Strategies for enhancing the adoptability of agroforestry innovations

Agroforestry has been given a broad and hopeful mandate to assist in devising productive and sustainable systems of land management to meet the demographic and ecological challenges of mankind's somewhat uncertain future. As a new and explicity interdisciplinary field of applied scientific research and technological synthesis, agroforestry is in a unique position to benefit from recent advances in our understanding of the rural development process which, if properly integrated into the emerging paradigm for agroforestry research and development, will greatly enhance its chances of fulfilling its potential as a source of solutions to many interrelated problems of tropical land use. Drawing on lessons from the literature on the adoption and diffusion of innovations, a number of research strategies and design tactics are proposed by which agroforestry R & D teams may improve on their ability to generate relevant and adoptable technologies and, thus, stand a better chance of having the kind of practical impact on land use systems which is expected of agroforestry.