Adoption of Sustainable Livestock Innovations: Evidence from Latin America

ABSTRACT To maintain the vital economic benefits of Latin America's livestock sector while minimizing its environmental footprint, producers must adopt clean and climate‐friendly ‘sustainable’ technologies including improved feed, grazing, reproductive, and herd management practices. Yet we have limited evidence on the barriers to and opportunities for the adoption of such technologies, and even less on that topic in Latin America and other developing regions where socioeconomic and geophysical conditions often differ from those in the developed countries. The product of a competitive open call by the Inter‐American Development Bank, the four articles that comprise the Special Focus aim to help fill that gap. Three examine the determinants of adoption in Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay; and the fourth presents a quasi‐experimental impact evaluation of a program aimed at promoting adoption in Uruguay. The findings suggest that: (i) generalizing about the drivers of the adoption of sustainable livestock technologies in Latin America is ill advised: they are both technology‐ and site‐specific; (ii) land tenure matters; (iii) adopting one sustainable livestock technology does not necessarily increase the chances of adopting others; (iv) adoption does not guarantee significant impacts on targeted outcomes; and (v) two of the most common policy interventions—enhancing access to credit and providing technical extension—are correlated with adoption, at least for some technologies and subgroups.