Realising the potential of agroforestry: integrating research and development to achieve greater impact

Glenn L. Denning

For more than two decades agroforestry has been heralded and actively promoted as a practical and beneficial land-use system for smallholders in developing countries. This promise led to the establishment of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) in 1978 and its support by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) since 1991. Functioning initially as an information council during the 1980s, in 1991 ICRAF shifted its emphasis towards strategic research to strengthen the scientific basis for advocating agroforestry. This significant investment in process-oriented research greatly enhanced understanding of the opportunities and limitations of agroforestry and led to more critical assessments of its potential use (Sánchez 1995,1999). As a result, agroforestry progressed from being an indigenous practice of great potential and romantic appeal to becoming a science-based system for managing natural resources (Sánchez 1995; Izac and Sánchez in press).

By the mid-1990s, the farm-level impact of agroforestry research was beginning to be observed in Africa and Asia. Much of this impact was a direct consequence of farmer-participatory research undertaken by ICRAF and its partners. Between 1992 and 1997, the number of farmers participating in on-farm research increased from 700 to more than 7000 (ICRAF 1998). Through such research, farmers acquired experience with the innovations, and this experience laid the foundation for pilot dissemination projects, and increased exposure to other farmers who did not directly participate in the research phase.

By 2000, several thousand smallholders in western Kenya were using short-term leguminous fallows and biomass transfer to improve the fertility of depleted yet high-potential soils. In Embu District of eastern Kenya, more than 3000 farmers were planting tree legumes in fodder banks for use as an inexpensive protein supplement for their dairy cows. In Zambia, more than 10,000 farmers were using short-rotation improved fallows to restore soil fertility and raise maize crop yields. In the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa, hundreds of farmers were adopting live hedges to protect dry-season market gardens from livestock. And in Southeast Asia, similar success was being observed on degraded sloping lands where hundreds of farmers in the southern Philippines were adopting contour hedgerow systems based on natural vegetative strips.

These examples from diverse ecoregions illustrate the emergence of sustainable agroforestry solutions to problems of land degradation, poverty, and food security in rural areas. The long-awaited promise of agroforestry as a science and as a practice is beginning to be realised at farm level. But impact on such limited scales, while certainly encouraging, cannot alone justify the millions of dollars invested in agroforestry research at ICRAF and national institutions over the past 25 years. Research institutions cannot rest on their laurels, having merely demonstrated that agroforestry has real potential. Instead, they must develop and implement strategies to ensure that millions of low-income farm families worldwide can capture the benefits of agroforestry.

This paper describes the approach that ICRAF has taken since 1997 to address the challenge of scaling up the adoption and impact of agroforestry innovations. To provide a conceptual foundation for scaling up, the first section provides a short overview of the literature and field experience regarding the constraints to adoption and impact. The next section describes institutional changes in the late 1990s that have embedded development within ICRAF's strategy, structure, and operations. These two sections form the basis of ICRAF's development strategy, which is outlined in eight focal areas of intervention and investment.

The fundamentals of adoption and impact

To increase the scale of adoption and the impact of innovations, action must be based on an understanding of the dynamics of adoption and the critical factors that determine whether farmers accept, do not accept, or partially accept, innovations. Adoption of agricultural innovations has been intensively researched since the seminal work of Grilliches (1957) on hybrid corn in the USA. Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) described adoption by individuals as an 'innovation-decision process', consisting of four stages as follows:

• Knowledge

The individual is exposed to the existence of the innovation and gains some understanding of how it functions.

• Persuasion

The individual forms a favourable or unfavourable attitude towards the innovation.

• Decision

The individual engages in activities that lead to a choice to adopt or reject an innovation.

• Confirmation

The individual seeks reinforcement for the innovation decision with the option of reversing that decision based on increased experience with the innovation.

The innovation-to-decision period is the length of time taken to go through this process, and it varies among individuals. Rogers and Shoemaker (1971) classified individuals by the length of their innovation-to-decision periods, categorising them as 'innovators',...