What enables and prevents sugarcane growing practice change? A review of publicly available sources for practice change projects

ABSTRACT

The Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan 2017–2022 identified that changes to evaluation practices were an urgent need if ambitious water quality targets were to be realised. To understand if progress had been made, this study synthesised publicly available evidence for ten projects aiming to engage sugarcane growers in practice change. The aims of this study were to identify factors facilitating or preventing practice change in sugarcane growing, drawing on monitoring and evaluation evidence that was publicly available for the ten projects. Twenty-one peer-reviewed articles and government and industry reports were collated and analysed. Thematic analysis identified seven enablers of engagement with practice changes resulting from project participation: government and industry partnerships, effective communication, training and education, grower or community leadership, financial support, return on investment and social factors. This review showed that a lack of enabling factors is a barrier to program adoption and practice change. Additional barriers were lack of availability of alternatives, lack of clear and transparent monitoring and evaluation for projects, lack of trust between stakeholders and competing stakeholder interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluation
• behaviour change
• review
• farmers
• Great Barrier Reef
• water quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 NESP Project 2.1.3 was a project funded by the National Environment Science Program that captured farmers’ views on projects they were participating in. This provided an additional publicly available data source to synthesise findings. The National Environmental Science Programme (NESP) Tropical Water Quality (TWQ) Hub Project 2.1.3: Harnessing the science of social marketing and behaviour change for improved water quality in the Great Barrier Reef: An action research project worked in partnership with staff from the Australian Government’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), the Department of the Environment and Energy (DoEE), regional Natural Resource Management bodies, and the Queensland Government’s Department of Science Information Technology and Innovation (DSITI) and the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP) to evaluate how water quality improvement programmes are ‘marketed’ to land managers.

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported with funding from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program.