Driving behavior change among farmers & fishers: Do social networks matter?

[...]maximisation of profit may be a trade-off with competing considerations and might not be a straightforward mechanism. [...]in India, to incentivise more ‘efficient’ on-farm crop water use, national and state governments have introduced financial subsidy policies to reduce the cost of purchasing micro-irrigation equipment (e.g. sprinklers, drip, and other technologies) for farmers [11]. Agent-Based Models are computational models that can simulate complex human-environment systems through explicit functions related to individual actors (e.g. their beliefs about the world and how they make decisions), social interactions (e.g. looking to culturally influential people to guide one’s behaviour or learning from others), and environmental features (e.g. socio-political or economic constraints and affordances as well as the physical environment such as biomass location and abundance in fisheries models in or farmland quality and distribution in farming models). Do social networks matter? PLOS Water 2(2): e0000095. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pwat.0000095 About the Authors: Ranu Sinha Roles: Conceptualization, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing E-mail: Ranu.Sinha@ouce.ox.ac.uk, Sinha.Ranu@gmail.com Affiliations: School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College, Oxford, United Kingdom ORICD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8343-2498 Jens Koed Madsen Roles: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing Affiliation: Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom ORICD: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2405-8496 1.