The evaluation of a participatory extension programme focused on climate friendly farming

Abstract

Agriculture is a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions and therefore effective policy interventions are required in order to mitigate these emissions. One form of intervention used within the agricultural sector is participatory extension programmes (PEPs). PEPs are advisory programmes based on voluntary participation where farmers, researchers, and rural experts collectively learn by sharing information and experiences. To evaluate the contribution of these programmes towards more climate friendly farming, this paper conducts an ex-post evaluation of a PEP focused on the voluntary uptake of on-farm emissions mitigation practices in the UK.We use a mixed-methods approach to understand both the adoption of new practices and a range of human-social outcomes such as social learning, resilience and improved decisionmaking. We find that participants in the PEP show a higher level of practice adoption compared to non-participants. However, the evaluation of the human-social indicators shows that the change cannot always be attributed to PEP participation. The paper contributes to the current literature by conducting the first evaluation on a climate change PEP in a developed country and by developing and applying an effective evaluation framework for climate change PEPs, in order to achieve an understanding of the change achieved by PEPs.

Spatial evaluation of the impact of a climate change participatory extension programme on the uptake of soil management practices*

“…The ATEs across different estimation settings (pre-or post-matching, and with or without regression, shown in Table 5) show that participation in the PEP increases the odds of more frequent soil testing and larger soil test areas, which is in line with other studies conducted in developed countries (Goodhue et al, 2010;Knook et al, 2020b;Läpple & Hennessy, 2015b;Läpple et al, 2013;Tamini, 2011). The results based on post-PSM regression models are presented in Table 5 (columns 5 and 6), along with the estimates from the regression without matching (column 2), and post-PSM without regression (columns 3 and 4).…”

Unraveling relevant factors for effective on farm demonstration: the crucial role of relevance for participants and structural set up

“…For this analysis 28 (4-point Likert scale) variables focusing on the structural, functional and learning aspects of on-farm demonstrations, along with 6 variables (Table 1) representing the events' effectiveness according to farmers' perceptions, were used. Therefore, we did not select the most usually used outcome indicators such as adoption (in line with the tenets of the Diffusion of Innovations theory; Rogers 2003), economic indicators or 'knowledge acquisition' which is usually assumed to translate into practice changes (Knook et al 2018(Knook et al , 2020Prager and Creaney 2017).…”

Climate change in the context of whole-farming systems: opportunities for improved outreach

“…2) but was too small to allow robust subpopulation analyses based on participant demographics. Thus, the inferences we could draw related to (Knook et al 2020). • Hire professionals with relevant sociocultural expertise to join outreach teams (Tanaka & Bhavar 2008).…”