What prevents the adoption of regenerative agriculture and what can we do about it? Lessons from a behaviorally-attuned Participatory Modelling exercise in Australia

Regenerative agricultural methods (RegenAg) can help farmers attune their agricultural practices to the natural design of earth’s cycles and support systems. Their adoption hinges not only on a good understanding of biophysical processes but perhaps more importantly on farmers’ values and beliefs, which can become an obstacle for triggering widespread transitions towards synergistic relationships with the land. We conducted a Participatory Modelling exercise with RegenAg stakeholders in Australia—the aim was to provide a blueprint of how challenges and opportunities could be explored in alignment with stakeholders' personal views and perspectives. A participatory Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping exercise was undertaken to unpack stakeholder perspectives into a formal representation or ‘mental model’ of the barriers and enablers for adoption of RegenAg practices, and to subsequently identify actions that might close the gap between the two. To promote a better understanding and internalization of the outcomes of the engagement, we extracted the dominant narratives which encode the key drivers and pain points in the system. The process relied on a suite of innovative virtual delivery methods that were designed to conduct the stakeholder engagement under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. For the first time, our Participatory Modelling exercise reveals the key drivers of RegenAg in Australia, highlighting the complex forces at work and the need for coordinated actions at the institutional, social, and individual levels, across long timescales (decades). Such actions are necessary for RegenAg to play a greater role in national economies, to bring balancing relationships to systems currently reliant on conventional agriculture with few internal incentives to change. Our methods and findings are relevant not only for those seeking to promote adoption of RegenAg in Australia, but more broadly for governments and agriculturalists seeking to take a behaviorally-attuned stance to engage with farmers on issues of sustainable and resilient agriculture.