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.
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...
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...
In an endeavor to promote agricultural innovation, the Government of India introduced two pieces of legislation: (i) the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001, which provide for the registration of traditional crop varieties as farmers' varieties, and...
La estrategia anual de ProHuerta realiza ajustes a nivel territorial en función de la experiencia y las directivas programáticas. En 2017 se incorporaron tecnologías de la información, en un plan que incluyó el registro online de la información de entrega...