Agricultural Economics Meet Environmental Challenges: Innovations & Technology Adoption

Dear Colleagues,

In a context of global changes, due to the pressure on land use and the scarcity of resource endowments, climate change adaptation and related sustainable management strategies are two major challenges for future agricultural and forest public policies directed to supporting the development of the agricultural sector in the south and its sustainability in the north.

Also, innovations and new engineering (e.g., drip irrigation in the north, solar cook stove in the south), and agronomic practices (e.g., improved crop/seed varieties and more specifically zai and half-moon practices in the south) or innovative agricultural governance and management (e.g., agro-ecological practices and smart food chain processes under both temperate and tropical climates) can be profitable and promising tools for sustainable strategies.

Building on synergies between advanced technological practices and sustainability, this Special Issue tries to assess potential innovations that could address these challenges. The aim of this Special Issue is to provide elements of applied research to examine the contribution of technological, institutional, and strategic innovations to the sustainable agricultural sector.

Papers on any innovative regulation policies (quota, subsidy, etc.), sustainable resource management techniques, use of social networks (peer effects in the diffusion of practices with the purpose of boosting their adoption, social monitoring of scarce resource use and distributional effects), original policy tools (risk mitigation, information diffusion through social media, training and associating users in the design of policies, nudges), fostering the adoption of innovative technology to meet critical environmental challenges or adaptation practices in the agricultural (eventually extended to forestry/land use) sector are welcome.

The main research methods of interest to this Special Issue are:

• Robust statistical evaluation of public policies, using smart identification techniques
• Experiments on economic incentives

Papers on development economics or environmental economics using empirical, behavioral, or experimental methods are invited. Also, researches including interdisciplinary approaches will be highly appreciated.

Dr. Antoine Leblois
Dr. Laetitia Tuffery
Guest Editors

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• agricultural and forest economics
• innovation
• global environmental changes
• public policies
• scarce resource use and allocation
• experimental and behavioral economics
• econometrics and survey-based analysis