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', 'early adopters', 'early majority', 'late majority', and 'laggards'. This gave rise to the characteristic 'S' curve of cumulative adoption over time.

Schutjer and Van Der Veen (1977) noted that it is vital to consider the characteristics of alternative agricultural innovations when attempting to understand the importance of various constraints to adoption. One such characteristic is divisibility of technology. A divisible technology can be adopted to varying degrees. For example, innovations such as seed or fertiliser can be used across any proportion of a farm depending on the farmer's choice and resource limitations.

Low-income farmers are more likely to experiment with a divisible innovation because it can be initially tested on a small scale. Many agroforestry innovations are divisible and can be readily tested and evaluated by farmers in relatively small portions of the farm, such as along boundaries and in home gardens. Others, such as agroforestry for soil and water conservation, require an approach involving a whole farm, community, and watershed. This differentiation has important implications for scaling-up strategies.

Relatively few studies have explicitly examined the adoption of agroforestry innovations. Scherr and Hazell (1994) proposed a framework for analysing adoption from the perspective of a farming household. They divide the process into six sequential stages: (1) knowledge of the resource problem, (2) economic importance of the resource, (3) willingness to invest long term, (4) capacity to mobilise resources, (5) economic incentive, (6) institutional support. Using this framework, Place and Dewees (1999) examined the effect of policy on the adoption of improved fallows, highlighting the importance of mineral fertiliser policy, production and distribution of planting material, and property rights. Franzel (1999) identified a number of factors that affect the adoptability of improved tree fallows. These were broadly grouped as factors affecting feasibility (such as the availability of labour, institutional support), profitability, and acceptability (perceptions of the soil fertility problem, past investments in soil fertility, wealth level, access to off-farm income). Franzel concluded that it is important to offer fanners different options to test, and to encourage them to experiment with and modify practices. The importance of fanner adaptation of innovations was also highlighted in a recent study on the adoption of alley farming in Cameroon (Adesina et al. 2000).

On the basis of relatively few empirical studies directly related to agroforestry, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions about what are the most important factors affecting adoption and their implications for scaling up. However, drawing on the available literature, in particular the recent reviews of Franzel (1999) and Place and Dewees (1999), several factors are most likely to affect adoption of agroforestry innovations:

• biophysical adaptation of the innovation – the ability of the innovation to adapt and be adapted successfully to the farm environment;

• profitability of the innovation – in a broad sense to include consideration of returns to labour and land as well as financial profitability;

• farmers' awareness of the innovation;

• access to land, labour, and water;

• access to social capital, particularly where group action is needed;

• availability of essential inputs, particularly seed;

• access to financial capital;

• degree of risk and uncertainty.

Over the past decade, on-farm participatory research has played a crucial role in understanding and addressing the factors listed above. This approach has led to an increased role of farmers in diagnosing problems and in identifying and evaluating possible solutions. The result is better appreciation of farmers' perspectives and constraints, a more focused, farmer-centred research agenda, and, ultimately, higher levels of adoption (Franzel et al. in press).

The promotion and facilitation of innovation adoption amongst farmers are aimed at achieving positive impact. Yet the complexities of impact and the means to assess it are not well understood. The types of impact that result from adopting innovations can be broadly classified as economic, social, biophysical, and ecological, and are generally a combination of all four. To be more fully understood, impact has to be viewed from different spatial and temporal scales, as well as from the perspectives of different stakeholders (Izac and Sánchez in press).

Impact assessment is best undertaken through a framework that explicitly recognises the existence of trade-offs. For example, studies undertaken by the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn Consortium in southern Cameroon demonstrated a clear trade-off between the global environmental benefits (carbon sequestration and biodiversity) and local profitability to farmers across a range of alternative land uses (Ericksen and Fernandes 1998). The research and development challenge is to understand the impact of adoption at these different scales (in this case, local versus global) and by different stakeholders (farmers versus the global community), and to optimise the trade-offs across a range of assumptions. Policy makers can then use this information to apply various policy instruments (for example, market intervention, land reform, infrastructure investments) that can affect the rate of adoption (Izac and Sánchez in press).

Impact over different temporal scales is an issue that is especially relevant to agroforestry in the developing world. Low-income farmers tend to discount heavily the potential long-term benefits of trees, opting instead for short-term practices that maximise food production and income. This slows the spread of soil conservation practices that have long-term benefits when the short-term effect on food production and income is negative (Fujisaka 1991). In contrast, farmers readily adopt agroforestry practices with short-term benefits such as short-term improved fallows (Kwesiga et al. 1999). The challenge for agroforestry research and development is to develop and introduce a range of options that provide an optimal trade-off between the long- and short-term expectations of farmers.

Institutional change: towards a research and development continuum

Now, after three decades of strong support to both international and national agricultural research, there are signs that growth has stagnated. Increasingly the call is for researchers to demonstrate the impact of past investments. This call is echoed at national levels where, in a climate of right-sizing in the public sector, ministries responsible for national budgets are starting to view public research as an extravagance. But the case for publicly funded research to address the challenges of food insecurity, poverty, and environmental degradation remains as compelling as it was in the 1960s. Research institutions must reinvent themselves to demonstrate that they are valuable and competitive investments of public resources. To this end, in the late 1990s, ICRAF embarked on institutional changes to foster and support greater impact of its research investments.

ICRAF's medium-term plan for 1998–2000 documented for the first time a clear institutional commitment to development impact (ICRAF 1997). The plan articulated three pillars of research: tree domestication, soil fertility replenishment, and policy, and two pillars of development: acceleration of impact, and capacity and institutional strengthening. In a departure from traditional CGIAR approaches to disseminating knowledge and technologies – that is, a reliance on networks, publications, and training as the principal vehicles of technology transfer – ICRAF and its partners adopted a more comprehensive and iterative functional model based on a continuum, from strategic research to applied research to adaptive research to adoption by farmers: a research and development continuum.

With this new approach, ICRAF and its partners accepted joint responsibility and accountability for ensuring the greater adoption and impact of agroforestry innovations. By proactively engaging in the development process, ICRAF could see four distinct benefits in institutional effectiveness:

• Faster and greater impact – by adopting a proactive rather than a passive approach to knowledge and technology dissemination, agroforestry innovations would reach more farmers, more quickly.

• Innovation and learning – by working directly and collaboratively with development partners in the field with farmers, opportunities would be greater for innovation and learning that would strengthen the knowledge and experience base of ICRAF and its scientists and thus share that asset with others.

• A more relevant, demand-driven research agenda – the innovation and learning associated with direct engagement in development would provide feedback to research on how innovations performed and generate hypotheses for future research.

• Institutional credibility – by demonstrating a clear commitment to greater impact of development, ICRAF would become a more credible partner in development and therefore could attract support from a broader group of stakeholders than would be the case if it assumed a strict 'research only' mandate.

In January 1998, ICRAF created a development division – the first of its type in the CGIAR system. The new division was established to complement the existing research division, which was responsible for planning and implementing an integrated natural resources management agenda related to agroforestry (ICRAF 2000; Izac and Sánchez in press). The development division brought together the existing development-oriented programmes and units of the centre: systems evaluation and dissemination, capacity building and institutional strengthening; and information. Both regionally and globally, the development division took on a more explicit, hands-on role in identifying, catalysing, and facilitating agroforestry-based opportunities for greater adoption and impact.