and cultural characteristics 4 , 5 . Agricultural market trends also affect producers’ decisions 6 .

This scoping review is thus motivated by the need to systematically evaluate the evidence base 6 the effects of incentives offered to farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices. To this end, this scoping review examines nearly 18,000 papers on the various incentives that are offered to farmers by governments, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, development banks and other market actors such as consumers and enterprises.

Three kinds of incentives (market and non-market, regulations and cross-compliance, Box 1 ), as well as their compulsory or voluntary nature, are assessed to determine whether the type of the incentive affects farmers’ willingness to adopt. This scoping review also examines the relationship between farmer’s adoption of sustainable practices and three types of outcomes: environmental, productivity and economic. Finally, the scoping review draws conclusions on the effectiveness of incentives and the adoption of sustainable farming practices to achieve the desired outcomes. These incentive–adoption–outcome pillars, and the links between them, offer a consistent logic by which to evaluate best practices in sustainable agricultural policy.

This scoping review also considers the broader demographic, social, environmental and economic factors that may drive the observed linkages between incentive, adoption and outcome.

This scoping review finds that regardless of the incentive type, linking programmes to economic benefits (productivity or profitability) is essential for farmers to adopt sustainable agriculture practices in the short term 6 , 7 . In the long term, one of the strongest motivations for farmers to adopt and maintain sustainable practices is perceived positive outcomes of adoption for their farm or the environment 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 . Beyond this, there are important analysis gaps in the existing literature, particularly regarding the interrelationships between the selected incentives, the adoption of best agricultural practices and outcomes. Some suggestions on the next lines of research are included in the analysis.

Box 1 Incentives, definitions and categories

Incentives are instruments used by the public and private sectors to encourage farmers to protect or enhance ecosystem services beneficial to them and others (for example, water quality, soil care, forestry), while simultaneously improving the productivity (yields, labour per hectare and so on) and the competitiveness (such as cost per hectare, profitability, farm incomes) of the agricultural sector. These were classified into three categories.

Market-based incentives encourage behavioural change by providing economic incentives through market signals. Examples of these include prices of input and output, subsidy, compensation, income transfer and other incentives in cash or in kind to agricultural producers. Non-market incentives are a broad basket. The parties of the Paris Agreement expressed that a non-market-based mechanism can be anything, provided it is not market-based 51 . This includes technical support, technology transfer and fiscal measures, such as putting a price on carbon or applying taxes to improve environmental sustainability.

Regulatory measures are general rules or specific actions imposed by government agencies or private entities to enhance environmental and economic outcomes through improved practices. Examples include certifications and environmental laws and standards. In general, they are mandatory.

Cross-compliance incentives link direct payments to farmers’ compliance with basic standards concerning the environment. They also require farmers to maintain land in good agricultural and environmental condition. In this case, they are mostly voluntary. Examples of these include government subsidies that are conditional on farmers adhering to certain environmental practices.

The purpose of this scoping review is to understand how incentives motivate the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and, ultimately, how and whether they result in measurable outcomes. This scoping review looked at the overall landscape of evidence of these instruments and their effectiveness in achieving the key outcomes. As in any scoping review, article screening against the inclusion and exclusion criteria took place in three phases: title screening, abstract screening and full-text screening (Box 2 ).

This resulted in 577 articles that were evaluated for relevance in terms of connecting either incentives to adoption, adoption to measurable outcomes or both sets of links. A machine learning-based approach helped to identify and cluster common terms and topics covered by the three incentive types (Fig. 1 ). Programmes fell into three broad categories related to ecosystem and environmental interventions, socioeconomic interventions and technological solutions. Articles typically showcased multiple interventions, with 36% of the total programmes falling under the technical category, and 32% each falling under the ecosystem and socioeconomic categories.

All programmes that appeared in more than 20 of the 577 articles are included. Note that the machine learning approach used to tag the articles by topic distinguished terms as used in the articles.

To better understand the links between incentive, adoption and outcome, a stratified random sample of 99 citations were selected from the 577 articles for additional review and data extraction. Of these, six articles were excluded as they were published in a language not spoken by any of the authors of this research or because full-text versions could not be located.

The subset of 93 articles facilitated more in-depth review of the incentive types. Each article contained a link between either incentives and adoption or adoption and outcomes, or both. For each article, the incentive types were identified, farmers’ adoption behaviours as described in the articles were recorded and the corresponding outcomes were noted as a function of the incentives. We found that market and non-market incentives tend to be the most prevalent mechanism (Fig. 2 ), whereas all three incentive categories are used more or less uniformly to achieve environmental outcomes. Furthermore, profitability-related outcomes tend to require balanced incentive structures, whereas productivity-related outcomes tend to be more market and non-market-oriented (Fig. 2 ).

The links are from the subset of 93 articles, colour-coded by outcome.

Given the importance of understanding when and how incentives drive farmers’ adoption behaviours and how the adoption of specific practices leads to the desired outcomes, additional analysis was needed. We further limited the subset of papers to only those that had a complete set of links between the incentive–adoption–outcome pillars (44 papers) (Supplementary Annex 1 ). The results of this exercise illustrate how many of the papers with the full logic actually addressed multiple incentive categories and outcomes (Fig. 3 ). This is an important finding, as it bolsters the earlier observation that multipronged, integrated development interventions, both in terms of incentive structure and expected outcomes, are relatively commonplace. It is also important to note that although environmental and profitability outcomes are more or less equally supported by all three incentives, profitability outcomes are more supported by market or non-market incentives.

The 44 full-text reviews are included (read from left to right). See Supplementary Annex 1 for the associated list of papers.

There is a clear general association between market and non-market incentives and environmental outcomes (Fig. 3 ). Nearly half of the interventions seen in the full-text review are considering market or non-market incentives and, simultaneously, just over 40% of the outcomes had an explicit environmental focus (Fig. 4 ). In general terms, this illustrates that, given appropriate design, market/non-market incentives can be successfully paired with environmental outcomes. Similarly important, it is clear that regulatory-based incentives are either less adequately documented or generally less prevalent in the development community’s menu of incentive-based approaches (left side of Fig. 4 ). Combined with the previous figures linking incentives to multiple outcome types (Figs. 2 and 3 ), there is support for the idea that development interventions tend to be moving away from simple productivity-enhancing approaches towards a more holistic style of engagement (Fig. 4 right side).

a , Incentives. b , Outcomes. The proportions are expressed as the percentage of the totals across the 44 full-text reviews.

Box 2 Abridged methods

A double-blind title and abstract screening was performed on 17,936 articles using the following inclusion and exclusion criteria:

Studies published in 1994 or later.

Studies with an explicit focus on incentives for sustainable environmental agricultural practices.

Studies with an explicit focus on adoption of sustainable environmental agricultural practices.

Studies that explicitly connect the adoption of agricultural practices to sustainability outcomes.

Studies with an explicit analysis of the impact of incentives on income, production, productivity, profits and/or environmental sustainability.

Original research (qualitative and quantitative reports) and/or review of existing research including grey literature.

The resulting 1,792 articles were subjected to a second round of rapid review by abstract. This resulted in 577 articles that met the a priori inclusion criteria. A stratified random sample of 99 of these articles were selected for the next step,: full-text screening.

We performed data extraction on 93 of the studies (6 excluded for issues of availability or language). A data extraction template (available in the Supplementary Information ) was developed to document the data, study type and context of each citation and all themes of interest.

Why is this method so important?

Unlike a typical narrative review, a scoping review strives to capture all of the literature on a given topic and reduce authorial bias. Scoping reviews offer a unique opportunity to explore the evidence in agricultural fields to address questions relating to what is known about a topic; what can be synthesized from existing studies to develop policy or practice recommendations; and what aspects of a topic are yet to be addressed by researchers.

Assessment of the evidence base

For this study, the incentive–adoption–outcome logic is only valid if evidence is present in the full-text review that backs up the claims regarding the outcomes. Although an assessment of evidence is not typically carried out as part of a scoping review 12 , 13 , we opted to undertake one to understand when and how evidence was used to support assertions regarding inventive–adoption–outcome logic. The review team undertook a subjective assessment to label each study according to the strength of the evidence presented and the quality of the methodology used.

Assessments of the quality of the methodology are based on the clarity of the research question, justification of the research approach given the question of the study, clear description of the methodology used and robustness of the chosen methodology. Each article was scored on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest. The findings were summarized by intervention type and outcome (Fig. 5 ). From the 44 articles, 23% received the highest score, followed by 32% with a quality index of 4 and 39% with a score of 3. Less than 10% of the papers were assigned a number lower than 3, which is why there is no yellow border line in the figure. It is important to notice that one article may be included in more than one cell, as it may include more than one incentive and/or outcome.

The map shows articles reviewed by intervention and outcomes (subset of 44 articles). The sizes of the circles correspond to the number of reviews in each category. The fill colours indicate the level of evidence, with dark blue representing strong evidence and light blue representing weak evidence. The border colours indicate the quality of the methodology; red is used for methodologies that are generally strong and yellow where there are concerns over the methodologies.

Relatively speaking, there was a general lack of clear measurement of outcomes, with only 50% of the reviewed papers presenting strong evidence (that is, evidence backed by robust analysis and clearly articulated support). Furthermore, evidence for incentive–outcome relationships is unequally distributed, in terms of the quality and quantity of available evidence, across both the incentive and outcome types (Fig. 5 ).

This evidence analysis suggests that there is a robust evidence base for environmental outcomes associated with cross-compliance incentives. Likewise, there is strong evidence linking market/non-market incentives and profitability-related outcomes. Both of these observations are generally consistent with the broader literature. This illustrates the need to substantiate measurement and reporting of evidence, especially in relation to the regulatory-based approaches. The current analysis suggests that understanding of regulatory approaches is generally less present in the literature, even though the methodologies were deemed relatively strong. Regulatory interventions tend to target environmental outcomes, but not exclusively, and are often associated with profitability and productivity-enhancing outcomes (Figs. 2 and 3 ). Given the general emphasis on cross-compliance and market/non-market approaches, perhaps more attention is needed to examine the scope and efficacy of regulatory approaches.

The available evidence allows us to make some standardized conclusions about the effectiveness of incentives for the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, and the associated productivity and economic outcomes. However, there is little or no evidence on environmental outcomes, as most of the evidence on this respect is qualitative. Most papers only made an approximation of changes towards improvements in agricultural practices and environmental outcomes through qualitative assessment of farmer’s perceptions.

Additional evidence on the effectiveness of incentives in promoting the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and the associated outcomes is required to move beyond qualitative assessment of farmer’s perceptions. In selected papers where there are reliable data and easy monitoring of implemented sustainable systems, there is no systematic follow-up of the environmental impacts. The results are only measurable through the improvements in the productivity and profitability of producers 9 . For measuring potential environmental outcomes, some papers compare adoption rates of farmers receiving incentives versus non-receiving farmers 8 , 9 , 12 , 14 or relate socioeconomic characteristics of participants versus non-participants 8 , 15 .

Most papers simply state the participation rates in terms of the percentage of potential beneficiaries and explain them using influencing factors. Some papers model the adoption according to different incentive levels (such as different tax or levels of payments for environmental services (PES)) 10 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 . In those articles, no complete evidence was found connecting incentives with adoption and outcomes. Stronger identification strategies are also needed to uncover the causal effect of the chain of incentives, adoption and outcomes. We found no randomized controlled trial studies in the selected papers, which constitutes an important gap in the literature as these kinds of experiments are key to more accurately testing the effectiveness of policy interventions, technologies and practices, taking into account socioeconomic, geographical and environmental influential factors. This scoping review reveals important research gaps: methods to detect causal pathways and to quantify the connections.

Type of incentive

However, despite weaknesses and limitations in the evidence base, the evidence provided by previous programmes on what has worked and what needs to be improved is important to consider when designing future incentive programmes. Looking at the articles reviewed in this scoping review, some interesting aspects for each of the three incentive categories can be highlighted (Fig. 6 ).

Market and non-market-based incentives

One of the general strengths of market-based incentives is that they offer flexible adoption to promote specific behaviour changes. Examples of this include altering market prices, setting a cap or altering quantities of a particular good, improving the way a market works, or creating a market where none previously existed (for example, water trading) 20 . However, one of the weaknesses of market-based incentives and their flexibility is that they can lead to negative social, environmental and economic changes that were unplanned or not in line with the intended strategic direction 10 . For example, subsidies may increase the adoption of intercropping and residue mulching, but these practices may crowd out adoption of zero tillage 21 .

However, a lack of flexibility has been linked to low adoption levels as farmers’ previous experiences of using a particular agricultural practice may significantly influence the types of policy instrument they will apply 5 . For example, promoting the use of specific crops for the incorporation of nutrients into the soil is more likely to be adopted by farmers who already practice crop rotation 21 , 22 , 23 . This is particularly pertinent for non-market incentives, for which it is important to understand the interaction between a particular practice and the policy instruments designed to achieve its uptake.

Regulatory incentives

Some studies show that instruments perceived as inflexible or too complex, such as legal regulations, were the least preferred by farmers 5 . Indeed, for regulatory measures, such as forest laws or watershed management programmes, the adoption of practices depends on the effectiveness of law enforcement, supervision and monitoring. For this reason, the adoption of regulatory measures is often linked to accompanying measures such as information sharing, capacity building, technical assistance, training support for the local population and farmer-to-farmer communication networks that build trust and enhance understanding of the potential benefits of conservation practices 24 . Agricultural extension services, both public and private, have been shown to have a positive impact on adoption rates 5 , 7 , 12 , 15 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 . Connecting these programmes with national extension systems can result in a significant change in agricultural sustainability.

To increase their effectiveness, regulatory measures are often linked to economic incentives including forest trade quotas, certification, access to rural credits or benefits in insurance markets. For example, voluntary community-based programmes are often coupled with short-term financial support to incentivize participation 25 , 29 . To improve efficiency in the adoption of the promoted practices, flexible payments may be preferred as participation costs and expected benefits differ depending on individual farmers and geographical location 16 .

Cross-compliance incentives

Cross-compliance incentives help overcome the barriers that make the adoption of sustainable practices unattractive, such as large up-front adoption costs, lack of capital, restricted access to financial markets and the need to provide for the household’s short-term economic needs. They are based on the hypothesis that incentives should at least compensate for the income loss or additional costs of adopting sustainable practices; and that there should be clear monitoring processes that ensure compliance with the conditionality (the adoption of the sustainable practice).

The main cross-compliance incentives are PES or agri-environment payments. These are incentives offered to farmers, or landowners, in exchange for managing their land to provide some type of ecological service, including water quality, forestry, soil erosion and air pollution. In the case of resource conservation in the Ecuadorian Andes, it was shown that when conservation technologies were offered in conjunction with measures that enhance the short-term profitability of agriculture (such as new crops, biological barriers and improved agricultural production), the adoption of conservation practices increased significantly 8 . Similar results were found in the Nepal Knowledge Based Integrated Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition (KISAN) project 30 . These two examples reflect the broader finding that in most of the reported PES case studies, socioeconomic and environmental outcomes have been positive 8 , 15 , 30 , especially if the PES is accompanied by technical assistance 7 , 12 .

The decision by farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices in response to incentive programmes is not a binary process. Adoption is a continuum that depends on many factors: the conditions of the programme, the incentives offered, the environmental preferences, personal perspectives, experience and education of farmers 4 . Farmers’ decisions are shaped by personal opinions, such as preferences over conservation measures, beliefs about the programme and degrees of risk aversion 21 , 31 . Factors such as income levels, asset ownership, age, and access to other economic opportunities also correlate with the decision to adopt, as they affect the capacity of the target population to reap benefits from the programme 5 , 6 , 7 , 12 , 29 , 32 , 33 , 34 . The decision to adopt is also affected by the biophysical characteristics of the land plot, and the institutional and policy context. Even agricultural market trends affect producers’ decisions to adopt agricultural practices 3 , 6 . The variety of factors that contribute to the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices necessitates the consideration of context in policy design and the use of differentiated policy instruments 16 .

Incentives across the spectrum

Direct economic benefits, increased productivity or profitability seem to be the essential condition for the adoption of sustainable practices in the short term 7 . Regardless of the incentive type, adoption rates are higher when programmes offer short-term economic benefits than those solely aimed at providing a positive ecological outcome. For example, restrictive land-use-change programmes, such as those induced by climate change, which modify the incentives for engaging in agricultural production, agroforestry and other land uses have higher adoption rates when they are connected with an improvement in income 13 , 15 .

Nevertheless, and independent of the incentive type, in the long term it seems that one of the strongest motivations for farmers to adopt and maintain sustainable practices is the perceived positive outcomes of these practices for their farm or the environment 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 . For example, the greatest motivating factor for participation in a forest conservation scheme in Kenya was the ‘will to conserve’, influenced by the local communities’ concern for the degradation of their environment and their perceived dependency on natural resources 11 . The will to participate was based on the perceived benefits of conservation, especially changes in water availability, which were reinforced by the potential benefits of new income-generating activities. This suggests that incentives can lead to the adoption of sustainable practices and have positive effects on ecological services, even without direct payments. If participants perceive future benefits of sustainable practices, the likelihood of adoption increases 15 , 29 .

Compulsory or voluntary incentives

The likelihood of a farmer adopting the associated sustainable agricultural practice depends on whether the incentive is compulsory or voluntary 5 . Voluntary incentive programmes, such as market and non-market-based incentives or certification schemes (for example, carbon footprints, water footprints, organic farming), have a high degree of uncertainty as they depend on the decision of farmers to adopt sustainable practices. In general, if the economic incentives or payment levels do not offset the costs of adoption (cover opportunity costs of changing production techniques or for the most productive land uses), farmers will rarely switch to the desired practices. However, if payment levels compensate, or overcompensate, for income losses and additional costs, then the willingness of farmers to adopt is normally high.

In contrast, the uptake of sustainable agricultural practices due to compulsory incentives is fairly certain. Regulatory measures, such as legal regulations, reduce uncertainty by imposing sanctions for non-compliance. The adoption of regulatory measures depends on the effectiveness of law enforcement, supervision and monitoring; however, if institutions are able to enforce the sanctions, the uncertainty surrounding adoption is low or non-existent 28 .

The degree of uncertainty in the adoption of sustainable practices is closely linked to contradictions between the preferences of farmers and society. Farmers may prefer the short-term financial support and flexibility offered by voluntary incentive programmes, which, being voluntary, tend to create more uncertainty in the achievement of the programme’s environmental goals. This can conflict with society’s preference for longer-term instruments, such as legal regulations, which tend to reduce uncertainty in the achievement of outcomes.

Broader contextual factors

Throughout all stages in the incentive–adoption–outcome chain, wider contextual factors play an important role. Ignorance of the practices promoted and the opportunity costs from foregone activities due to limitations on land use and restrictions on the use of some management practices may deter participation by some farmers 16 , 29 , 35 . Complexity, inflexibility and complicated procedures are also salient obstacles for participation 5 , 15 , 16 . Therefore, the timescale, desired outcome and target population must be considered in all aspects of sustainable agricultural policy, from design to implementation to assessment.

The effectiveness of a particular incentive, and the likelihood of adoption, varies depending on the agricultural practice that one wants to promote and the associated (predicted) outcomes 5 . Within this, there are a multitude of factors that determine the perceived and actual costs and benefits, both direct and indirect, of adopting sustainable practices. The attributes of the programme determine the likelihood of adoption, which is influenced by the perception of an improvement in net benefit and access to alternative markets. In some cases, positive outcomes—such as increases in yields—may not be enough to compensate for the higher input and capital requirements of the proposed agricultural interventions 36 . Therefore, economic incentives are necessary and need to be large enough to compensate for the opportunity cost of change, taking into consideration that the effects on outcomes take time to realize.

Outcomes may not be obvious in the short term; there may be a substantial time lag associated with the uptake of new practices and the expected results. For example, in examining fruit farmers in Uruguay, it was found that even with clear evidence of the adoption of specific practices, the expected outcomes took different times to materialize 37 . In the case of productivity, there may actually be negative consequences in the short run. Therefore, the link between adoption and outcome requires consideration of the time horizon.

Broader findings to boost adoption

The important complementary role of technical assistance and extension services also emerges strongly from several papers within this scoping review. Technical assistance, training and extension agents, both public and private, enhance the rate of adoption for all incentive mechanisms 7 , 12 , 15 , 22 , 23 , 27 , 28 . Beyond this, additional assistance programmes boost short-term benefits, and ensure the long-term sustainability and inclusiveness of the incentives. For example, where PES incentives (cross-compliance) were accompanied by additional technical assistance, the sustainability of the sustainable outcomes beyond the life of the PES contract could be expected 7 , 12 , 27 , 29 , 37 . The availability of technical support or other complementary practices is particularly pertinent to regulatory incentives, for which a key criticism is their complexity. In these cases, an increased knowledge and understanding of environmental services and regulations can boost adoption 5 , 24 . Overall, the provision of information and technical assistance regarding sustainable practices can foster a higher take-up rate of the programmes and a broader retention of the practices 5 , 11 , 15 , 23 , 38 .

Beyond this, training programmes and the introduction of locally adapted technologies can contribute to changing practices even without other types of incentives or interventions if they present economic advantages for their users. Adoption can be enhanced by the promotion of sustainable farming activities by a development organization or farmers’ associations, coupled with marketing activities 15 , 25 .

Trade-offs in outcomes

Sustainable policies should seek to adopt an integrated approach that addresses both short-term priorities such as profitability, while simultaneously working towards long-term environmental outcomes. The design of these instruments often entails trade-offs among the long-term outcomes, different environmental objectives, and equity and efficiency goals.

In designing sustainable agricultural policy, it may be necessary to prioritize and make trade-offs between different environmental objectives. For example, quantity-based market-based incentives (MBIs) such as water trading may reallocate water to ‘high-value’ users, such as mining, manufacturing and electricity production from ‘low-value’ users, such as agricultural producers 25 . As some high-value users produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, achieving the goals for water use may come at a cost for the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In such cases, an additional measure, such as a regulatory mechanism, may be put in place to minimize the potential trade-off 17 . The design of sustainable agricultural policies, and their incentives, therefore requires a broad assessment and consideration of the potential outcomes, and their consequences.

In some cases, trade-offs in socioeconomic and environmental outcomes may be required, as effectively attaining environmental outcomes may deepen economic inequality. The evidence shows that targeting wealthier landowners can produce greater impacts on environmental outcomes 29 . Wealthier landowners may be able to have a higher impact on environmental outcomes than poorer farmers who face much higher opportunity costs from adopting sustainable practices, chief among them subsistence production. If programmes are targeted at regions with higher wealth and environmental degradation to maximize the achievement of environmental goals, it is likely that a larger percentage of wealthier owners will enrol in the programme and the poorest ones will be excluded. If financial incentives are provided, the income of the wealthier landowners will further increase, enhancing income disparities. Consequently, it may not always be possible to simultaneously achieve different environmental and equity development goals with the same policy tool. Indeed, several papers in this scoping review point out the potential for conflict associated with equity and efficiency 13 , 29 , a subset of which suggested that the environmental efficiency of these approaches should justify their adoption in certain instances. In general, the alignment of equity and efficiency will occur only if the geographical location of the programme overlaps with the location of poor farmers.

An alternative approach is to target incentive programmes at the lands most vulnerable to land-use change or farmers more reluctant to adopt sustainable practices to promote additionality. Additionality measures the net result from an intervention and is defined as the product of environmental service provision (for example, hydrological services, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and landscape beauty services) and deforestation probability, resulting from an PES 22 . The question therefore is if and when incentive programmes are necessary to encourage adoption. Farmers who are more likely to adopt incentive programmes are often located in regions in which deforestation risks are lower, have stronger preferences for conservation programmes, the opportunity costs from adopting sustainable practices are lower, or the net benefits of adoption are high regardless of the economic incentives. Hence, the incentives might not be the real driver for adopting sustainable practices, and adopters might participate in the programme regardless of the incentives. Incentive programmes should therefore target vulnerable areas to ensure additionality of the programme and the most effective use of resources.

Furthermore, the measure of outcomes should account for the trade-offs among different types of incentives—or how different incentive types could complement one another to achieve the desired outcomes. Indeed, multipronged programmes that incorporate social, economic and productivity components are more likely to succeed in developing countries. This echoes the findings of Giller et al. 39 , whose review of conservation agriculture and sustainable intensification technologies and practices suggests that a systems approach, combining the tools of experimentation and simulation modelling, should be adopted to evaluate multiscale trade-offs and synergies. This will provide the toolbox and methods to allow informed choices of technologies and practices tailored to local conditions (Box 3 ).

Box 3 Policy recommendations

Notwithstanding the limitations and gaps found in the literature, the following is a set of tested principles to follow when designing interventions or policy instruments. These are based on the most solid evidence found on the effectiveness of incentives to motivate the adoption of sustainable practices that, in turn, led to better indicators of productivity, profitability and environmental sustainability of farms under different production systems and conditional factors.

Balance the incentives and outcomes

Incentives must be high enough to motivate a change in production practices. This is because productivity and profitability gains can be insufficient to compensate for the total cost of the initial capital requirements and any unexpected costs of the proposed agricultural interventions.

Know your farmers

The likelihood of farmers adopting sustainable agricultural practices will vary depending on their experience, education, access to information and level of risk-aversion. Policymakers must be familiar with the farmers, and tailor the incentive programmes for them by incorporating the range of personal, political, institutional and biophysical factors into the design of the programme.

Keep it simple

Instruments should be simple to understand and communicate given that farmers dislike instruments that are too complex (such as some legal regulations) and are therefore less likely to adopt them. Besides, complexity makes instruments harder to communicate and more expensive to adopt or enforce.

Single interventions are less likely to succeed, hence the need to use a combination of policy instruments. For example, the provision of technical assistance and extension services contributes to the understanding of farmers and helps them adopt proposed practices.

Behavioural preferences matter

Given that people have a tendency to follow the behaviour of others, farmers’ preferences should be taken into account when designing incentives, acknowledging that they vary depending on the target population.

Be prepared for a long time horizon

The time horizon depends on the agricultural practice, the production system and the biological cycle. This means the opportunity cost of time has to be considered and financial tools have to be put in place so that cash flow problems do not jeopardize the intervention.

Create an enabling environment

Incentives that make the adoption of sustainable practices attractive depend heavily on an enabling economic and financial environment. Beyond incentives, it is necessary to improve the general conditions that influence agricultural systems. There are many factors that influence the capacity and willingness of farmers to invest in land, water and forest conservation and to pursue sustainable practices such as agricultural institutions, policies and regulations, social protection, infrastructure and markets, prices, off-farm employment opportunities and structural poverty.

Recommendations

Incentive programmes need to be well targeted, effective and efficient while taking into account spatial differences, differences in economic activities and types and the number of economic, social and environmental outcomes pursued, as well as budget limitations. The design of such programmes, which are also flexible, simple to implement and cost effective, is not an easy task and requires a collective effort and good data. A challenge for the future is to reduce the cost and allocate more resources to the collection of detailed data. This is a condition for the estimation of environmental services such as biodiversity, carbon services (that require information on the amount of stored carbon before and after an adopted practice) or hydrological services (that require information on site-specific soil characteristics, vegetation cover, slope, distribution and intensity of precipitation). Similarly, the quality and availability of data are frequently inadequate for more precise measures of the cost of participation in incentive programmes.

Beyond the specific incentives examined in this scoping review, it is still necessary to improve the general conditions influencing agricultural systems and practices for sustainable outcomes of the whole sector (Box 3). Agricultural institutions, policies and regulations, social protection, infrastructure and markets, relative prices, off-farm employment opportunities, structural poverty and the scarcity of asset endowments all influence the capacity and willingness of farmers to invest in land, water and forest conservation and to pursue sustainable practices. These are discussed in some papers as conditioning factors. Nevertheless, there is still the need to better understand the interrelationships between these factors, incentives, adoption and outcomes.

Evidence synthesis methodology and protocol pre-registration

This scoping review was prepared following guidelines from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) 40 . The methodology for this scoping review follows the framework established in the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, which builds on the Joanna Briggs Institute’s guidelines 41 for conducting scoping reviews. Note that the current CEE Guidelines for Systematic Reviews in Environmental Management 42 (version 4.2, March 2013) do not provide recommendations for the number of people who should conduct eligibility screening, although the Guidelines implicitly suggest that a single screener may be acceptable provided that an assessment of screener reliability is conducted. According to the latest CEE evidence synthesis protocols published in Environmental Evidence journal (January–July 2017), screening by a single person, subject to a check of screener reliability using a subset of articles, is the currently practiced approach in most cases 42 .

Scoping reviews are designed to summarize studies of varying methodological designs while highlighting key areas for future research and engagement 43 , 44 . This scoping review leveraged a data–science framework to accelerate the work within each of the individual steps, which are described below. This framework comprises five steps: identifying the research question; identifying relevant studies; study selection; extracting and charting the data; and collating, summarizing and reporting the results. The protocol used in this scoping review was registered on the Open Science Framework and is available in Supplementary Annex 2 (ref.  45 ).

The guiding question for this scoping review was, “What are the market, non-market, regulatory and compliance incentives or compulsory/voluntary programmes for farmers to adopt environmentally sustainable practices?”.

This study spans both developed and developing world contexts and characterizes how the incentives associated with different instruments may affect adoption given local institutional, environmental and socioeconomic factors. It was not limited by geography or country status.

The goal of this scoping review was to make recommendations about how to promote environmental practices for more sustainable, and at the same time competitive, agricultural production systems. This scoping review looks at the overall landscape of evidence of these instruments and their effectiveness in achieving higher levels of productivity, profitability and equity.

Information sources, searches and citation management

A comprehensive search strategy was developed to identify all available research pertaining to the market, non-market, regulatory and cross-compliance incentives for farmers to adopt environmentally sustainable practices. Search terms included variations of the key concepts in the research question: farmers, incentives, implementation of agricultural practices and environmental impact (see Appendix A of Supplementary Annex 2 (ref. 45 ) for a presentation of the search strategy in its entirety such that it may be reproduced in CAB Abstracts).

Research synthesis experts conducted searches of the following electronic databases: CAB Abstracts (access via CAB Direct); Web of Science Core Collection (access via Web of Science); Scopus (access via Elsevier); and EconLit (access via EBSCOhost). A search of grey literature sources was also conducted. The grey literature searches were conducted using custom web-scraping scripts. The search strings were tested per website before initiating web-scraping. An existing Google Chrome extension was needed to scrape dynamically generated websites.

A data science team supported much of our process. The results from the databases and the grey literature searches were combined and deduplicated using a Python script. Duplicates were detected using title, abstract and same year of publication where year of publication was a match, where title cosine similarity was greater than 85% and where an abstract’s cosine similarity greater than 80% or one of the abstracts (or both) was empty. When duplicates were found, the citation priority order was Scopus, CAB Abstracts, Web of Science and then grey literature sources.

Following deduplication, each citation was analysed using a boosted machine learning model. The model added more than 30 new metadata fields that identified population, geographies, interventions, study design type and outcomes of interest. This allowed for accelerated identification of potential articles for exclusion at the title/abstract screening stage.

The combined search results and new metadata were shared with the research team using Excel spreadsheets and through the screening platform Covidence. The metadata was made available in Covidence 46 in the abstract field delineated by hash-tags (###) using a global open-source converter that can translate existing bibliographic data from a .csv format to .ris format.

Study selection and eligibility criteria

The systematic review software Covidence was used for title, abstract and full-text screening decision-making. Article screening took place in three phases: title screening, abstract screening and full-text screening. At all screening stages, citations were screened for relevance against the following inclusion and exclusion criteria; reasons for exclusion were documented at the full-text screening phase.

Citations were included in this scoping review if they met all of the inclusion criteria listed in Box 2 .

Exclusion criteria were the inverse of the inclusion criteria. Each citation that met all of the inclusion criteria at the title and abstract and full-text screening phases was included, and each citation that met one of the exclusion criteria at the title, abstract, or full-text screening phases was excluded.

Title/abstract screening was initiated for the 17,936 articles with two independent reviewers reviewing each citation. After the first 200 articles, due to the very large number of citations to screen and because there was a strong degree of inter-rater reliability, a rapid review, single-screener methodology was adopted for all of the remaining citations. The rapid review process comprised a title review followed by an abstract review of included citations. After this first stage, 1,792 papers were selected; of these, 1,694 were found in scholarly databases and 98 were found in grey literature sources.

The inclusion criteria were complex and nuanced, particularly the connection of the adoption of incentives to sustainability outcomes, and the degree to which a study focused on incentives or their adoption. These matters of focus and connection could not be captured by a search strategy alone, but required human judgement. This resulted in a large number of irrelevant results from the initial searches. Among the 1,215 articles that were excluded at the abstract screening phase, 442 were excluded because they did not include an explicit analysis of the impact of the incentives on income, production, productivity, profits and/or environmental sustainability and 418 were excluded because there was no explicit focus on incentives for sustainable environmental practices. For more information, the PRISMA flow diagram (Supplementary Fig. 1 ) shows the steps followed for the screening process and selection exercise.

Following Waffenschmidt et al., we conducted a double-blind pre-test of ten articles and then assessed inter-rater reliability using the Fleiss Kappa indicator to test for inter-rater reliability in the full-text screening 47 . This indicator is a statistical measure for assessing the reliability of agreement between a fixed number of raters when classifying a number of items. The measure calculates the degree of agreement in classification over that which would be expected by chance.

After calculating the indicator, we can say that the level of potential bias of a single-screener method introduced here is not significant, given that the kappa value of at least 0.61 indicates substantial agreement and we have a value of 0.7.

In the next selection round, the single -screener methodology was also used, maintaining the same inclusion/exclusion criteria. After this process, 577 citations were kept; of these, 551 were found in scholarly databases, 27 were found in grey literature sources and one was removed as a duplicate. The proportion of resources from the grey literature versus scholarly databases remained consistent throughout the screening process, with 4.48% of the resources originally identified and 4.88% of the resources eligible for full-text inclusion coming from the grey literature.

Because a very large set of citations was included for full-text screening, a semi-structured, stratified randomized sample of 99 citations was selected. Our early review process suggested that certain categories of papers (for example, regarding forestry policy) were more common than others. In an effort to capture relevant citations in less prevalent categories, we used smooth inverse document frequency and cosine distances to create a vector space representation of the contents of the titles, key words and abstracts of the 577 articles. We then clustered the vectors—each article is represented as a vector of terms and frequencies—into 20 clusters using Ward’s method for hierarchical clustering 48 . A threshold of 20 clusters resulted in clusters ranging in size from 5 to 300 articles. The basis of cluster composition for the smaller clusters was moderately discernible (for example, ecosystem services and water-related), whereas the basis for agglomeration of the larger clusters was not immediately evident. We then implemented a stratified random sampling process to identify the set of 99 articles from the 20 clusters as a function of cluster size. The Orange Data Mining Toolbox was used for the analysis 49 . Finally, 6 of these 99 articles were not included as they were written in a language not spoken by any of the authors of this research or because of their unavailability.

Data extraction

A data extraction template was developed based on Barrett et al. to document the data, study type and context of each citation, and all themes of interest: incentives, outcomes, measurements of impact and the cost of intervention 50 . The data extraction template was tested by the review team before use to make sure that all the necessary information for the analysis of the research question was included. Data was extracted by the reviewers using an excel worksheet including the following information:

A categorization of incentives by market, non-market, regulatory and compliance incentives for farmers.

Type of outcomes covered in question of the study: environmentally sustainable, profitability and productivity.

Other information relevant for the analysis including characteristics of the stakeholders, commodity (crop, pasture, aquaculture, forestry), data (cross-section, panel, survey, interviews, policy analysis), methodology (econometrics, systematic review, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trials), study (quantitative or qualitative).

Questions relating to the quality of the paper, the link between incentives and adoption, measurement of the incentive, the type of outcome and its measurement and cost of the incentive.

The retrieval of hundreds of PDFs for full-text screening is a repetitive and time-consuming task. A Python script was created that would handle the repetitive tasks of PDF discovery, download and file renaming using Google Scholar (the code is available in GitHub). The script read the bibliographic data from an Excel spreadsheet and then executed a script to retrieve the full-text PDF. The possible returning results are ‘not found, ‘backed by a paywall’, ‘available for download’ or ‘available for request’. If the article is spotted in the search results, the download link is clicked, and the article will be auto-renamed and marked as being downloaded. This process significantly cut down the time needed to retrieve PDFs, and on average 200 PDFs were searched and retrieved in 3–4 h.

The collation, summary and report of the results

This research was based on three pillars—incentives, adoption and outcomes—in looking at the question of how the incentives farmers receive influence the adoption of good environmental practices. These three pillars are important in answering the question, but the links between them are crucial as well. The connection between the incentives and actual adoption, as well as the connection between adoption and the outcomes identified play a key role in this scoping review (Fig. 6 ).

The diagram illustrates the pathways between the three pillars.

Incentives were categorized as market-based and non-market-based, regulatory and cross-compliance incentives for farmers to adopt sustainable environmental practices and integrated risk management systems (crop insurance, catastrophic insurance, price options, mitigation and adaptation programmes and so on) in a voluntary or compulsory way. The outcomes were identified as practices adopted by farmers, and their impact on the multiple objectives of environmental sustainability, increased productivity and profitability.

An appraisal for quality was done for the 44 articles that passed the inclusion selection process, were part of the sample chosen and had the link between incentives and adoption, and adoption and outcomes.

The assessment was done by the authors of this research from a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest. The quality assessment was based on the clarity of the research question, justification of the research approach given the question of the study, clear description of the methodology used and robustness of the chosen methodology. However, it was not used to further exclude papers. From the 44 articles, 23% received the highest score, followed by 32% with a quality index of 4 and 39% with a 3, less than 10% of the papers were assigned a score of less than 3. The previously completed screening process was key in ensuring that articles that did not have substantive evidence were not included in this last stage.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. E. Gonzalez for his contribution to the quantitative analysis of the document corpus and for producing the graphs presented in Figs. 1 and 2. Similarly, we thank D. Amariles for his analysis and presentation of the alluvial diagrams presented in Figs. 2 and 3, and A. M. D. Gonzalez for the data work that is represented in Figs. 4 and 5. We also acknowledge the editing contributions made by M. Eber-Rose. Finally, we thank J. Porciello, whose deep knowledge, drive and understanding made this effort possible.

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Climate-smart agriculture: adoption, impacts, and implications for sustainable development

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The 19 papers included in this special issue examined the factors influencing the adoption of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices among smallholder farmers and estimated the impacts of CSA adoption on farm production, income, and well-being. Key findings from this special issue include: (1) the variables, including age, gender, education, risk perception and preferences, access to credit, farm size, production conditions, off-farm income, and labour allocation, have a mixed (either positive or negative) influence on the adoption of CSA practices; (2) the variables, including labour endowment, land tenure security, access to extension services, agricultural training, membership in farmers’ organizations, support from non-governmental organizations, climate conditions, and access to information consistently have a positive impact on CSA adoption; (3) diverse forms of capital (physical, social, human, financial, natural, and institutional), social responsibility awareness, and digital advisory services can effectively promote CSA adoption; (4) the establishment of climate-smart villages and civil-society organizations enhances CSA adoption by improving their access to credit; (5) CSA adoption contributes to improved farm resilience to climate change and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions; (6) CSA adoption leads to higher crop yields, increased farm income, and greater economic diversification; (7) integrating CSA technologies into traditional agricultural practices not only boosts economic viability but also contributes to environmental sustainability and health benefits; and (8) there is a critical need for international collaboration in transferring technology for CSA. Overall, the findings of this special issue highlight that through targeted interventions and collaborative efforts, CSA can play a pivotal role in achieving food security, poverty alleviation, and climate resilience in farming communities worldwide and contribute to the achievements of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

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1 Introduction

Climate change reduces agricultural productivity and leads to greater instability in crop production, disrupting the global food supply and resulting in food and nutritional insecurity. In particular, climate change adversely affects food production through water shortages, pest outbreaks, and soil degradation, leading to significant crop yield losses and posing significant challenges to global food security (Kang et al. 2009 ; Läderach et al. 2017 ; Arora 2019 ; Zizinga et al. 2022 ; Mirón et al. 2023 ). United Nations reported that the human population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050. In response, food-calorie production will have to expand by 70% to meet the food demand of the growing population (United Nations 2021 ). Hence, it is imperative to advocate for robust mitigation strategies that counteract the negative impacts of climate change and enhance the flexibility and speed of response in smallholder farming systems.

A transformation of the agricultural sector towards climate-resilient practices can help tackle food security and climate change challenges successfully. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an approach that guides farmers’ actions to transform agrifood systems towards building the agricultural sector’s resilience to climate change based on three pillars: increasing farm productivity and incomes, enhancing the resilience of livelihoods and ecosystems, and reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere (FAO 2013 ). Promoting the adoption of CSA practices is crucial to improve smallholder farmers’ capacity to adapt to climate change, mitigate its impact, and help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Realizing the benefits of adopting CSA, governments in different countries and international organizations such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have made great efforts to scale up and out the CSA. For example, climate-smart villages in India (Alam and Sikka 2019 ; Hariharan et al. 2020 ) and civil society organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Waters-Bayer et al. 2015 ; Brown 2016 ) have been developed to reduce information costs and barriers and bridge the gap in finance access to promote farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultural practices, including CSA. Besides, agricultural training programs have been used to enhance farmers’ knowledge of CSA and their adoption of the technology in Ghana (Zakaria et al. 2020 ; Martey et al. 2021 ).

As a result, smallholder farmers worldwide have adopted various CSA practices and technologies (e.g., integrated crop systems, drop diversification, inter-cropping, improved pest, water, and nutrient management, improved grassland management, reduced tillage and use of diverse varieties and breeds, restoring degraded lands, and improved the efficiency of input use) to reach the objectives of CSA (Kpadonou et al. 2017 ; Zakaria et al. 2020 ; Khatri-Chhetri et al. 2020 ; Aryal et al. 2020a ; Waaswa et al. 2022 ; Vatsa et al. 2023 ). In the Indian context, technologies such as laser land levelling and the happy seeder have been promoted widely for their potential in climate change adaptation and mitigation, offering benefits in terms of farm profitability, emission reduction, and water and land productivity (Aryal et al. 2020b ; Keil et al. 2021 ). In some African countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, climate-smart feeding practices in the livestock sector have been suggested to tackle challenges in feed quality and availability exacerbated by climate change, aiming to improve livestock productivity and resilience (García de Jalón et al. 2017 ; Shikuku et al. 2017 ; Radeny et al. 2022 ).

Several studies have investigated the factors influencing farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA practices. They have focused on, for example, farmers’ characteristics (e.g., age, gender, and education), farm-level characteristics (e.g., farm size, land fertility, and land tenure security), socioeconomic factors (e.g., economic conditions), institutional factors (e.g., development programs, membership in farmers’ organizations, and access to agricultural training), climate conditions, and access to information (Aryal et al. 2018 ; Tran et al. 2020 ; Zakaria et al. 2020 ; Kangogo et al. 2021 ; Diro et al. 2022 ; Kifle et al. 2022 ; Belay et al. 2023 ; Zhou et al. 2023 ). For example, Aryal et al. ( 2018 ) found that household characteristics (e.g., general caste, education, and migration status), plot characteristics (e.g., tenure of plot, plot size, and soil fertility), distance to market, and major climate risks are major factors determining farmers’ adoption of multiple CSA practices in India. Tran et al. ( 2020 ) reported that age, gender, number of family workers, climate-related factors, farm characteristics, distance to markets, access to climate information, confidence in the know-how of extension workers, membership in social/agricultural groups, and attitude toward risk are the major factors affecting rice farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA technologies in Vietnam. Diro et al.’s ( 2022 ) analysis revealed that coffee growers’ decisions to adopt CSA practices are determined by their education, extension (access to extension services and participation on field days), and ownership of communication devices, specifically radio in Ethiopia. Zhou et al. 2023 ) found that cooperative membership significantly increases the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices among banana-producing farmers in China. These studies provide significant insights regarding the factors influencing farmers’ decisions regarding CSA adoption.

A growing body of studies have also estimated the effects of CSA adoption. They have found that CSA practices enhance food security and dietary diversity by increasing crop yields and rural incomes (Amadu et al. 2020 ; Akter et al. 2022 ; Santalucia 2023 ; Tabe-Ojong et al. 2023 ; Vatsa et al. 2023 ; Omotoso and Omotayo 2024 ). For example, Akter et al. ( 2022 ) found that adoption of CSA practices was positively associated with rice, wheat, and maize yields and household income, contributing to household food security in Bangladesh. By estimating data from rice farmers in China, Vatsa et al. ( 2023 ) reported that intensifying the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices improved rice yield by 94 kg/mu and contributed to food security. Santalucia ( 2023 ) and Omotoso and Omotayo ( 2024 ) found that adoption of CSA practices (improved maize varieties and maize-legume intercropping) increases household dietary diversity and food security among smallholders in Tanzania and Nigeria, respectively.

Agriculture is crucial in climate change, accounting for roughly 20% of worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Additionally, it is responsible for approximately 45% of the global emissions of methane, a potent gas that significantly contributes to heat absorption in the atmosphere. CSA adoption improves farm resilience to climate variability (e.g., Makate et al. 2019 ; Jamil et al. 2021 ) and mitigates greenhouse gas emissions (Israel et al. 2020 ; McNunn et al. 2020 ). For example, Makate et al. ( 2019 ) for southern Africa and Jamil et al. ( 2021 ) for Pakistan found that promoting CSA innovations is crucial for boosting farmers’ resilience to climate change. McNunn et al. ( 2020 ) reported that CSA adoption significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by increasing soil organic carbon stocks and decreasing nitrous oxide emissions.

Although a growing number of studies have enriched our understanding of the determinants and impacts of ICT adoption, it should be emphasized that no one-size-fits-all approach exists for CSA technology adoption due to geographical and environmental variability. The definitions of CSA should also be advanced to better adapt to changing climate and regional production conditions. Clearly, despite the extensive research on CSA, several gaps remain. First, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that consolidate findings across different geographical regions to inform policymaking effectively. The calls for studies on literature review and meta-analysis to synthesize the findings of the existing studies to make our understanding generalized. Second, although the literature on determinants of CSA adoption is becoming rich, there is a lack of understanding of how CSA adoption is influenced by different forms of capital, social responsibility awareness of farmers’ cultivating family farms, and digital advisory services. Third, there is a lack of understanding of how climate-smart villages and civil society organizations address farmers’ financial constraints and encourage them to adopt modern sustainable agricultural practices, including CSA practices. Fourth, very few studies have explored how CSA adoption influences the benefit–cost ratio of farm production, factor demand, and input substitution. Fifth, no previous studies have reported the progress of research on CSA. Addressing these gaps is crucial for designing and implementing effective policies and programs that support the widespread adoption of CSA practices, thereby contributing to sustainable agricultural development and climate resilience.

We address the research gaps mentioned above and extend the findings in previous studies by organizing a Special Issue on “Climate-Smart Agriculture: Adoption, Impacts, and Implications for Sustainable Development” in the Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change (MASGC) journal. We aim to collect high-quality theoretical and applied research papers discussing CSA and seek to comprehensively understand the associations between CSA and sustainable rural and agricultural development. To achieve this goal, we aim to find answers to these questions: What are the CSA practices and technologies (either single or multiple) that are currently adopted in smallholder farming systems? What are the key barriers, challenges, and drivers of promoting CSA practices? What are the impacts of adopting these practices? Answers to these questions will help devise appropriate solutions for promoting sustainable agricultural production and rural development. They will also provide insights for policymakers to design appropriate policy instruments to develop agricultural practices and technologies and promote them to sustainably enhance the farm sector’s resilience to climate change and increase productivity.

Finally, 19 papers were selected after a rigorous peer-review process and published in this special issue. We collected 10 papers investigating the determinants of CSA adoption. Among them, four papers investigated the determinants of CSA adoption among smallholders by reviewing and summarizing the findings in the literature and conducting a meta-analysis. Three papers explored the role of social-economic factors on ICT adoption, including capital, social responsibility awareness, and digital advisory services. Besides, three papers examined the associations between external development interventions, including climate-smart villages and civil-society initiatives, and CSA adoption. We collected eight papers exploring the impacts of CSA adoption. Among them, one paper conducted a comprehensive literature review to summarize the impacts of CSA adoption on crop yields, farm income, and environmental sustainability. Six papers estimated the impacts of CSA adoption on crop yields and farm income, and one paper focused on the impact of CSA adoption on factor demand and input substitution. The last paper included in this special issue delved into the advancements in technological innovation for agricultural adaptation within the context of climate-smart agriculture.

The structure of this paper is as follows: Section  2 summarizes the papers received in this special issue. Section  3 introduces the international conference that was purposely organized for the special issue. Section  4 summarizes the key findings of the 19 papers published in the special issue, followed by a summary of their policy implications, presented in Section  5 . The final section provides a brief conclusion.

2 Summary of received manuscripts

The special issue received 77 submissions, with the contributing authors hailing from 22 countries, as illustrated in Fig.  1 . This diversity highlights the global interest and wide-ranging contributions to the issue. Notably, over half of these submissions (53.2%) originated from corresponding authors in India and China, with 29 and 12 manuscripts, respectively. New Zealand authors contributed six manuscripts, while their Australian counterparts submitted four. Following closely, authors from the United Kingdom and Kenya each submitted three manuscripts. Authors from Thailand, Pakistan, Japan, and Germany submitted two manuscripts each. The remaining 12 manuscripts came from authors in Vietnam, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Italy, Indonesia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Bangladesh.

Distributions of 77 received manuscripts by corresponding authors' countries

Among the 77 received manuscripts, 30 were desk-rejected by the guest editors because they did not meet the aims and scope of the special issue, and the remaining 47, considered candidate papers for the special issue, were sent for external review. The decision on each manuscript was made based on review reports of 2–4 experts in this field. The guest editors also read and commented on each manuscript before they made decisions.

3 ADBI virtual international conference

3.1 selected presentations.

The guest editors from Lincoln University (New Zealand) and the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) (Tokyo, Japan) organized a virtual international conference on the special issue theme “ Climate-Smart Agriculture: Adoption, Impacts, and Implications for Sustainable Development ”. The conference was organized on 10–11 October 2023 and was supported by the ADBI. Footnote 1 As previously noted, the guest editors curated a selection of 47 manuscripts from the pool of 77 submissions, identifying them as potential candidates for inclusion in the special issue, and sent them out for external review. Given the logistical constraints of orchestrating a two-day conference, the guest editors ultimately extended invitations to 20 corresponding authors. These authors were invited to present their work at the virtual international conference.

Figure  2 illustrates the native countries of the presenters, showing that the presenters were from 10 different countries. Most of the presenters were from India, accounting for 40% of the presenters. This is followed by China, where the four presenters were originally from. The conference presentations and discussions proved immensely beneficial, fostering knowledge exchange among presenters, discussants, and participants. It significantly allowed presenters to refine their manuscripts, leveraging the constructive feedback from discussants and fellow attendees.

Distributions of selected presentations by corresponding authors' countries

3.2 Keynote speeches

The guest editors invited two keynote speakers to present at the two-day conference. They were Prof. Edward B. Barbier from the Colorado State University in the United States Footnote 2 and Prof. Tatsuyoshi Saijo from Kyoto University of Advanced Science in Japan. Footnote 3

Prof. Edward Barbier gave a speech, “ A Policy Strategy for Climate-Smart Agriculture for Sustainable Rural Development ”, on 10th October 2023. He outlined a strategic approach for integrating CSA into sustainable rural development, particularly within emerging markets and developing economies. He emphasized the necessity of CSA and nature-based solutions (NbS) to tackle food security, climate change, and rural poverty simultaneously. Highlighting the substantial investment needs and the significant role of international and domestic financing, Prof. Barbier advocated reducing harmful subsidies in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and fossil fuel consumption to redirect funds toward CSA and NbS investments. He also proposed the implementation of a tropical carbon tax as an innovative financing mechanism. By focusing on recycling environmentally harmful subsidies and leveraging additional funding through public and private investments, Prof. Barbier’s strategy aims to foster a “win–win” scenario for climate action and sustainable development, underscoring the urgency of adopting comprehensive policies to mobilize the necessary resources for these critical investments.

Prof. Tatsuyoshi Saijo, gave his speech, “ Future Design ”, on 11th October 2023. He explored the significant impact of the Haber–Bosch process on human civilization and the environment. Prof. Saijo identifies this process, which synthetically fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere to create ammonia for fertilizers and other products, as the greatest invention from the twentieth century to the present, fundamentally transforming the world’s food production and enabling the global population and industrial activities to expand dramatically. He also discussed the environmental costs of this technological advancement, including increased greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and contribution to climate change. Prof. Saijo then introduced the concept of “Future Design” as a method to envision and implement sustainable social systems that consider the well-being of future generations. He presented various experiments and case studies from Japan and beyond, showing how incorporating perspectives of imaginary future generations into decision-making processes can lead to more sustainable choices. By doing so, Prof. Saijo suggested that humanity can address the “Intergenerational Sustainability Dilemma” and potentially avoid the ecological overshoot and collapse faced by past civilizations like Easter Island. He called for a redesign of social systems to activate “futurability”, where individuals derive happiness from decisions that benefit future generations, ultimately aiming to ensure the long-term survival of humankind amidst environmental challenges.

4 Summary of published articles

As a result of a rigorous double-anonymized reviewing process, the special issue accepted 19 articles for publication. These studies have investigated the determinants and impacts of CSA adoption. Table 1 in the Appendix summarises the CSA technologies and practices considered in each paper. Below, we summarize the key findings of the contributions based on their research themes.

4.1 Determinants of CSA adoption among smallholders

4.1.1 influencing factors of csa adoption from literature review.

Investigating the factors influencing farmers’ adoption of CSA practices through a literature review helps offer a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted determinants of CSA adoption. Investigating the factors influencing farmers’ adoption of CSA practices through a literature review helps provide a comprehensive understanding of the determinants of CSA adoption. Such analyses help identify consistent trends and divergences in how different variables influence farmers’ CSA adoption decisions. In this special issue, we collected four papers that reviewed the literature and synthesized the factors influencing farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA.

Li, Ma and Zhu’s paper, “ A systematic literature review of factors influencing the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices ”, conducted a systematic review of the literature on the adoption of CSA, summarizing the definitions of CSA practices and the factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt these practices. The authors reviewed 190 studies published between 2013 and 2023. They broadly defined CSA practices as “agricultural production-related and unrelated practices that can help adapt to climate change and increase agricultural outputs”. Narrowly, they defined CSA practices as “agricultural production-related practices that can effectively adapt agriculture to climate change and reinforce agricultural production capacity”. The review identified that many factors, including age, gender, education, risk perception, preferences, access to credit, farm size, production conditions, off-farm income, and labour allocation, have a mixed (positive or negative) influence on the adoption of CSA practices. Variables such as labour endowment, land tenure security, access to extension services, agricultural training, membership in farmers’ organizations, support from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), climate conditions, and access to information were consistently found to positively influence CSA practice adoption.

Thottadi and Singh’s paper, “ Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) adaptation, adaptation determinants and extension services synergies: A systematic review ””, reviewed 45 articles published between 2011 and 2022 to explore different CAS practices adopted by farmers and the factors determining their adoption. They found that CSA practices adopted by farmers can be categorized into five groups. These included resilient technologies (e.g., early maturing varieties, drought-resistant varieties, and winter ploughing), management strategies (e.g., nutrient management, water management, and pest management), conservation technologies (e.g., vermicomposting and residue management, drip and sprinkler irrigation, and soil conservation), diversification of income security (e.g., mixed farming, livestock, and crop diversification), and risk mitigation strategies (e.g., contingent planning, adjusting plant dates, and crop insurance). They also found that farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA practices are mainly determined by individual characteristics (age, gender, and education), socioeconomic factors (income and wealth), institutional factors (social group, access to credit, crop insurance, distance, land tenure, and rights), behavioural factors (climate perception, farmers’ perception on CSA, Bookkeeping), and factor endowments (family labour, machinery, and land size). The authors emphasized that extension services improved CSA adaptation by reducing information asymmetry.

Naveen, Datta, Behera and Rahut’s paper, “ Climate-Smart Agriculture in South Asia: Exploring Practices, Determinants, and Contribution to Sustainable Development Goals ”, offered a comprehensive systematic review of 78 research papers on CSA practice adoption in South Asia. Their objective was to assess the current implementation of CSA practices and to identify the factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt these practices. They identified various CSA practices widely adopted in South Asia, including climate-resilient seeds, zero tillage, water conservation, rescheduling of planting, crop diversification, soil conservation and water harvesting, and agroforestry. They also identified several key factors that collectively drive farmers’ adoption of CSA practices. These included socioeconomic factors (age, education, livestock ownership, size of land holdings, and market access), institutional factors (access to information and communication technology, availability of credit, input subsidies, agricultural training and demonstrations, direct cash transfers, and crop insurance), and climatic factors (notably rising temperatures, floods, droughts, reduced rainfall, and delayed rainfall).

Wang, Wang and Fu’s paper, “ Can social networks facilitate smallholders’ decisions to adopt Climate-smart Agriculture technologies? A three-level meta-analysis ”, explored the influence of social networks on the adoption of CSA technologies by smallholder farmers through a detailed three-level meta-analysis. This analysis encompassed 26 empirical studies, incorporating 150 effect sizes. The authors reported a modest overall effect size of 0.065 between social networks and the decision-making process for CSA technology adoption, with an 85.21% variance observed among the sample effect sizes. They found that over half (55.17%) of this variance was attributed to the differences in outcomes within each study, highlighting the impact of diverse social network types explored across the studies as significant contributors. They did not identify publication bias in this field. Among the three types of social networks (official-advising network, peer-advising network, and kinship and friendship network), kinship and friendship networks are the most effective in facilitating smallholders’ decisions to adopt climate-smart agriculture technologies.

4.1.2 Socioeconomic factors influencing CSA adoption

We collected three papers highlighting the diverse forms of capital, social responsibility awareness, and effectiveness of digital advisory services in promoting CSA in India, China and Ghana. These studies showcase how digital tools can significantly increase the adoption of CSA technologies, how social responsibility can motivate CSA practices and the importance of various forms of capital in CSA strategy adoption.

Sandilya and Goswami’s paper, “ Effect of different forms of capital on the adoption of multiple climate-smart agriculture strategies by smallholder farmers in Assam, India ”, delved into the determinants behind the adoption of CSA strategies by smallholder farmers in Nagaon district, India, a region notably prone to climate adversities. The authors focused on six types of capital: physical, social, human, financial, natural, and institutional. They considered four CSA practices: alternate land use systems, integrated nutrient management, site-specific nutrient management, and crop diversification. Their analyses encompassed a dual approach, combining a quantitative analysis via a multivariate probit model with qualitative insights from focus group discussions. They found that agricultural cooperatives and mobile applications, both forms of social capital, play a significant role in facilitating the adoption of CSA. In contrast, the authors also identified certain barriers to CSA adoption, such as the remoteness of farm plots from all-weather roads (a component of physical capital) and a lack of comprehensive climate change advisories (a component of institutional capital). Furthermore, the authors highlighted the beneficial impact of irrigation availability (a component of physical capital) on embracing alternate land use and crop diversification strategies. Additionally, the application of indigenous technical knowledge (a component of human capital) and the provision of government-supplied seeds (a component of institutional capital) were found to influence the adoption of CSA practices distinctly.

Ye, Zhang, Song and Li’s paper, “ Social Responsibility Awareness and Adoption of Climate-smart Agricultural Practices: Evidence from Food-based Family Farms in China ”, examined whether social responsibility awareness (SRA) can be a driver for the adoption of CSA on family farms in China. Using multiple linear regression and hierarchical regression analyses, the authors analyzed data from 637 family farms in five provinces (Zhejiang, Shandong, Henan, Heilongjiang, and Hebei) in China. They found that SRA positively impacted the adoption of CSA practice. Pro-social motivation and impression management motivation partially and completely mediated the relationship between SRA and the adoption of CSA practices.

Asante, Ma, Prah and Temoso’s paper, “ Promoting the adoption of climate-smart agricultural technologies among maize farmers in Ghana: Using digital advisory services ”, investigated the impacts of digital advisory services (DAS) use on CSA technology adoption and estimated data collected from 3,197 maize farmers in China. The authors used a recursive bivariate probit model to address the self-selection bias issues when farmers use DAS. They found that DAS notably increases the propensity to adopt drought-tolerant seeds, zero tillage, and row planting by 4.6%, 4.2%, and 12.4%, respectively. The average treatment effect on the treated indicated that maize farmers who use DAS are significantly more likely to adopt row planting, zero tillage, and drought-tolerant seeds—by 38.8%, 24.9%, and 47.2%, respectively. Gender differences in DAS impact were observed; male farmers showed a higher likelihood of adopting zero tillage and drought-tolerant seeds by 2.5% and 3.6%, respectively, whereas female farmers exhibited a greater influence on the adoption of row planting, with a 2.4% probability compared to 1.5% for males. Additionally, factors such as age, education, household size, membership in farmer-based organizations, farm size, perceived drought stress, perceived pest and disease incidence, and geographic location were significant determinants in the adoption of CSA technologies.

4.1.3 Climate-smart villages and CSA adoption

Climate-Smart Villages (CSVs) play a pivotal role in promoting CSA by significantly improving farmers’ access to savings and credit, and the adoption of improved agricultural practices among smallholder farmers. CSV interventions demonstrate the power of community-based financial initiatives in enabling investments in CSA technologies. In this special issue, we collected two insightful papers investigating the relationship between CSVs and the adoption of CSA practices, focusing on India and Kenya.

Villalba, Joshi, Daum and Venus’s paper, “ Financing Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Case Study from the Indo-Gangetic Plains ”, investigated the adoption and financing of CSA technologies in India, focusing on two capital-intensive technologies: laser land levelers and happy seeders. Conducted in Karnal, Haryana, within the framework of Climate-Smart-Villages, the authors combined data from a household survey of 120 farmers, interviews, and focus group discussions with stakeholders like banks and cooperatives. The authors found that adoption rates are high, with 77% for laser land levelers and 52% for happy seeders, but ownership is low, indicating a preference for renting from Custom-Hiring Centers. Farmers tended to avoid formal banking channels for financing, opting instead for informal sources like family, savings, and money lenders, due to the immediate access to credit and avoidance of bureaucratic hurdles. The authors suggested that institutional innovations and governmental support could streamline credit access for renting CSA technologies, emphasizing the importance of knowledge transfer, capacity building, and the development of digital tools to inform farmers about financing options. This research highlights the critical role of financing mechanisms in promoting CSA technology adoption among smallholder farmers in climate-vulnerable regions.

Asseldonk, Oostendorp, Recha, Gathiaka, Mulwa, Radeny Wattel and Wesenbeeck’s paper, “ Distributional impact of climate‑smart villages on access to savings and credit and adoption of improved climate‑smart agricultural practices in the Nyando Basin, Kenya ”, investigated the impact of CSV interventions in Kenya on smallholder farmers’ access to savings, credit, and adoption of improved livestock breeds as part of CSA practices. The authors employed a linear probability model to estimate a balanced panel of 118 farm households interviewed across 2017, 2019, and 2020. They found that CSV interventions significantly increased the adoption of improved livestock breeds and membership in savings and credit groups, which further facilitated the adoption of these improved breeds. The findings highlighted that community-based savings and loan initiatives effectively enable farmers to invest in CSA practices. Although there was a sustained positive trend in savings and loans group membership, the adoption of improved livestock did not show a similar sustained increase. Moreover, the introduction of improved breeds initially benefited larger livestock owners more. However, credit availability was found to reduce this inequity in ownership among participants, making the distribution of improved livestock more equitable within CSVs compared to non-CSV areas, thus highlighting the potential of CSV interventions to reduce disparities in access to improved CSA practices.

4.1.4 Civil-society initiatives and CSA adoption

Civil society initiatives are critical in promoting CSA by embedding its principles across diverse agricultural development projects. These initiatives enhance mitigation, adaptation, and food security efforts for smallholder farmers, demonstrating the importance of varied implementation strategies to address the challenges of CSA. We collected one paper investigating how civil society-based development projects in Asia and Africa incorporated CSA principles to benefit smallholder farmers and local communities.

Davila, Jacobs, Nadeem, Kelly and Kurimoto’s paper, “ Finding climate smart agriculture in civil-society initiatives ”, scrutinized the role of international civil society and non-government organizations (NGOs) in embedding CSA principles within agricultural development projects aimed at enhancing mitigation, adaptation, and food security. Through a thematic analysis of documentation from six projects selected on the basis that they represented a range of geographical regions (East Africa, South, and Southeast Asia) and initiated since 2009, the authors assessed how development programs incorporate CSA principles to support smallholder farmers under CSA’s major pillars. They found heterogeneous application of CSA principles across the projects, underscoring a diversity in implementation strategies despite vague definitions and focuses of CSA. The projects variedly contributed to greening and forests, knowledge exchange, market development, policy and institutional engagement, nutrition, carbon and climate action, and gender considerations.

4.2 Impacts of CSA adoption

4.2.1 impacts of csa adoption from literature review.

A comprehensive literature review on the impacts of CSA adoption plays an indispensable role in bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical implementation in the agricultural sector. In this special issue, we collected one paper that comprehensively reviewed the literature on the impacts of CSA adoption from the perspective of the triple win of CSA.

Zheng, Ma and He’s paper, “ Climate-smart agricultural practices for enhanced farm productivity, income, resilience, and Greenhouse gas mitigation: A comprehensive review ”, reviewed 107 articles published between 2013–2023 to distill a broad understanding of the impacts of CSA practices. The review categorized the literature into three critical areas of CSA benefits: (a) the sustainable increase of agricultural productivity and incomes; (b) the adaptation and enhancement of resilience among individuals and agrifood systems to climate change; and (c) the reduction or avoidance of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions where feasible. The authors found that CSA practices significantly improved farm productivity and incomes and boosted technical and resource use efficiency. Moreover, CSA practices strengthened individual resilience through improved food consumption, dietary diversity, and food security while enhancing agrifood systems’ resilience by mitigating production risks and reducing vulnerability. Additionally, CSA adoption was crucial in lowering Greenhouse gas emissions and fostering carbon sequestration in soils and biomass, contributing to improved soil quality.

4.2.2 Impacts on crop yields and farm income

Understanding the impact of CSA adoption on crop yields and income is crucial for improving agricultural resilience and sustainability. In this special issue, we collected three papers highlighting the transformative potential of CSA practices in boosting crop yields, commercialization, and farm income. One paper focuses on India and the other concentrates on Ghana and Kenya.

Tanti, Jena, Timilsina and Rahut’s paper, “ Enhancing crop yields and farm income through climate-smart agricultural practices in Eastern India ”, examined the impact of CSA practices (crop rotation and integrated soil management practices) on crop yields and incomes. The authors used propensity score matching and the two-stage least square model to control self-selection bias and endogeneity and analyzed data collected from 494 farm households in India. They found that adopting CSA practices increases agricultural income and paddy yield. The crucial factor determining the adoption of CSA practices was the income-enhancing potential to transform subsistence farming into a profoundly ingrained farming culture.

Asante, Ma, Prah and Temoso’s paper, “ Farmers’ adoption of multiple climate-smart agricultural technologies in Ghana: Determinants and impacts on maize yields and net farm income ”, investigated the factors influencing maize growers’ decisions to adopt CSA technologies and estimated the impact of adopting CSA technologies on maize yields and net farm income. They considered three CSA technology types: drought-resistant seeds, row planting, and zero tillage. The authors used the multinomial endogenous switching regression model to estimate the treatment effect of CSA technology adoption and analyze data collected from 3,197 smallholder farmers in Ghana. They found that farmer-based organization membership, education, resource constraints such as lack of land, access to markets, and production shocks such as perceived pest and disease stress and drought are the main factors that drive farmers’ decisions to adopt CSA technologies. They also found that integrating any CSA technology or adopting all three CSA technologies greatly enhances maize yields and net farm income. Adopting all three CSA technologies had the largest impact on maize yields, while adopting row planting and zero tillage had the greatest impact on net farm income.

Mburu, Mburu, Nyikal, Mugera and Ndambi’s paper, “ Assessment of Socioeconomic Determinants and Impacts of Climate-Smart Feeding Practices in the Kenyan Dairy Sector ”, assessed the determinants and impacts of adopting climate-smart feeding practices (fodder and feed concentrates) on yield, milk commercialization, and household income. The authors used multinomial endogenous switching regression to account for self-selection bias arising from observable and unobservable factors and estimated data collected from 665 dairy farmers in Kenya. They found that human and social capital, resource endowment, dairy feeding systems, the source of information about feeding practices, and perceived characteristics were the main factors influencing farmers’ adoption of climate-smart feeding practices. They also found that combining climate-smart feed concentrates and fodder significantly increased milk productivity, output, and dairy income. Climate-smart feed concentrates yielded more benefits regarding dairy milk commercialization and household income than climate-smart fodder.

4.2.3 Impacts on crop yields

Estimating the impacts of CSA adoption on crop yields is crucial for enhancing food security, improving farmers’ resilience to climate change, and guiding policy and investment towards sustainable agricultural development. In this special issue, we collected one paper that provided insights into this field.

Singh, Bisaria, Sinha, Patasaraiya and Sreerag’s paper, “ Developing A Composite Weighted Indicator-based Index for Monitoring and Evaluating Climate-Smart Agriculture in India ”, developed a composite index based on a weighted index to calculate the Climate Smart Score (CSS) at the farm level in India and tested the relationship between computed CSS and farm-level productivity. Through an intensive literature review, the authors selected 34 indicators, which were then grouped into five dimensions for calculating CSS. These dimensions encompassed governance (e.g., land ownership, subsidized fertilizer, and subsidized seeds), farm management practices (mulching, zero tillage farming, and inter-cropping and crop diversification), environment management practices (e.g., not converting forested land into agricultural land and Agroforestry/plantation), energy management (e.g., solar water pump and Biogas digester), and awareness and training (e.g., knowledge of climate-related risk and timely access to weather and agro-advisory). They tested the relationship between CSS and farm productivity using data collected from 315 farmers. They found that improved seeds, direct seeding of rice, crop diversification, zero tillage, agroforestry, crop residue management, integrated nutrient management, and training on these practices were the most popular CSA practices the sampled farmers adopted. In addition, there was a positive association between CSS and paddy, wheat, and maize yields. This finding underscores the beneficial impact of CSA practices on enhancing farm productivity.

4.2.4 Impacts on incomes and benefit–cost ratio

Understanding the income effects of CSA adoption is crucial for assessing its impact on household livelihoods, farm profitability, and income diversity. Quantifying income enhancements would contribute to informed decision-making and investment strategies to improve farming communities’ economic well-being. In this special issue, we collected two papers looking into the effects of CSA adoption on income.

Sang, Chen, Hu and Rahut’s paper, “ Economic benefits of climate-smart agricultural practices: Empirical investigations and policy implications ”, investigated the impact of CSA adoption intensity on household income, net farm income, and income diversity. They used the two-stage residual inclusion model to mitigate the endogeneity of CSA adoption intensity and analyzed the 2020 China Rural Revitalization Survey data. They also used the instrumental-variable-based quantile regression model to investigate the heterogeneous impacts of CSA adoption intensity. The authors found that the education level of the household head and geographical location determine farmers’ adoption intensity of CSAs.CSA practices. The higher levels of CSA adoption were positively and significantly associated with higher household income, net farm income, and income diversity. They also found that while the impact of CSA adoption intensity on household income escalates across selected quantiles, its effect on net farm income diminishes over these quantiles. Additionally, the study reveals that CSA adoption intensity notably enhances income diversity at the 20th quantile only.

Kandulu, Zuo, Wheeler, Dusingizimana and Chagund’s paper, “ Influence of climate-smart technologies on the success of livestock donation programs for smallholder farmers in Rwanda ”, investigated the economic, environmental, and health benefits of integrating CSA technologies —specifically barns and biogas plants—into livestock donation programs in Rwanda. Employing a stochastic benefit–cost analysis from the perspective of the beneficiaries, the authors assessed the net advantages for households that receive heifers under an enhanced program compared to those under the existing scheme. They found that incorporating CSA technologies not only boosts the economic viability of these programs but also significantly increases the resilience and sustainability of smallholder farming systems. More precisely, households equipped with cows and CSA technologies can attain net benefits up to 3.5 times greater than those provided by the current program, with the benefit–cost ratios reaching up to 5. Furthermore, biogas technology reduces deforestation, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and lowering the risk of respiratory illnesses, underscoring the multifaceted advantages of integrating such innovations into livestock donation initiatives.

4.2.5 Impacts on factor demand and input substitution

Estimating the impacts of CSA adoption on factor demand and input substitution is key to optimizing resource use, reducing environmental footprints, and ensuring agricultural sustainability by enabling informed decisions on efficient input use and technology adoption. In this field, we collected one paper that enriched our understanding in this field. Understanding the impacts of CSA adoption on factor demand, input substitution, and financing options is crucial for promoting sustainable farming in diverse contexts. In this special issue, we collected one paper comprehensively discussing how CSA adoption impacted factor demand and input substitution.

Kehinde, Shittu, Awe and Ajayi’s paper, “ Effects of Using Climate-Smart Agricultural Practices on Factor Demand and Input Substitution among Smallholder Rice Farmers in Nigeria ”, examined the impacts of agricultural practices with CSA potential (AP-CSAPs) on the demand of labour and other production factors (seed, pesticides, fertilizers, and mechanization) and input substitution. The AP-CSAPs considered in this research included zero/minimum tillage, rotational cropping, green manuring, organic manuring, residue retention, and agroforestry. The authors employed the seemingly unrelated regression method to estimate data collected from 1,500 smallholder rice farmers in Nigeria. The authors found that labour and fertilizer were not easily substitutable in the Nigerian context; increases in the unit price of labour (wage rate) and fertilizer lead to a greater budget allocation towards these inputs. Conversely, a rise in the cost of mechanization services per hectare significantly reduced labour costs while increasing expenditure on pesticides and mechanization services. They also found that most AP-CSAPs were labour-intensive, except for agroforestry, which is labor-neutral. Organic manure and residue retention notably conserved pesticides, whereas zero/minimum tillage practices increased the use of pesticides and fertilizers. Furthermore, the demand for most production factors, except pesticides, was found to be price inelastic, indicating that price changes do not significantly alter the quantity demanded.

4.3 Progress of research on CSA

Understanding the progress of research on CSA is essential for identifying and leveraging technological innovations—like greenhouse advancements, organic fertilizer products, and biotechnological crop improvements—that support sustainable agricultural adaptation. This knowledge enables the integration of nature-based strategies, informs policy, and underscores the importance of international cooperation in overcoming patent and CSA adoption challenges to ensure global food security amidst climate change. We collected one paper in this field.

Tey, Brindal, Darham and Zainalabidin’s paper, “ Adaptation technologies for climate-smart agriculture: A patent network analysis ”, delved into the advancements in technological innovation for agricultural adaptation within the context of CSA by analyzing global patent databases. The authors found that greenhouse technologies have seen a surge in research and development (R&D) efforts, whereas composting technologies have evolved into innovations in organic fertilizer products. Additionally, biotechnology has been a significant focus, aiming to develop crop traits better suited to changing climate conditions. A notable emergence is seen in resource restoration innovations addressing climate challenges. These technologies offer a range of policy options for climate-smart agriculture, from broad strategies to specific operational techniques, and pave the way for integration with nature-based adaptation strategies. However, the widespread adoption and potential impact of these technologies may be hindered by issues related to patent ownership and the path dependency this creates. Despite commercial interests driving the diffusion of innovation, international cooperation is clearly needed to enhance technology transfer.

5 Summary of key policy implications

The collection of 19 papers in this special issue sheds light on the critical aspects of promoting farmers’ adoption of CSA practices, which eventually help enhance agricultural productivity and resilience, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve food security and soil health, offer economic benefits to farmers, and contribute to sustainable development and climate change adaptation. We summarize and discuss the policy implications derived from this special issue from the following four aspects:

5.1 Improving CSA adoption through extension services

Extension services help reduce information asymmetry associated with CSA adoption and increase farmers’ awareness of CSA practices’ benefits, costs, and risks while addressing their specific challenges. Therefore, the government should improve farmers’ access to extension services. These services need to be inclusive and customized to meet the gender-specific needs and the diverse requirements of various farming stakeholders. Additionally, fostering partnerships between small and medium enterprises and agricultural extension agents is crucial for enhancing the local availability of CSA technologies. Government-sponsored extension services should prioritize equipping farmers with essential CSA skills, ensuring they are well-prepared to implement these practices. This structured approach will streamline the adoption process and significantly improve the effectiveness of CSA initiatives.

5.2 Facilitating CSA adoption through farmers’ organizations

Farmers’ organizations, such as village cooperatives, farmer groups, and self-help groups, play a pivotal role in facilitating farmers’ CSA adoption and empowering rural women’s adoption through effective information dissemination and the use of agricultural apps. Therefore, the government should facilitate the establishment and development of farmers’ organizations and encourage farmers to join those organizations as members. In particular, the proven positive impacts of farmer-based organizations (FBOs) highlight the importance of fostering collaborations between governments and FBOs. Supporting farmer cooperatives with government financial and technical aid is essential for catalyzing community-driven climate adaptation efforts. Furthermore, the successful use of DAS in promoting CSA adoption underscores the need for government collaboration with farmer groups to expand DAS utilization. This includes overcoming usage barriers and emphasizing DAS’s reliability as a source of climate-smart information. By establishing and expanding digital hubs and demonstration centres in rural areas, farmers can access and experience DAS technologies firsthand, leading to broader adoption and integration into their CSA practices.

5.3 Enhancing CSA adoption through agricultural training and education

Agricultural training and education are essential in enhancing farmers’ adoption of CSA. To effectively extend the reach of CSA practices, the government should prioritize expanding rural ICT infrastructure investments and establish CSA training centres equipped with ICT tools that target key demographics such as women and older people, aiming to bridge the digital adoption gaps. Further efforts should prioritize awareness and training programs to ensure farmers can access weather and agro-advisory services. These programs should promote the use of ICT-based tools through collaborations with technology providers and include regular CSA training and the establishment of demonstration fields that showcase the tangible benefits of CSA practices.

Education plays a vital role in adopting CAPs, suggesting targeted interventions such as comprehensive technical training to assist farmers with limited educational backgrounds in understanding the value of CAPs, ultimately improving their adoption rates. Establishing robust monitoring mechanisms is crucial to maintaining farmer engagement and success in CSA practices. These mechanisms will facilitate the ongoing adoption and evaluation of CSA practices and help educate farmers on the long-term benefits. Centralizing and disseminating information about financial products and subsidies through various channels, including digital platforms tailored to local languages and contexts, is essential. This approach helps educate farmers on financing options and requirements, supporting the adoption of CSA technologies among smallholder farmers. Lastly, integrating traditional and local knowledge with scientific research and development can effectively tailor CSA initiatives. This integration requires the involvement of a range of stakeholders, including NGOs, to navigate the complexities of CSA and ensure that interventions are effective but also equitable and sustainable. The enhanced capacity of institutions and their extension teams will further support these CSA initiatives.

5.4 Promoting CSA adoption through establishing social networks and innovating strategies

The finding that social networks play a crucial role in promoting the adoption of CSA suggests that implementing reward systems to incentivize current CSA adopters to advocate for climate-smart practices within their social circles could be an effective strategy to promote CSA among farmers. The evidence of a significant link between family farms’ awareness of social responsibility and their adoption of CSA highlights that governments should undertake initiatives, such as employing lectures and pamphlets, to enhance family farm operating farmers’ understanding of social responsibility. The government should consider introducing incentives that foster positive behavioural changes among family farms to cultivate a more profound commitment to social responsibility. The government can also consider integrating social responsibility criteria into the family farm awards and recognition evaluation process. These measures would encourage family farms to align their operations with broader social and environmental goals, promoting CSA practices.

Combining traditional incentives, such as higher wages and access to improved agricultural inputs, with innovative strategies like community-driven development for equipment sharing and integrating moral suasion with Payment for Ecosystem Services would foster farmers’ commitment to CSA practices. The finding that technological evolution plays a vital role in shaping adaptation strategies for CSA highlights the necessity for policy instruments that not only leverage modern technologies but also integrate them with traditional, nature-based adaptation strategies, enhancing their capacity to address specific CSA challenges. Policymakers should consider the region’s unique socioeconomic, environmental, and geographical characteristics when promoting CSA, moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to ensure the adaptability and relevance of CSA practices across different agricultural landscapes. They should foster an environment that encourages the reporting of all research outcomes to develop evidence-based policies that are informed by a balanced view of CSA’s potential benefits and limitations.

Finally, governance is critical in creating an enabling environment for CSA adoption. Policies should support CSA practices and integrate environmental sustainability to enhance productivity and ecosystem health. Development programs must offer financial incentives, establish well-supported voluntary schemes, provide robust training programs, and ensure the wide dissemination of informational tools. These measures are designed to help farmers integrate CAPs into their operations, improving economic and operational sustainability.

6 Concluding remarks

This special issue has provided a wealth of insights into the adoption and impact of CSA practices across various contexts, underscoring the complexity and multifaceted nature of CSA implementation. The 19 papers in this special issue collectively emphasize the importance of understanding local conditions, farmer characteristics, and broader socioeconomic and institutional factors that influence CSA adoption. They highlight the crucial role of extension services, digital advisory services, social responsibility awareness, and diverse forms of capital in facilitating the adoption of CSA practices. Moreover, the findings stress the positive impact of CSA on farm productivity, income diversification, and resilience to climate change while also pointing out the potential for CSA practices to address broader sustainability goals.

Significantly, the discussions underline the need for policy frameworks that are supportive and adaptive, tailored to specific regional and local contexts to promote CSA adoption effectively. Leveraging social networks, enhancing access to financial products and mechanisms, and integrating technological innovations with traditional agricultural practices are vital strategies for scaling CSA adoption. Furthermore, the discussions advocate for a balanced approach that combines economic incentives with moral persuasion and community engagement to foster sustainable agricultural practices.

These comprehensive insights call for concerted efforts from policymakers, researchers, extension agents, and the agricultural community to foster an enabling environment for CSA. Such an environment would support knowledge exchange, financial accessibility, and the adoption of CSA practices that contribute to the resilience and sustainability of agricultural systems in the face of climate change. As CSA continues to evolve, future research should focus on addressing the gaps identified, exploring innovative financing and technology dissemination models, and assessing the long-term impacts of CSA practices on agricultural sustainability and food security. This special issue lays the groundwork for further exploration and implementation of CSA practices, aiming to achieve resilient, productive, and sustainable agricultural systems worldwide and contribute to the achievements of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Data availability

No new data were created or analyzed during this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.

The conference agenda, biographies of the speakers, and conference recordings are available at the ADBI website: https://www.adb.org/news/events/climate-smart-agriculture-adoption-impacts-and-implications-for-sustainable-development .

Profile of Prof. Edward B. Barbie: http://www.edwardbbarbier.com/ .

Google Scholar of Prof. Tatsuyoshi Saijo: https://scholar.google.co.nz/citations?user=ju72inUAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao .

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank all the authors who have submitted papers for the special issue and the reviewers who reviewed manuscripts on time. We acknowledge the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) for supporting the virtual international conference on “ Climate-smart Agriculture: Adoption, Impacts, and Implications for Sustainable Development ” held on 10-11 October 2023. Special thanks to the invited keynote speakers, Prof. Edward Barbier and Prof. Tatsuyoshi Saijo. Finally, we would like to express our thanks, gratitude, and appreciation to the session chairs (Prof. Anita Wreford, Prof. Jianjun Tang, Prof. Alan Renwick, and Assoc. Prof. Sukanya Das), ADBI supporting team (Panharoth Chhay, Mami Nomoto, Mami Yoshida, and Raja Rajendra Timilsina), and discussants who made substantial contributions to the conference.

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Department of Global Value Chains and Trade, Faculty of Agribusiness and Commerce, Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand

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Dil Bahadur Rahut

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Ma, W., Rahut, D.B. Climate-smart agriculture: adoption, impacts, and implications for sustainable development. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 29 , 44 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-024-10139-z

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Received : 08 April 2024

Accepted : 17 April 2024

Published : 29 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-024-10139-z

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