Knowing what influences individuals' decisions to adopt sustainable land-use practices can guide strategies to encourage these. For example, by helping practitioners and policymakers evaluate levers and potential barriers to adoption in a specific context. However, such individuals' decisions are complex and the understanding of drivers of sustainable land use adoption is spread across disciplines.
A recent review and framework for policy has been published by Aiora Zabala, Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG), University of Cambridge, along with co-authors Unai Pascual, Luis Garcia-Barrios and Nibedita Mukherjee. They develop a framework of potential drivers of agroforestry adoption, based on a structured review of 79 peer-reviewed papers. They reviewed quantitative and qualitative empirical studies, and earlier reviews. They grouped 207 predictors of adoption in categories of drivers that are external (contextual), related to the innovation, and internal or intrinsic to individuals. The framework can be used ex-ante to assess place-based conditions for a programme or ex-post to select variables for programme evaluation.
The paper 'Drivers to adopt agroforestry and sustainable land-use innovations: A review and framework for policy' can be read here.
Photo: Agroforestry in Burkina Faso with Borassus akeassii and Faidherbia albida
Photo credit: Marco Schmidt, via Wikimedia Commons