Barriers to scaling sustainable land and water management in Uganda: a cross-scale archetype approach

Abstract

In African small-scale agriculture, sustainable land and water management (SLWM) is key to improving food production while coping with climate change. However, the rate of SLWM adoption remains low, suggesting a gap between generalized SLWM advantages for rural development across the literature, and the existence of context-dependent barriers to its effective implementation. Uganda is an example of this paradox: the SLWM adoption rate is low despite favorable ecological conditions for agriculture development and a large rural population. A systemic understanding of the barriers hindering the adoption of SLWM is therefore crucial to developing coherent policy interventions and enabling effective funding strategies. Here, we propose a cross-scale archetype approach to identify and link barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. We performed 80 interviews across the country to build cognitive archetypes, harvesting stakeholders' perceptions of different types of barriers. We complemented this bottom-up perspective with a spatial archetype analysis to contextualize these results across different social-ecological regions. We found poverty trap, overpopulation, risk aversion, remoteness, and post-conflict patriarchal systems as cognitive archetypes that synthesize the different dynamics of barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. Our results reveal both specific and cross-cutting barriers. Ineffective extension services emerges as a ubiquitous barrier, whereas gender inequality is a priority barrier for large supported farms and farms in drier lowlands in northern Uganda. The combination of cognitive and spatial archetypes proposed here can help to overcome ineffective "one-size-fits-all" solutions and support context-specific policy plans to scale up SLWM, rationing resources to support sustainable intensification of agriculture.

Investing in sustainable intensification for smallholders: quantifying large-scale costs and benefits in Uganda

“…While, at first glance, this might suggest to direct investments on the highlands, which is one of the most populated areas of Uganda, this should not discourage investments in the Northern archetype. In fact, the general higher costs and lower returns in the Northern archetype can be explained by the particularly fragile postconflict conditions of this area [19]. National policies could facilitate investment (e.g.…”

“…We consider the 12 most adopted SLWM practices: mulching, trenches, terraces, agroforestry, intercropping, vegetation strips, check dams, water harvesting, soil and water conservation, manure, zero grazing and integrated crop-livestock. Since every case study includes more than one practices, we delineate the most recurrent sets of practices by using hierarchical clustering [19,30] (i.e. grouping the cases that have similar sets of SLWM practices), using the Gower dissimilarity matrix [31] to handle categorical data.…”

“…grouping the cases that have similar sets of SLWM practices), using the Gower dissimilarity matrix [31] to handle categorical data. We use the NbClust function in R, which provides the aggregated results of 30 indices, to select the optimal number of clusters in line with previous works with similar clustering methods [19,30].…”

“…The World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) documented more than 50 cases of implementation of SLWM across Uganda and thousands cases globally [15,16], finding that the large majority (93%) reported a positive or very positive cost/benefit ratio in the long term [17]. However, despite the documented benefits, the widespread adoption required to reverse land degradation is limited by the establishment costs, which represent an unbearable burden for most farmers [18,19].…”

Validity and validation in archetype analysis: practical assessment framework and guidelines

“…For example, involving stakeholders from the problem framing and hypothesis formulation phase can increase not only the conceptual validity, but can also enhance the application validity and final utility of archetypes (Vidal Merino et al 2019). Stakeholder involvement can prove useful also for increasing construct validity, because a participatory selection of attributes could be a strategy to identify the most relevant attribute and operationalize the conceptual problem (Piemontese et al 2021b), especially if used after participatory problem framing. For internal validity, participatory methods are only appropriate for specific, mostly qualitative, research methods.…”