A New Perspective on the Adoption of Sustainable Agricultural Practices: A Review

Abstract

There have been plenty of studies investigating farmers’ decision to adopt sustainable agricultural practices but a lot more segregated studies exist, highlighting the importance of individual factors affecting adoption. This review addresses this gap and provides a suggestion to effectively understand adoption of sustainable agricultural practices by farmers from a comprehensive perspective. The study underscores and justifies the use of the integrated framework of Reasoned Action Approach/Theory of Planned Behavior, to present a new perspective on studying sustainable agriculture. The paper presents a review of empirical studies, reports and some review papers from past research from 1995 to 2014. Till now, only a handful of studies have incorporated the usage of this framework, which has significant relevance in studying the adoption behaviour of farmers. As suggested by previous studies about the use of socio-psychological models in agriculture, and the importance of studying adoption from multi-disciplinary a perspective, this study justifies the use and significance of Reasoned Action Approach/Theory of Planned Behaviour by providing evidences from past literature. The study concludes that the framework is comprehensive enough to look at the multidisciplinary aspects, necessary to investigate farmers’ adoption decisions, and thereby provides more than a starting point for contributing to the existing body of literature.