Membership in farmers' organizations and intention to innovate: A mixed random utility and behavioral approach

Despites a growing body of literature on the adoption of agricultural innovations, their uptake by smallholder farmers in developing countries is slow. The processes underpinning farmers’ decision-making in these countries are yet to be fully understood as the existing literature remains contradictory with regards to the factors explaining innovation adoption. Conflicting conclusions emerge from studies on different countries, which may be the result of different social, cultural, and institutional environments. We develop a novel theoretical model which joins random utility and behavioral models, to assess how membership in farmers’ organizations affects intention to innovate. Using a two-steps framework, we assume that background factors influence farmers’ attitudes, which in turn affect their intention to innovate. Three distal attitudes are selected as intermediate drivers: interest in new ways of production, attitude toward risk, and trust towards organizations promoting innovations. Membership in farmers’ organizations is assumed to work as a mediator variable between background factors and intention to innovate. We test our framework using primary survey data from five African countries, 4,529 farmers, and more than twenty farmers’ organizations. We find that behavioral attitudes work as mediator variables between the factors classically used in random utility models (e.g., farm, household, and farmer characteristics) and the intention to innovate. The effect of membership varies across organizations, and a specific institutional approach is necessary to evaluate which characteristics of a farmers’ organization can impact the innovation behavior of its members.