Adoption of agroforestry innovations in the tropics: A review

The period since the early 1990s has witnessed an explosion of research on the adoption of agroforestry innovations in the tropics. Much of this work was motivated by a perceived gap between advances in agroforestry science and the success of agroforestry-based development programs and projects. Achieving the full promise of agroforestry requires a fundamental understanding of how and why farmers make long-term land-use decisions and applying this knowledge to the design, development, and ‘marketing’ of agroforestry innovations. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature that has developed during the past decade analyzing agroforestry adoption from a variety of perspectives and identifies needed future research. Much progress has been made, especially in using binary choice regression models to assess influences of farm and household characteristics on adoption and in developing ex-ante participatory, on-farm research methods for analyzing the potential adoptability of agroforestry innovations. Additional research-needs that have been identified include developing a better understanding of the role of risk and uncertainty, insights into how and why farmers adapt and modify adopted systems, factors influencing the intensity of adoption, village-level and spatial analyses of adoption, the impacts of disease such as AIDS and malaria on adoption, and the temporal path of adoption.