Assessing farmers’ importance-performance gap for agricultural water scarcity adaptation strategies

Water scarcity presents an escalating challenge for agricultural systems, particularly in regions dependent on rain-fed agriculture and vulnerable to climate change. Although smallholder farmers are adopting various adaptation strategies, their effectiveness remains uneven due to implementation barriers and limited gains. This study, conducted in Bolero and Tembwe Agricultural Extension Planning Areas (EPAs) of Rumphi and Salima in Malawi, applied factor and cluster analysis to examine farmers’ perceptions and attitudes toward agricultural water scarcity (AWS) adaptation. The Importance–Performance Gap (IPG) framework assessed the alignment between the perceived importance of adaptation strategies and their actual performance, while Probit and Logit models identified behavioural drivers of variation. The analysis identified four critical factors: personal responsibility, community-supported collective responsibility, technological adaptation and investment, and financial barriers. Cluster analysis revealed three farmer typologies—technologically disadvantaged strugglers, community-driven adopters, and self-reliant technological adopters—each exhibiting different importance–performance perceptions of the adaptation strategies. Across all groups, irrigation techniques were rated as highly important but underperforming, while drought-tolerant crops and climate-smart agriculture trainings were perceived as both highly important and highly effective. Socioeconomic characteristics, including age, education, income, household size, and farm registration status, influenced the likelihood of adopting Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices for managing AWS. These findings offer actionable insights for policymakers, development practitioners, and researchers. Key recommendations include improving irrigation infrastructure, promoting water conservation technologies, enhancing climate information dissemination, strengthening tenure security, expanding financing mechanisms, and designing cluster-specific interventions aligned with farmers’ priorities and adaptive capacities.