Water conservation and saving technologies for irrigation. A structured literature review of econometric studies on the determinants of adoption

Abstract

Water Conservation and Saving Technologies (WCSTs) can contribute to reduce the pressure on water resources from agricultural activities. A significant strand of literature on agricultural and innovation economics has explored the main drivers behind the adoption of WCSTs in agriculture, but due to the shortage of data most studies are based on survey analyses focusing on a specific case study. Therefore, results cannot be easily generalised. In this paper, we used a structured literature review (SRL) approach to systematise the original studies already published on the WCSTs adoption. Focusing on the econometric analysis used to estimate the main drivers of WCSTs adoption, our analysis started from an initial selection of 1027 studies, then after excluding book chapters, book, conference chapters and after checking abstracts and key-words we arrived to a final selection of 36 papers which have been deeply scrutinized with a structured analysis of their contents. Several findings have emerged from the analysis. The drivers of WCSTs adoption are various and heterogenous. We synthetized the main determinants into different categories: a) farm characteristics (land size, the presence of extension services, capital assets and internal organization within the farm; b) farmer characteristics ( age, level of education, income); c) institutional environment (social networks, previous information on the technology, membership to farmer organizations, public fundings, access to credit, cost of water, access to groundwater, water constraint); d) geographic and climate characteristics (soil quality, drought, aridity).