However, at the village level and beyond, more interesting and significant issues often arise: Why is there widespread adoption in one village but not others in the same general location? Why does one project lead to apparently successful adoption, but another, following the same procedures and promoting the same technologies, result in failure? Answers to these questions are likely to be more useful in achieving widespread agricultural development.

This paper focuses on the higher order factors affecting successful adoption of technologies. Drawing on the "actor-oriented perspective" in rural sociology, it is argued that successful examples of adoption at this higher level result from a complex conjunction of people and events, with outcomes that may have been quite unanticipated at the outset. From this perspective, research and extension projects and programs are viewed as arenas in which social actors–village leaders, farmers, researchers (local and international), aid officials, municipal agents, extension workers, and traders–pursue their own short- and long-term objectives and strategies. To this end, they maneuver, negotiate, organize, cooperate, participate, coerce, obstruct, form coalitions, adopt, adapt, and reject, all within a specific geographical and historical context.

Out of this process, improved technology may be developed, disseminated, and incorporated in farming systems, and many of the actors may be made better off. However, there is nothing predetermined about this outcome. Hence, a detailed, case history approach is needed to understand and explain the patterns of success in achieving beneficial technical change.

Using an actor-oriented perspective, the processes involved in the development, dissemination and adoption of agricultural technologies are reviewed. The fruitfulness of this approach is then illustrated with a case study from an upland project in the Philippines.

Technology Development

In the conventional or "central source" view of agricultural research and development, technology emanates from "upstream" activities in the formal research system and is adapted by "downstream" research until it is ready for dissemination to farmers. Some people have used an analogy from home economics rather than hydrology, speaking of quarter-baked (notional), half-baked (preliminary), and fully baked (developed) technology. Others have referred to the development of experimental, prototype, and off-the-shelf technologies. All these analogies imply a linear process of technology development and dissemination, culminating in the adoption of new technologies by farmers.

In practice, however, agricultural innovations are derived not only from the laboratories and research stations of the national and international centers but from multiple sources. These sources include research-minded farmers, innovative research practitioners at the local level, research-minded administrators, non-government organizations (NGOs), private corporations, and extension agencies. In the "multiple source" model, technology consists of many old and new components. It evolves and is continually modified over time. Consequently, in contrast to technology transfer, there is no clear-cut, one-way progression from research to extension to adoption.

In fact, technology adaptation cannot be separated from technology adoption. Adoption and adaptation are intertwined, in that adaptation of the technology frequently occurs in the process of implementing it on-farm (a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "reinvention"). Indeed, such adaptation is the norm, resulting from an ongoing process of "farmer experimentation." This experimentation is not confined to a few research-oriented farmers, but is the process by which almost all farmers incorporate technology into their farming systems. Technology supplied by the formal research and extension system, thus, becomes "raw material" for farmer experimentation. In other words, technology is only fully developed or adapted as part of a specific, operational farming system.

Thus, from an actor-oriented perspective, technology development is a complex, multistranded, and multidirectional process, involving many actors other than scientists in the formal research system. Moreover, the emergence of a particular technology depends not only on its scientific merits but also on the actions of "development coalitions" or loose groupings of actors who combine their resources to push for a particular path of technical change. Hence, while it is appropriate to evaluate a given technology in itself, the result often leads to an incomplete account of what it takes to succeed in technology development. This typically involves networking, advocacy, lobbying, and other activities, which can be called "coalition building." These activities are often excluded from conventional accounts of technology development.

Technology Dissemination

Conventional extension theory, based on the central source model of technology development and diffusion, examines the role of various organizational arrangements and communication techniques in persuading farmers to adopt a recommended technology. The Training and Visit System, promoted extensively by the World Bank in the 1970s and 1980s, exemplifies this approach. The "transfer of technology" view of extension has been superseded (in the literature, if not widely in practice) by more participatory, community-based methodologies, reflected in the currently fashionable approaches of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Farmer Participatory Research (FPR) or, more generally, Participatory Learning and Action (PLA).

Such participatory methodologies have now been incorporated in development agency manuals and training courses worldwide. A recent set of guidelines for watershed development produced by the Ministry of Rural Development in an Asian country states that project staff need to be trained in the tools and techniques of project management, PRA methods, community organization, and other administrative and accounting procedures. Such statements hint at the rigid, top-down enforcement of "participatory" procedures.

While institutional endorsement of innovative participatory approaches is to be welcomed, there is a concern that a preoccupation with methods (described as a "manual mentality") and their institutionalization within both government and non-government agencies will lead to unrealistic expectations of their general efficacy. This may distract attention from the complex requirements for successful research and extension projects.

Rural development interventions, such as agricultural extension projects, involve a variety of social actors with diverse histories and agendas from both within and beyond rural communities. Hence, a project intervention needs to be recognized as part of an ongoing, continually renegotiated social process, not simply the execution of a prespecified plan of action with expected outcomes. Moreover, any technology dissemination activity takes place in a specific historical, political, economic, agroclimatic, and institutional context. The influence of these contextual factors may be crucial in determining the outcome of a particular extension project.

Technology Adoption

Conventional research into farmer adoption of new technology explains the adoption-decision and the timing (early or late) primarily in terms of the decisionmaker's perceptions and inherent characteristics, with "innovators" at one extreme and "laggards" at the other. However, farmer's decision making is generally more complex than this implies. Farmers have multiple objectives including food security, adequate cash income, a secure asset or resource base and social security.

Farmers select "livelihood strategies" to pursue these objectives with the resources available to them. Both the objectives and the available resources vary between farmers and change over the life cycle of the farm household. Some farmers sometimes may rely on off-farm work as a major source of livelihood, restricting their capacity to invest in labor-intensive conservation measures. Thus, farmers in the same environment may have different objectives and livelihood strategies, so they respond differently to a given technology.

The conventional adoption framework further simplifies the analysis of the adoption-decision by its implicit assumption of an individual "decision-maker." Within the farm household, the ability to make decisions regarding resource use and technology varies according to age, gender and other categories. Actual decisions can depend on a complex bargaining process among household members. Beyond the household, group processes and the ability to harness them can play a crucial role in adoption decisions, particularly on conservation practices. Moreover, decisions about new technology are frequently prompted by an intervention in the form of a project.

As discussed above, such interventions draw farmers into a wider arena in which various social actors are pursuing their personal and institutional strategies. Hence, the outcomes in terms of adoption decisions will be highly contingent on the interplay between these actors, including such factors as the creation of a sense of obligation to a respected extension worker, or the development of conflict between contending factions within a community.

Thus, an actor-oriented perspective leads us to expect a range of responses to the promotion of an agricultural technology, not merely a clear-cut decision to adopt or not. Differences between the environment in which the technology was developed and the environment of the "target" community will prompt farmers to adapt the technology in the process of adopting it. Differences within a given community in farmers' goals and circumstances, livelihood strategies, and the complexity of intra-household, group, and project interactions and decision-making will result in a variety of adoption-adaptation behaviors, which should be investigated on their own terms and not pre-judged by labeling them as "poor adoption" or "non-adoption."

References

Biggs, S. D. 1990. A Multiple Source of Innovation Model of Agricultural Research and Technology Promotion. World Development. Vol. 18, pp. 1481-1499.

Biggs, S. D. and G. Smith. 1998. Beyond Methodologies: Coalition-Building for Participatory Technology Development. World Development. Vol. 26, pp. 239-248.

Cramb, R.A. 2000. Processes Affecting the Successful Adoption of New Technologies by Smallholders. In: Hacker, B. (ed.) Working with Farmers: The Key to the Adoption of Forage Technologies, pp. 11-22. ACIAR Proceedings No. 95. Canberra: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

Garcia, J. N. M. et al. 1996. Soil Conservation in an Upland Farming System in Nueva Vizcaya. Los BaÑos: SEARCA-UP Upland Research Project.

Sumberg, J. and C. Okali. 1997. Farmers' Experiments: Creating Local Knowledge. Boulder and London: Lynne Reinner.

Contributed by:
Rob Cramb
Email: r.cramb@uq.edu.au