Socio-Economic Aspects

**135**

**Chapter 8**

Done?

**Abstract**

Socio-Economic Dimensions

of Adoption of Conservation

*Nisa Sansel Tandogan and Haluk Gedikoglu*

Practices: What Is Needed to Be

Promoting sustainable agricultural production requires farmers to adopt new technologies such as organic farming to increase the agricultural productivity, while conserving the environment. Adoption and diffusion of new technologies need a long process, as experienced in the past. There are social and economic factors, identified in the literature, and those could cause delays in farmers' use of new technologies. Hence, technology adoption and diffusion are important policy issues in agriculture. For that reason, this paper provides a literature review including factors influencing the adoption and diffusion of technology in agriculture and aims to contribute to the future studies and policies, especially focusing on the social capital or the social aspects, which are proven not to be analyzed by the previous studies comprehensively. The results show that interaction with neighbors and relatives, and membership in a group or organization, which represent the social aspects, has a positive influence on adoption and diffusion of new technologies. Hence, policy-makers should incorporate the social aspects when designing the policies, such as cost sharing

programmes, to promote adoption and diffusion of new technologies.

sustainable agriculture, social capital

important factor for adoption [1].

**1. Introduction**

**Keywords:** technology adoption, diffusion of innovations, conservation practices,

Promoting sustainable agricultural production requires farmers to adopt new technologies to increase the agricultural productivity, while conserving the environment. Since the seminal study by Griliches, adoption of new technologies has been widely analyzed in the agricultural economics literature [1]. Technology adoption in agriculture is also analyzed in the rural sociology literature. The studies in rural sociology mostly focused on diffusion of new technologies in a region, whereas studies in agricultural economics focused on adoption of new technologies by an individual farmer. Initially, the focus of agricultural technology adoption was to increase the productivity of the farmers or the profitability, especially during the Green Revolution. Hence, profitability of the technology was found to be an
