Behavioural factors for farmers' adoption of agroforestry practices in Sweden

Abstract

Agroforestry has recently been recognized as a sustainable land-use system that can both address farmers' productive needs and provide ecosystem services to society such as biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Further investigation into the role played by social and psychological factors for adoption of agroforestry within a European context, is needed. This paper provides an analysis of farmers' behavioural drivers with respect to their adoption of agroforestry practices, using a survey of 387 farmers from Sweden. We extended the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) model to incorporate the following behavioural factors: businessperson identity, network memberships, conservation objectives, as well as perceived economic benefits and labour constraints on actual adoption. Latent constructs in the model were first extracted with factor analysis before estimating their impact on adoption using logit models. The results indicate that network memberships improve the explanation of adoption and positively impact farmers' adoption of agroforestry, while the remaining behavioural variables were found to be statistically insignificant. We therefore recommend to encourage farmers' connection to formal networks in order to disseminate ideas, technical experience and guidance on agroforestry, thereby facilitating adoption. The lack of a significant influence of the TPB-factors in our study suggests that we are not able to confirm that TPB variables have an effect on actual adoption and may support the common criticism given to the model in relation to the well-known intention-behaviour “gap”.