Behavioral Change in Agriculture

Behavioral Change in Agriculture PDF

Author: J. Paul Leagans

Publisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

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Compilation of papers on concepts and strategies for behavioural change in agricultural development - includes discussions on political aspects, agricultural research and technology, agricultural extension, agricultural economics, administrative aspects, rural sociology, the role of social psychology and the social sciences, etc.

Behaviour Change Communication Strategy for Food Security and Agriculture Productivity Project: “You are what you eat!”

Behaviour Change Communication Strategy for Food Security and Agriculture Productivity Project: “You are what you eat!” PDF

Author: ?Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.

Published: 2022-08-04

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 9251366675

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The BCC strategy document contains a collection of communication processes and strategies used in programming to influence social change and individual behaviour. The strategies outlined in the document focuses on messages including a set of technical themes linking nutrition, health, food safety, dietary diversity, and production innovations within a food systems approach, where different activities and products are correlated and allow building up of basic to technical knowledge and practice. The strategy document, which is presented in a theme-based booklet, is prepared for community resource persons and agriculture extension officers to equip them in bringing about desired changes in knowledge, attitudes, and practices of farmers in terms of crop production and consumption behaviours via sensitisation/training of producing and consuming nutrient dense crops at individual, household and community level. The BCC efforts follow the strategic objectives delineated in the National Food and Nutrition Security Strategy, Bhutan. The key messages, therefore, have been developed to improve the identified behaviours in order to achieve the strategic objectives of the National Food and Nutrition Security Strategy. The messages will be disseminated to the right target audiences through a multipronged communication approach to facilitate behaviour changes.

Impact of a gender and nutrition behavioral change communication amid the COVID-19 crisis in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone

Impact of a gender and nutrition behavioral change communication amid the COVID-19 crisis in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone PDF

Author: Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA)

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13:

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Social behavior change communication (SBCC) interventions on gender and nutrition are now commonly implemented, but their impact on diet quality and empowerment is rarely assessed rigorously. We estimate the impact of a nutrition and gender SBCC intervention on women’s dietary diversity and empowerment in Myanmar during an especially challenging period—the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial in 30 villages in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone. Our analysis employs data from the baseline survey implemented in February 2020 and a phone survey implemented in February–March 2021 and focuses on women’s dietary diversity and sub-indicators of the project-level women’s empowerment in agriculture index (pro-WEAI). Two indicators of women’s empowerment―inputs to productive decisions and access to and decisions over credit―improved, indicating that SBCC interventions can contribute to changing gendered perceptions and behaviors; however, most of the empowerment indicators did not change, indicating that much of gendered norms and beliefs take time to change. Women’s dietary diversity scores were higher by half a food group out of 10 in treatment villages. More women in treatment villages consumed nuts, milk, meat or fish, and Vitamin A–rich foods daily than in control villages. We show that even in the setting of a pandemic, a SBCC intervention can be delivered through a range of tools, including household visits, phone-based coaching, and voice-based training, that are responsive to local and individual resource limitations. Gender messaging can change some gendered perceptions; but it may take more time to change deeply ingrained gender norms. Nutrition messaging can help counter the declines in dietary quality that would be expected from negative shocks to supply chains and incomes.

Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture

Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture PDF

Author: Douglas J. Kennett

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-01-02

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0520932455

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This innovative volume is the first collective effort by archaeologists and ethnographers to use concepts and models from human behavioral ecology to explore one of the most consequential transitions in human history: the origins of agriculture. Carefully balancing theory and detailed empirical study, and drawing from a series of ethnographic and archaeological case studies from eleven locations—including North and South America, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Near East, Africa, and the Pacific—the contributors to this volume examine the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding using a broad set of analytical models and concepts. These include diet breadth, central place foraging, ideal free distribution, discounting, risk sensitivity, population ecology, and costly signaling. An introductory chapter both charts the basics of the theory and notes areas of rapid advance in our understanding of how human subsistence systems evolve. Two concluding chapters by senior archaeologists reflect on the potential for human behavioral ecology to explain domestication and the transition from foraging to farming.

Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture

Economics of Research and Innovation in Agriculture PDF

Author: Petra Moser

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-10-08

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 022677905X

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"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--

Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development PDF

Author: Juha I. Uitto

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-01-11

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 331943702X

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This book is open access under a Creative Commons license. This authoritative book presents the ever progressing state of the art in evaluating climate change strategies and action. It builds upon a selection of relevant and practical papers and presentations given at the 2nd International Conference on Evaluating Climate Change and Development held in Washington DC in 2014 and includes perspectives from independent evaluations of the major international organisations supporting climate action in developing countries, such as the Global Environment Facility. The first section of the book sets the stage and provides an overview of independent evaluations, carried out by multilateral development banks and development organisations. Important topics include how policies and organisations aim to achieve impact and how this is measured, whether climate change is mainstreamed into other development programs, and whether operations are meeting the urgency of climate change challenges. The following sections focus on evaluation of climate change projects and policies as they link to development, from the perspective of international organisations, NGO’s, multilateral and bilateral aid agencies, and academia. The authors share methodologies or approaches used to better understand problems and assess interventions, strategies and policies. They also share challenges encountered, what was done to solve these and lessons learned from evaluations. Collectively, the authors illustrate the importance of evaluation in providing evidence to guide policy change to informed decision-making.