Drivers to adopt agroforestry and sustainable land-use innovations: A review and framework for policy

Aiora Zabala, Unai Pascual, Luis Enrique García-Barrios and Nibedita Mukherjee

Land Use Policy, 2025, vol. 151, issue C

Abstract: What influences individuals' decisions to adopt sustainable land-use practices? The drivers of such complex decisions are manyfold. We develop a conceptual framework of the predictors that are external (contextual), related to the innovation, and internal or intrinsic to individuals. This framework can guide the design and evaluation of policies to encourage such decisions and subsequent behaviour. The conceptual framework is based on a literature review that includes empirical qualitative and quantitative analyses, mainly focused on agroforestry and its subtype, silvopasture. We inventoried 207 adoption drivers (predictors) used across the studies reviewed. We grouped these predictors into key concepts along these categories: farm and household characteristics, social environment and institutions, individual objective and subjective factors, and variables related to the land-use practice (knowledge, technical feasibility and economically rational motives). The concepts in the framework incorporate and enhance those proposed in earlier reviews of adoption of a range of sustainable land-use practices (soil conservation, organic farming, conservation agriculture, ecological farming practices, etc.). The framework is also interdisciplinary and comprehensive by including behavioural, socioeconomic and biophysical factors. It is applicable to a range of sustainable farming innovations. It can be used to evaluate policy ex-ante, by assessing what place-based conditions or barriers may need to be addressed through tailored policy instruments, as well as to inform the selection of explanatory variables in ex-post evaluations.

Keywords: Adoption; Innovation diffusion; Behavioural change; Land-use practices; Agroforestry; Silvopasture; Sustainable land use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837725000018
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:lauspo:v:151:y:2025:i:c:s0264837725000018

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2025.107468

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().