The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, adoption simplifies and mischaracterises what happens during processes of technological change. In all but the very simplest cases, it is likely to be inadequate to capture the complex reconfiguration of social and technical components of a technological practice or system. We review the insights of a large and expanding literature, from various disciplines, which has deepened understanding of technological change as an intricate and complex sociotechnical reconfiguration, situated in time and space. We explain the problems arising from the inappropriate use of adoption as a framing concept and propose an alternative conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating technological change. The new approach breaks down technology change programmes into four aspects: propositions, encounters, dispositions and responses. We begin to sketch out how this new framework could be operationalised.
In this paper, results from a study on the use of improved coffee production technology schemes among smallholder coffee producers in three prominent coffee producing regions in Honduras are presented. The impact of various schemes (trajectories) in which different agents...
The DURAS Project, which ran from 2004 to 2008, established a truly pioneering means of integrating innovation from science with that from communities themselves. At the heart of DURAS has been its innovative competitive grants system. Following an original selection...
Extension services play a crucial role by improving skills and access to information that result in greater farm level innovations, especially on family farms which are the predominant form of agriculture in the world. This study analyzed the connection between...
Small enterprises are one of the most effective factors in the development of each country’s economic and social systems, having the ability to compete with large industries, so these enterprises are mainly focused by authorities. This study aimed to develop...
In order to facilitate Participatory Technology Development (PTD) in African agriculture, extensionists and scientists must collaborate with local innovators to optimise (where necessary) and disseminate their innovations. This literature review proposes a conceptual model for PTD in which technology is...