Ethiopian agriculture is changing as new actors, relationships, and policies influence the ways in which small-scale, resource-poor farmers access and use information and knowledge in their agricultural production decisions. Although these changes suggest new opportunities for smallholders, too little is known about how changes will ultimately improve the wellbeing of smallholders in Ethiopia. The authors of this paper examine whether these changes are improving the ability of smallholders to innovate and thus improve their own welfare.
This paper characterises some of the main issues confronting water-catchment managing in a climate-changing world and addresses wide-spread concerns about the lack of connectivity between science, policy making and implementation. The paper’s arguments are ‘framed’ within a paradigm of systemic and adaptive governing, regulating, planning and managing understood as a nested systemic hierarchy. It is argued that climate change adaptation is best understood as a coevolutionary dynamic, principally, but not exclusively between human beings and the biophysical world.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a promising concept for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation in sustainable agricultural development, but empirical evidence from the farmers’ viewpoint is scarce. This paper contributes to empirical insights on the knowledge creation in CoPs as valued by farmers. Using concepts from CoP theory (domain, community, and practice) and the value creation framework (VCF) developed by Wenger et al. (Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework.
Recent research on agricultural innovation has outlined social networks’ role in diffusing agricultural knowledge; however, so far, it has broadly neglected the socio-spatial dimensions of innovation processes. Against this backdrop, the authors applies a spatially explicit translocal network perspective in order to investigate the role of migration-related translocal networks for adaptive change in a small-scale farming community in Northeast Thailand.
Farmer innovation diffusion (FID) in the developing world is not simply the adoption of an innovation made by farmers, but a process of communication and cooperation between farmers, governments, and other stakeholders. While increasing attention has been paid to farmer innovation, little is known about how farmers’ innovations are successfully diffused. To fill this gap, this paper aims to address the following questions: What conditions are necessary for farmers to participate in FID? How is a collaborative network built up between farmers and stakeholders for this purpose?
Regional agroecological systems are examples of complex adaptive systems, where sustainability is promoted by social networks that facilitate information sharing, cooperation, and connectivity among specialized components of the system. Much of the existing literature on social capital fails to recognize how networks support multiple social processes.
Agricultural information is transferred through social interactions; therefore, ties to agricultural informants and network structures within farmers’ local neighborhoods determine their information-gathering abilities. This paper uses a spatial autoregressive model that takes account of spatial autocorrelation to examine such network connections, including friendship networks and advice networks, upon farmers’ knowledge-gathering abilities during formal agricultural training.
Proven that the adoption rate of a new product is influenced by the network characteristics of the early adopters, the aim of this paper is to find the network features of the early adopters associated with high adoption rates of a specific new practice: the use of biodegradable mulching films containing soluble bio-based substances derived from municipal solid wastes. The study simulated the diffusion process by means of an agent-based model calibrated on real-world data.
In this paper is presented a novel approach to elicit stakeholder visions of future desired land use, which was applied with a broad range of experts to develop cross-sectoral visions in Europe. The approach is based on (i) combination of software tools and facilitation techniques to stimulate engagement and creativity; (ii) methodical selection of stakeholders; (iii) use of land attributes to deconstruct the multifaceted sectoral visions into land-use changes that can be clustered into few cross-sectoral visions, and (iv) a rigorous iterative process.
The objective of this paper is to review both supply- and demand-side measures for climate-smart agriculture and discuss their interlinkages, trade-offs, and context- and site-specific validity. The literature reviewed focuses on studies during the last decade (2008–2017) addressing food- and feed-related measures. Based on the literature review, potentials for different measures are identified and mapped across the globe using representative datasets.