Basket of options: Unpacking the concept

Abstract

How to stimulate technological change to enhance agricultural productivity and reduce poverty remains an area of vigorous debate. In the face of heterogeneity among farm households and rural areas, one proposition is to offer potential users a ‘basket of options’ – a range of agricultural technologies from which potential users may select the ones that are best suited to their specific circumstances. While the idea of a basket of options is now generally accepted, it has attracted little critical attention. In this paper, we reflect on outstanding questions: the appropriate dimensions of a basket, its contents and how they are identified, and how a basket might be presented. We conceive a basket of options in terms of its depth (number of options related to a problem or opportunity) and breadth (the number of different problems or opportunities addressed). The dimensions of a basket should reflect the framing of the problem or opportunity at hand and the objective in offering the basket. We recognise that increasing the number of options leads to a trade-off by decreasing the fraction of those options that are relevant to an individual user. Farmers might try out, adapt or use one or more of the options in a basket, possibly leading to a process of technological change. We emphasise that the selection (or not) of specific options from the basket, and potential adaptation of the options, provide important opportunities for learning. Baskets of options can therefore be understood as important boundary concepts that invite critical engagement, comparison and discussion. Significant knowledge gaps remain, however, about the best ways to present the basket and to guide potential users to select the options that are most relevant to them.

Context Specificity and Time Dependency in Classifying Sub-Saharan Africa Dairy Cattle Farmers for Targeted Extension Farm Advice: The Case of Uganda

“…Although average values are often used in classification to come up with recommendation domains [34], the remaining heterogeneity reveals that idiosyncratic characteristics should also be valued when offering farm advice and designing agricultural technologies. Researchers and extensionists/advisors should respond to this remaining diversity by developing a basket of options for highly diverse clusters so that farmers within such clusters may select the options that are best suited to their specific circumstances [82], hence the importance of understanding the heterogeneity within the clusters. This approach of offering a basket of options for such clusters enables farmers to decide on what is most suitable for their specific situations, and it reduces the burden for research and extension to develop recommendations that address thousands of possible situations [36,83].…”

“…Although our study characterizes the current dairy production systems in Uganda, it is vital to note that these characteristics are dynamic and likely to change over time [53,99]. Such changes should therefore always be taken into consideration by the extension advisors, who should endeavor to update the training modules and methods of delivery of advice to the farmers, given the dynamic nature of the farming communities and their link to the adoption of the different innovations and interventions [82]. For instance, the farmers in cluster 1 are currently considered as resource-constrained traditional small-scale farmers, but with the use of the relevant advice derived from the aforementioned insights, some farmers can increase their scale or start using modern tools and equipment.…”

Investment Research and Analysis for the Elude Company Based on POCD and SWOT Analysis

“…The client may prefer certain locations; hence this product will have a range of alternatives. Ronner et al [12] elaborate that one approach to an efficient market and increasing its demand is offering diverse options from which they would choose. It ensures that the consumers are not restricted to a particular option.…”

Which Innovative Cropping System for Which Farmer? Supporting Farmers' Choices Through Collective Activities

“…Moreover, type-specific technical packages are often prescriptive and not flexible enough to be adopted by small-scale farmers (Tittonell and Giller, 2013;Ronner et al, 2017). An emerging way of overcoming this problem is to propose a variety of flexible technical options, sometimes called a "basket of options", from which each farmer can choose the system that best fits their own conditions (Descheemaeker et al, 2019;Ronner et al, 2021). This participatory research approach assumes that farmers are in the best position to know what is most suitable for their specific situation, and has the advantage of avoiding the need for agronomists to develop solutions adapted to each possible situation (Ronner et al, 2021).…”

“…As highlighted by Ronner et al (2021), a knowledge gap remains on how to present the various technical options and how to support farmers in their selection of the options that are most relevant to them. The objective of this research was to propose and test an innovative approach to understand farmers' selection process and to help each farmer in selecting a relevant ICS to be tested and adapted on their own farm.…”