Extension professionals are expected to help disseminate agricultural technologies, information, knowledge and skills to farmers. In order to develop valuable and long-lasting extension services, it ...is essential to understand the methods of extension that farmers find most beneficial. This understanding helps adopt improved practices, overcome barriers, provide targeted interventions and continuously improve agricultural extension programs. Thus, assessing factors affecting farmers' choice of agricultural extension methods is essential for developing extension methods that comply with farmers' needs and socio-economic conditions. Therefore, we analyzed the factors affecting farmers' preferences in extension methods, using cross-sectional data collected from 300 households in two sample districts and 16 Kebelles in Ethiopia between September 2019 and March 2020. Four extension methods, including training, demonstration, office visits and phone calls were considered as outcome variables. We fitted a multivariate probit model to estimate the factors that influence farmers' choice of extension methods. The results of the study showed that the number of dependents in the household head, formal education and membership of Idir (an informal insurance program a community or group runs to meet emergencies) were negatively associated with farmers' choices to participate in different extension methods compared to no extension. On the other hand, the sex of the household head, farm experience, participation in non-farm activities, monetary loan access, owning a mobile phone, radio access and membership of cooperatives were found to have a statistically significant positive impact on farmers' choices of extension methods. Based on these findings, the government and the concerned stakeholders should take farmers' socio-economic and institutional traits into account when selecting and commissioning agricultural extension methods. This could help to develop contextually relevant extension strategies that are more likely to be chosen and appreciated by farmers. Furthermore, such strategies can aid policymakers in designing extension programs that cater to farmers' needs and concerns. In conclusion, farmers' socio-economic and institutional affiliation should be taken into consideration when selecting agricultural extension methods.
•Adaptation interventions may reinforce, redistribute or create new vulnerability.•Retrofitting adaptation into existing development agendas risks maladaptation.•Overcoming these challenges demands ...engaging more deeply with vulnerability contexts.•Real involvement of marginalised groups is required to improve use of climate finance.•Unless adaptation is rethought, transformation may also worsen vulnerability.
This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulnerability context; (ii) inequitable stakeholder participation in both design and implementation; (iii) a retrofitting of adaptation into existing development agendas; and (iv) a lack of critical engagement with how ‘adaptation success’ is defined. Emerging literature shows potential avenues for overcoming the current failure of adaptation interventions to reduce vulnerability: first, shifting the terms of engagement between adaptation practitioners and the local populations participating in adaptation interventions; and second, expanding the understanding of ‘local’ vulnerability to encompass global contexts and drivers of vulnerability. An important lesson from past adaptation interventions is that within current adaptation cum development paradigms, inequitable terms of engagement with ‘vulnerable’ populations are reproduced and the multi-scalar processes driving vulnerability remain largely ignored. In particular, instead of designing projects to change the practices of marginalised populations, learning processes within organisations and with marginalised populations must be placed at the centre of adaptation objectives. We pose the question of whether scholarship and practice need to take a post-adaptation turn akin to post-development, by seeking a pluralism of ideas about adaptation while critically interrogating how these ideas form part of the politics of adaptation and potentially the processes (re)producing vulnerability. We caution that unless the politics of framing and of scale are explicitly tackled, transformational interventions risk having even more adverse effects on marginalised populations than current adaptation.
This research identifies critical determinants for interactions between farmers and extension agencies. Cross-sectional farm household-level data from three hundred household heads were collected ...between September 2019 and March 2020 and triangulated with data from workshops with farmers and extension agents. The data were analyzed using Spearman’s correlation coefficient, Kruskal–Wallis analysis of variance and the ordered probit model. Farmers’ socio-economic characteristics significantly affect their degree of interaction with extension agencies. Recognition of the determinants of the level of farmers’ interactions can inform policymakers about how to formulate and improve the effectiveness of extension programs, enhance information and knowledge dissemination and facilitate development in collaboration with local communities by focusing on a better interaction between farmers and extension agencies. The level of a farmer’s interactions is based on a systematic decision-making process. Although personal and demographic characteristics are important, farmers’ interaction levels require conducive institutional and household assets, groups/social capital and access to extension agents’ contexts. These contexts will differ by household, country and region. Therefore, extension agencies should create and design contextually appropriate strategies for substantial interactions with farmers for the dissemination of farm information. This research is original and valuable in identifying the factors associated with the level of farmers’ interactions with extension agencies in the Amhara region, Ethiopia. It also provides a new pathway for operationalizing farmer-oriented agricultural extension policies and strategies and to help agricultural policymakers formulate extension service programs.
The large variation in climate, geology and land forms in Ethiopia has led to a great variety of ecosystems with high plant species diversity. The authors sought to provide a comprehensive ...documentation on forest based medicinal plants, indigenous knowledge, and conservation challenges in degraded dry afromontane forest in northern Ethiopia. Ethnobotanical data were collected using semi-structured interviews (n=272) and focus group discussions (n=26) with key informants. Frequencies were calculated and cross tabulated to see the medicinal value of plants found and effect of demographic characteristics on medicinal plants use. Thirty-four medicinal wild plants species belonging to 33 genera and 26 families used as cure for 35 human and livestock ailments were documented. Shrubs were dominantly used (48.8%), followed by trees (25.6%), and herbs (16.3%). The largest number of remedies (29%) was used to treat gastro-intestinal disorders followed by joint pain (25.8%). The administration routes for human medicines were oral (42%), traditional smoke bath (36%), dermal (7%), nasal (5%) and auricular (2%); while oral (32%), dermal (25%) and tie (27%) were for veterinary medicines. Leaves (33%), roots (22%) and stem (16%) were commonly used plant parts for herbal preparation. The authors suggest encouraging in situ conservation of the existing medicinal plants. As a result of heavy exploitation, many forest associated medicinal plants in the area, like Laggera tomentosa, Phytolacca dodecandra, Verbena officinalis, and Zehneria scabra are becoming rare and difficult to find. The authors suggest domestication of some of the wild medicinal plants by households or usage of communal lands for long term conservation of the species and continued availability for the use by local communities.
Climate change introduces new challenges for humanitarian aid through changing hazard patterns. The linkages between climate change and humanitarian aid are complex. While humanitarian organisations ...deal directly with vulnerable populations, interventions and actions also form part of global politics and development pathways that are currently generating climate change, inequities and vulnerability. This IDS Bulletin represents a call for increasing engagement betwieen humanitarian aid and adaptation interventions to support deliberate transformation of development pathways. Based on studies carried out as part of the 'Courting Catastrophe' project, we argue that humanitarian interventions offer several entry points and opportunities for a common agenda to drive transformational adaptation. Changes in political and financial frameworks are needed to facilitate longer-term actions; additionally, transformational adaptation demands moving from a mode of delivering expert advice and solutions to vulnerable populations, to taking up multiple vulnerability knowledges and making space for contestation of current development.
Examining the boundaries of state-society-citizen-environment after the federal restructuring in Nepal, we ask how do people claim authority or citizenship rights? We theorise state power through the ...socio-environmental state framework as a set of socio-natural relations in the making, formed by struggles over authority, recognition and environment. Using qualitative data from Barpak, the epicentre of the 2015 earthquake, we capture the politics of natural resource governance that (re)emerged during earthquake reconstruction and local-level elections, illustrating how control over resources is negotiated, disputed, and inscribed in law (land titles and water sources) and landscapes (water sources, earthquake resettlement area, an open-air museum).
In spite of growing international attention for natural resource management, relations of property regarding natural resources have hardly been studied in Ethiopia, a country known for its ...oxen-plow-based agriculture and revolutionary land reforms. This article goes beyond the agricultural focus and provides an actor-oriented analysis of water management in an Ethiopian microlevel context within a theoretical framework that builds on development discourses, social interfaces, and relations of property. The disconnectedness between government policies and local reality and the repercussions thereof for policy implementation are unraveled and so bring to light hybrids of development discourses. Relations of property still appear to be based on former private landholding systems in spite of socialist land reform, and hybrids of development discourses are deployed at three levels of institutionalization, policymaking, and implementation that are disconnected from each other, which leads to discrepancies between policy discourse and practice.
The role of post-1991 ethnic-based federalism on conflicts along regional boundaries has been a topic of great dispute in Ethiopianist literature. This article sheds new light on the on-going debate ...based on original ethnographic material from the Afar-Tigray regional border zone. Contrary to other studies, conflicts appear to have reduced in that area. Two key questions are addressed: how do different groups lay future claims to land; and which role does the post-1991 government play in those claims to land and in reducing conflicts? The case study reveals that people materialise religion to lay future claims to land and that conflicts have reduced with increased involvement of the state over the past two decades, but that this reduction has come at a high cost and may therefore not be sustainable in the long term.
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