Abstract
Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. We are now beginning to pay attention to the complex social factors that affect uptake of sustainable soil management practices. To understand why some communities try these practices whilst others do not, we undertook a narrative review to understand how social capital influences adoption. We found that the four components of social capital – trust, norms, connectedness and power – can all influence the decision of farmers to change their soil management. Specifically, information flows more effectively across trusted, diverse networks where social norms exist to encourage innovation. Uptake is more limited in homogenous, close-knit farming communities that do not have many links with non-farmers and where there is a strong social norm to adhere to the status quo. Power can enhance or inhibit uptake depending on how it is managed. Future research, policy and practice should consider whether a lack of effective social capital could hinder uptake of new practices and, if so, which aspects of social capital could be developed to increase adoption of sustainable soil management practices. Enabling diverse, collaborative groups (including farmers, advisers and government officials) to work constructively together could help build effective social capital, where they can co-define, -develop and -enact measures to sustainably manage soils.
Highlights
There has arguably never been a more important time in history to improve the sustainability of agriculture (Willett et al, 2019)
We start with a broad overview of studies that have looked at sustainable land management practices and focus on studies that covered soil management
Power may be the most difficult part of social capital to effectively address. This extensive narrative review has proven the difficulty of drawing general conclusions on how social capital can affect uptake of sustainable soil management
Summary
There has arguably never been a more important time in history to improve the sustainability of agriculture (Willett et al, 2019). A growing human population, an increased demand for (cheap) food, rapid biodiversity loss and a decline in soil and water quality make it increasingly likely that more planetary boundaries will be crossed, triggering abrupt environmental change with potentially catastrophic effects (Steffen et al, 2015). Dynamic interactions between these drivers require new approaches that consider ecological and social processes (Ostrom, 2009). Successful agri-environmental policies that incentivise more sustainable soil management must take into account the drivers of human decision-making (Carlisle, 2016)
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