Holistic analysis of factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry to foster forest sector based climate solutions

Dagninet Amare and Dietrich Darr

Forest Policy and Economics, 2024, vol. 164, issue C

Abstract: Improving adoption rate is vital for realizing agroforestry innovations' financial and environmental benefits including fostering climate change adaptation and resilience efforts. Adoption rate of agroforestry innovations improves through feedback-enriched interventions. Yet, the lessons that decades of adoption research generated were only partially incorporated for improving prospective development interventions. Among others, application of reductionist approaches and rarity of holistic perspectives were primary causes for poor understanding of adoption contexts and subsequent incorporation in development programs. This study shows how to undertake holistic adoption empirical analysis by constructing Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). Findings revealed that household contexts consistently, followed by innovation attributes and system level features, influenced likelihood of adopting agroforestry innovations. BBN allowed discovery of the contribution of each variable and layer of variables on optimized adoption rate. Hence results suggested which (groups of) variables to focus when aiming to improve adoption results. Further testing hypothetical policy intervention allowed comprehension of potential outcomes. The approach consolidated the view that comprehensive assessment is essential for inclusive and actual understanding of adoption influencing factors. The stratification of farmers from discretization feature of BBN allowed potential of addressing all groups of farmers (e.g., poor, medium, rich, male decision-making dominated families), evading earlier concerns of development interventions benefitting only better-off farmers. Our findings proved that holistic analysis can better foster agroforestry innovations adoption by allowing targeted interventions and hence consolidated the forest sectors climate solution opportunities for smallholder farmers.

Keywords: Ethiopia; Holistic analysis; Ensemble analysis; Reductionist approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934124000868
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:forpol:v:164:y:2024:i:c:s1389934124000868

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2024.103233

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

More articles in Forest Policy and Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().