Improving the adoption of agricultural sustainability tools: A comparative analysis

The implementation and ongoing adoption of agricultural sustainability tools are challenging and not well addressed in the literature on sustainability assessment. Co-production of sustainability assessment and reporting systems between researchers and stakeholders has been promoted to increase the successful adoption of sustainability tools. Scientific attention has focused primarily on the development of sustainability assessment tools and has given less attention to the factors that encourage or discourage adoption and implementation. This paper provides ex-post reflections of the critical success factors, barriers, and lessons learned from the development of nine sustainability tools by the New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard Project (NZSDP) over six years of research and across multiple case studies