Exploring pathways to sustainable agriculture: Understanding institutional lock-in in Tunisia through analysis of stakeholders’ discourse
Résumé
Despite extensive research on the adverse effects of intensive farming practices, global farmers continue to extensively use pesticides and other intensive practices, suggesting a significant lock-in phenomenon in farming practices. This study investigates the institutional mechanisms that hinder the transition to more sustainable farming practices in Tunisia. Drawing on adoption and socio-technical transition studies, our approach focuses on examining individual and socio-technical system interactions within the context of a developing country. To explore these dynamics, we conducted a survey involving 111 interviewees, primarily farmers and key agricultural stakeholders. A lexicometric analysis of their discourses revealed the strong prevalence of pesticide use and other intensive practices, with 89% of farmers deeming them essential for their survival, despite a large awareness of their impacts. Beyond the well-documented cognitive barriers, our findings highlight the critical role of institutional factors in determining a lock-in situation. Current policies heavily incentivise intensification, while weak and inadequate State intervention, both pre- and post-revolution, combined with the dominance of informal practices, especially corruption that facilitates the proliferation of illegal chemical inputs, significantly obstruct the transition to more sustainable practices. Finally, we emphasise that bottom-up collective actions, often proposed as a driver for transition, are hampered by the negative symbolic representation of cooperatives, a legacy of Tunisia’s institutional history. These results enable us to recommend the adaptation of agricultural policies, especially to address the specific needs of small farms, prioritizing the enhancement of rural development and public agricultural support institutions, the provision of favorable development conditions to grassroot collective initiatives and the fight against the counterfeiting of agricultural inputs.