Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, USA.
Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs, USA.
J Environ Manage. 2019 Apr 15;236:490-498. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2019.02.009. Epub 2019 Feb 13.
Farmers' conservation decisions are central to addressing regional environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, water quality impairment, or climate change. However, three decades of substantial investment in agri-environmental programs has not yielded widespread adoption or improved environmental outcomes. It remains difficult to explain why farmers adopt despite an extensive body of research on the topic. One possible reason for this is that researchers are limiting the types of metrics they are analyzing to explain farmer decisions. We systematically and critically evaluated the social science adoption literature to address three important gaps: (1) How are adoption studies measuring adoption effectiveness? (2) How do studies integrate individual farmer perspectives into broader institutional (i.e., social and governance) contexts? (3) What are the most prevalent metrics that adoption research uses to characterize the human-natural system? We coded 174 studies and found that only 10% connect adoption decisions to conservation outcomes or undertake longitudinal research, while the dominant approach in adoption research excludes the institutional contexts in which farmers are situated. The most prevalent metrics focus on farmer demographics, financial and technical capacity to adopt, and economic motivations. The lack of attention to both conservation outcomes and longitudinal studies limits researchers' ability to analyze the effectiveness of CP adoption. To advance our understanding of adoption, we recommend that future research measure conservation outcomes and track how knowledge about adoption effectiveness feeds back into farmer perceptions and social norms towards adoption. Research should also consistently measure how agri-environmental programs mediate the social acceptability of adoption. Lastly, institutional metrics that can be widely incorporated into coupled human-natural systems research will advance synthesis efforts to better explain why farmers adoption conservation practices.
农民的保护决策对于解决区域环境挑战至关重要，如生物多样性丧失、水质受损或气候变化。然而，三十年来对农业环境计划的大量投资并未导致广泛采用或改善环境成果。尽管关于这个主题有大量的研究，但仍难以解释为什么农民会采用这些措施。一个可能的原因是，研究人员将他们分析的度量标准类型限制在解释农民决策的范围内。我们系统地和批判性地评估了社会科学采用文献，以解决三个重要差距：（1）采用研究如何衡量采用效果？（2）研究如何将个体农民的观点融入更广泛的制度（即社会和治理）背景中？（3）采用研究用于描述人与自然系统的最常见指标是什么？我们对 174 项研究进行了编码，发现只有 10%的研究将采用决策与保护成果联系起来，或者进行纵向研究，而采用研究中的主流方法排除了农民所处的制度背景。最常见的指标侧重于农民的人口统计学特征、采用的财务和技术能力以及经济动机。对保护成果和纵向研究的关注不足限制了研究人员分析 CP 采用效果的能力。为了增进我们对采用的理解，我们建议未来的研究测量保护成果，并跟踪关于采用效果的知识如何反馈到农民对采用的看法和社会规范中。研究还应始终衡量农业环境计划如何调解采用的社会可接受性。最后，可广泛纳入耦合人类自然系统研究的制度指标将推进综合努力，以更好地解释为什么农民采用保护实践。
