A Novel NGO Approach to Facilitate the Adoption of Sustainable Innovations in Low-Income Countries: Lessons from Small-scale Farms in Nicaragua
研究尼加拉瓜一个新型保护性农业项目，发现非政府组织采用非中心化方法能更有效帮助小农户采纳可持续创新，挑战了传统文献观点。
There are about 500 million small-scale farms in low-income countries on the planet. Farmers have been slow to adopt a threefold set of sustainable agronomic practices known as “conservation agriculture” (CA) that have been shown to double productivity. Our study of a novel CA project in Nicaragua, organized based on principles that counter convention, may point to improved ways of understanding and managing sustainable innovations in low-income countries. In particular, by connecting core ideas from the innovation literature to the literature that explores the role of intermediaries such as NGOs, our case study suggests that the efficacy of NGOs to facilitate the adoption of sustainable innovations by small-scale farmers in these settings may be enhanced if NGOs employ non-centrist approaches in order to address the critical uncertainties associated with such innovations. We discuss how our findings contradict some of long-standing arguments in the literature, and their implications for theory and practice.