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Sammanfattning

Agriculture has long been at the core of Mediterranean culture, resulting in multifunctional landscapes and diverse ecosystem services. In Mediterranean Europe, policy favored specialized agriculture, and reversing this trend has proven difficult. Diversification of crop rotations holds ecological benefits, yet adoption remains low. The objective of this study was to accompany Spanish and Greek stakeholders in a structured learning process beginning with the co-design of available diversification options. It continued with an ex-ante assessment of agrienvironmental, social, and economic performance of these options, followed by a co-evaluation step where stakeholders rated both the assessed performances and the indicators used. These ratings were analyzed using an importance-performance matrix. Finally, the adoption likelihood of diversification was predicted using the Adoption and Diffusion Outcome Prediction (ADOPT) tool. The ex-ante assessment revealed that legumes, rapeseed, and intercropping systems generally outperformed continuous cereal cropping in the agrienvironmental and social dimensions but not economically, with a profit reduction of up to 12 %. From the stakeholders' ratings, we learned that they placed the greatest importance on the economic indicators. In contrast, the agri-environmental dimension was given little importance even when energy use indicators increased by 5-42 %. Likewise, diversified systems offered notable social benefits, such as reduced workload by up to 29 %, but social aspects were ranked as less important. This divergent performance of the diversified options was translated into low adoption rates. Legume systems reached a 23-28 % adoption rate in 8-10 years, while intercropping reached 14 % in 17 years, and rapeseed systems reached only 4-5 % in 9-11 years. Economic performance emerged as the main barrier to the adoption of diversification. This study evaluated the impacts of different diversification options available to local farmers from both scientific and a local stakeholder perspective. This process can be adapted to other regions to create shared knowledge, thus enabling a wide range of actors to better understand diversification impacts. This knowledge gain affects the stakeholder's capacity to adopt diversification options and, beforehand, their willingness to do so.

Nyckelord

Multi-criteria assessment; Performance; Importance; Co-design; Impact indicator; Adoption; Mediterranean

Publicerad i

European Journal of Agronomy
2026, volym: 175, artikelnummer: 128000
Utgivare: ELSEVIER

SLU författare

UKÄ forskningsämne

Jordbruksvetenskap
Jordbruksekonomi och landsbygdsutveckling

Publikationens identifierare

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eja.2026.128000

Permanent länk till denna sida (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/146059