A scoping review on incentives for adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and their outcomes

Abstract

The increasing pressure on agricultural production systems to achieve global food security and prevent environmental degradation necessitates a transition towards more sustainable practices. The purpose of this scoping review is to understand how the incentives offered to farmers motivate the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and, ultimately, how and whether they result in measurable outcomes. To this end, this scoping review examines the evidence of nearly 18,000 papers on whether incentive-based programmes lead to the adoption of sustainable practices and their effect on environmental, economic and productivity outcomes. We find that independent of the incentive type, programmes linked to short-term economic benefit have a higher adoption rate than those aimed solely at providing an ecological service. In the long run, one of the strongest motivations for farmers to adopt sustainable practices is perceived benefits for either their farms, the environment or both. Beyond this, the importance of technical assistance and extension services in promoting sustainable practices emerges strongly from this scoping review. Finally, we find that policy instruments are more effective if their design considers the characteristics of the target population, and the associated trade-offs between economic, environmental and social outcomes.

A deforestation-free path to scaling silvopastoral production systems

“…Complementary policies to mitigate the potential unintended effects on forest cover of scaling SPS may include conditional payments. Conditional payments have the same essence as payments for ecosystem services, that is, to provide economic incentives for landowners to carry out and maintain speci c actions on their farms (Alix-Garcia et al, Andersson et al, 2018;Piñeiro et al, 2020) In this context, the objective of the conditional payment would be that cattle farmers prescribe an adequate and e cient use to the calves and male cattle that will not be incorporated in the specialization of their cattle herd designated to dairy production. Likewise, the strengthening of value chains makes it possible to create incentives for farmers to not only maintain the adoption of sustainable technologies, but also to not increase the area of land that is subject those strategies (Bold, et al, 2017;de Janvry & Sadoulet, 2020).…”

One CGIAR and the Integrated Agri-food Systems Initiative: From short-termism to transformation of the world’s food systems

“…Simultaneously addressing the intimidating set of agri-food system challenges will require coordinated implementation of many strategies including rapid, extensive roll out of existing and emerging technologies (e.g., crop and animal breeding; resource use efficiency), demand management (i.e., aligning food consumption with health and environmental sustainability), ambitious spatial planning and target-setting (i.e., without double-counting or excess optimism), regulatory reform, and substantial financial investment [11,12]. Farmer adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and technologies and risk mitigation in change management will require context-appropriate combinations of agronomic support, value chain enhancement, tailored incentives, and responsive policies [13][14][15][16].…”

“…While techniques for interactive, scenario-assisted, multi-objective development planning are not new [50][51][52][53][54], they have infrequently led to significant agri-food system change [31]. Challenges range from reductionist knowledge management systems [38], narrowly scoped outcome metrics [55,56] or technological feasibility analysis [47], poorly defined validation processes [43], and sparse attention to competing interests and policy incentives [14,32] to a lack of stakeholder engagement in scenario building [30] and tradeoff analysis [57,58] and weak governance and investment capacity [24].…”

Restoring Nature at Lower Food Production Costs

“…Owing to the systems inherent complexity but also lack of consistent and adequate crop-specific financial information at global scales, to the extent of our knowledge, there are no analytical approaches investigating crop-specific and spatially explicit global-scale costs of production under existing and land-sparing production scenarios. The latter emerges as a significant research gap because it is necessary to evaluate the crop-and location-specific financial attractiveness of sustainable practices (Piñeiro et al, 2020) as higher costs essentially trigger higher risk to farmer livelihoods, and this is one of the aspects that we aim to improve alongside food security and environmental sustainability. Providing such an analytical framework, addresses this need for knowledge which is essential for investigating the cost-competitiveness of different agricultural production strategies.…”