Characterizing farmer innovation behavior for agricultural technologies in transitional areas facing environmental change

To understand better the issues of technology transfer and information flow, this chapter discusses a research conducted in Nepal that was designed to study the significant socio-economic factors contributing to an individual farmer's likelihood of adopting introduced conservation agriculture (CA) technologies under transitioning conditions or with weak government support. The results of this are assessed to identify and understand the major constraints leading to non-adoption of CA technologies. Furthermore, the structure of social networks for the transfer of CA and the major constraints due to network configuration are identified, with the goal of identifying implications for CA approaches and developing policy implications