TY - JOUR
T1 - Promoting adoption of two-stage agricultural drainage ditches
T2 - A change agent perspective
AU - Ranjan, Pranay
AU - Witter, Jonathan D.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Ranjan, Witter. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Adoption of innovations, including adoption of conservation practices, is a topic of extensive scholarly enterprise. The diffusion of innovations literature has often examined the characteristics of three sets of variables: the adopter, the change agent, and the innovation. This literature clearly establishes the crucial role of change agents in promoting an innovation. However, what we don’t know is what makes change agents want to promote a particular innovation. In this study, change agents’ perceptions of the attributes of two-stage drainage ditches, an innovative agricultural drainage ditch design, are examined in order to understand what affects their willingness to promote them. Diffusion of innovation theory provides the conceptual grounding as well as the theoretical motivation for this study. The data for this study come from semi-structured interviews with 17 change agents. Results suggest that change agents perceive the relative advantage associated with two-stage ditches to be low, and that two-stage ditches might be perceived by potential adopters to be incompatible with the prevalent sociocultural beliefs about drainage ditch management. Results also indicate that change agents’ perceptions of environmental benefits of adopting two-stage ditches affects their willingness to promote them. Results are more broadly informative about promoting conservation practices, and is relevant for both academicians and practitioners.
AB - Adoption of innovations, including adoption of conservation practices, is a topic of extensive scholarly enterprise. The diffusion of innovations literature has often examined the characteristics of three sets of variables: the adopter, the change agent, and the innovation. This literature clearly establishes the crucial role of change agents in promoting an innovation. However, what we don’t know is what makes change agents want to promote a particular innovation. In this study, change agents’ perceptions of the attributes of two-stage drainage ditches, an innovative agricultural drainage ditch design, are examined in order to understand what affects their willingness to promote them. Diffusion of innovation theory provides the conceptual grounding as well as the theoretical motivation for this study. The data for this study come from semi-structured interviews with 17 change agents. Results suggest that change agents perceive the relative advantage associated with two-stage ditches to be low, and that two-stage ditches might be perceived by potential adopters to be incompatible with the prevalent sociocultural beliefs about drainage ditch management. Results also indicate that change agents’ perceptions of environmental benefits of adopting two-stage ditches affects their willingness to promote them. Results are more broadly informative about promoting conservation practices, and is relevant for both academicians and practitioners.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229969
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0229969
M3 - Article
C2 - 32150597
AN - SCOPUS:85081118693
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 15
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 3
M1 - e0229969
ER -