Incentives are not enough! The intricacies of an agroecological transition in upland Cambodia

Agroecological transitions have gained momentum in recent years, especially in institutional and policy discourses. A key challenge of such a transition, however, is to ensure that specific incentives given to farmers to adopt or maintain agroecological practices can be scaled up and sustained at the landscape level. In this paper, we examine the intricacies of such a transition. The incentive is an organic rice certification scheme and the landscape is Rik Reay commune located in Preah Vihear province, upland Cambodia. Using an agrarian diagnostic approach, we analyze the positive and negative interactions between organic rice production, the other components of the farmers' activity systems, and the functioning of the organic rice value chain. Our results show that the enabling environment supporting organic rice production and certification is threatened by geographical, historical, technical and economic lock-ins factors. We argue that bringing agroecology to scale level requires incentives but also a careful attention and mitigation of lock-ins factors at household, watershed and market levels.

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