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This paper examines the impacts of conformity tendencies (including conformity to rich villagers, conformity to relatives, conformity to neighbors and conformity to village cadres) on households’ willingness to adopt energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas in rural areas in China. Particularly, to address estimation errors caused by possible sample self-selection biases, propensity score matching is employed to further ensure the robustness of the regression results obtained by Binary Logistic model. The empirical results highlight that, in contrast to the significantly negative impact of conformity to rich villagers, conformity to relatives, neighbors and village cadres all have positive and statistically significant influences on households’ willingness to adopt energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas. These findings suggest the potential importance of providing households with quick and convenient access to the relatives’, neighbors’ and village cadres’ adoption information of energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas but carefully filtering out rich villagers’ adoption information in promoting energy utilization of crop straw exampled by biogas in rural areas.

Many studies have investigated energy utilization of crop straw; however, there has been little analysis in the literature from the perspective of willingness to accept compensation. This study is one of the first studies to introduce the variable trust into the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, and it mainly the factors influencing rural households' willingness to accept compensation for energy utilization of crop straw. The results show that a certain amount of compensation—approximately 0.95%–1.62% of the average family annual income —encourages households to participate in energy utilization of crop straw. This means that a reasonable compensation standard is an important means of coordinating the relationship between economic development and protection of the natural environment. This paper also finds that, in addition to the factors (time cost expectation, economic cost expectation, influence from persons with high education, influence from persons with high income) in the original Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model, trust in neighbors, as one aspect of the interpersonal trust, and trust in village cadres, as one aspect of the institutional trust, all exert a significant influence on rural households' willingness to accept. This paper therefore recommends linking energy utilization of crop straw to broader attempts to strengthen trust.

The problem of agricultural waste pollution has aroused wide concern around the world. An effective measure to solve this problem is to implement the compensation policy so as to encourage people to participate in agricultural waste recycling. This paper seeks to estimate households' willingness to accept compensation in terms of agricultural waste recycling adopting the contingent valuation method, and to calculate the compensation standard for households' participation in agricultural waste recycling by methods of non-parametric and parametric estimate. It aims to answer two questions: how much the compensation should be given for encouraging households to participate in agricultural waste recycling? Which factors would affect willingness to accept compensation value of households for participating in agricultural waste recycling? The results show that most households recognize the value of agricultural waste recycling and a certain amount of compensation which is about 1.08%–1.31% of average family annual income does encourage households to participate in agricultural waste recycling. Household's willingness to accept compensation and household's expected value of compensation are affected by personal or family characteristics (such as gender, household income) as well as the non-economic variables (such as environmental knowledge and environmental attitude). According to this research, reasonable compensation standard is the cornerstone of the effectiveness and efficiency of compensation policies. Household income inequality and capital allocation in terms of households' willingness to accept compensation should be taken into consideration when compensation policies about agricultural waste recycling are formulated. Environmental education for households is an effective measure to enhance their environmental consciousness, while raising the strength of government's waste management is turned out to be effective for improving the rural ecological environment. Conclusions of this study provide an important scientific basis for developing countries and regions to formulate compensation policies in terms of inspiring their agricultural waste recycling.

Energy utilization of crop straw is of high economic, social and ecological benefit. In this paper, based on the beneficiary pays principle, we use biogas production from crop straw as an example and analyze households' willingness to pay (WTP) for the local government-led project on energy utilization of crop straw. “Interpersonal trust” and “institutional trust” variables are introduced to improve the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model, on the basis of which, Probit and Interval Regression Models are employed to explore the determinants of households' WTP. Results show that: 1) Most households are willing to pay for biogas utilization of crop straw, and the average expected value of households' WTP is about 20.72 RMB per household monthly; 2) Crop straw program cost and benefit trade-offs, convenience of logistics and technology, and trust factors all play an important role in households’ WTP; 3) If the cultivation of trust is neglected, even if households have high expectations for the ecological performance of biogas production from crop straw, their WTP will not be improved. Conclusions are summarized to provide an important reference for the formulation of policies to improve energy utilization of crop straw in developing countries or regions.

This paper attempts to address a recurring theme in agricultural resources and environmental economics - the low adoption rates of pro-environmental agricultural practices in many developing countries. By improving the Norm-activation model, this paper incorporates external incentives and social norms into the framework and employs multivariate probit and ordered probit models to explore how environmental conscience, external incentives and social norms influence rice farmers' adoption behaviours and intensive use of pro-environmental agricultural practices. The case study, involving 954 household-level data of rice farmers from rural Hubei province, China, reveals that the adoption rates of certain practices are very low, and that only 6.5% rice farmers adopt three or more pro-environmental agricultural practices. Results show that straw returning and soil testing and fertilizer recommendation are complementaries, and that environmental conscience, external incentives and social norms all positively affect the adoption behaviours, while the adoption intensity is significantly influenced by awareness of consequences, perceived efficacy, external incentives and descriptive norm. These findings underscore that policy interventions to improve rice farmers' environmental conscience, to provide well-designed external incentives and to activate social norms are needed to enhance the adoption of pro-environmental agricultural practices in developing countries.

Many studies have been conducted on agricultural waste management, especially review articles; however, there are few literature analyses from the scientometric and bibliometric perspective. This study is one of the first to offer insights into the research topics and trend evaluation in terms of agricultural waste management over time. Our main findings are as follows: For nearly half a century, the United States has maintained the leading position in research on agricultural waste management. Many core research institutions or scholars are also from the United States. There are four major areas in this field: the research on the low-carbon and energy utilization of agricultural waste, the influence of agricultural waste emissions, the material and energy flow of agricultural waste and the prevention and control of agricultural waste pollution. As time progresses and with the development of environment, economy and society, the popular research topics in different stages vary, but on the whole, the research on agricultural waste management has emerged in the early stage. With the change of global natural resource conditions and political and economic background, there are more space for the future. We believe that research on greenhouse gas emission reduction from agricultural waste management based on specific social policies is extremely urgent, and will be of great significance in reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emission.

Sustainable agricultural technologies are of great significance in fully utilizing agricultural resources and promoting agricultural production. However, the adoption rates of these technologies are often characterized as low in rural areas in China. To figure out the potential salient determinants of rice farmers’ willingness to adopt sustainable agricultural technologies, this paper, by employing the multivariate probit model and ordered probit model, particularly and firstly explores the roles of observational learning and experience-based learning through communication from parents within the household on rice farmers’ willingness to adopt these technologies. Results show that there are strong complementarities and substitutabilities between sustainable agricultural technologies that rice farmers are willing to adopt, and that observational learning and experience-based learning through communication within the household do have pronounced effects on rice farmers’ willingness to adopt some sustainable agricultural technologies and on their intensive use intentions. Therefore, while formulating policies to improve the adoption rates and adoption intensity of these technologies, relevant government agencies should take the complementarities and substitutabilities between sustainable agricultural technologies as well as observational learning and experience-based learning through communication from parents into consideration.

Agricultural ecological compensation has drawn an increasingly broad range of interest since early 1990s. In recent years, the volume of the literature grows rapidly. As a result, a systematic review of the diverse research field and its current trends becomes essential. This paper surveys the literature of agricultural ecological compensation between 1990 and 2016. Specifically, by employing CiteSpace information visualization software, we firstly identified the research hotspots and evolution path and then illustrated the frontier and developing trend of the domain in core and broader perspectives. It is found that the focus of the academic community has always been researches on the theoretical policy and application of the payment for agro-ecosystem services, agricultural ecological compensation based on contingent valuation method, and ecological compensation of farmland landscape and organic food production as well as willingness to accept/pay for land use and ecological protection. Meanwhile, we also found that, in recent years, qualitative research has received more and more attention in the field of agricultural ecological compensation, since global warming, agricultural carbon emissions, and other emerging environmental issues have aroused widespread concern of the people around the world. Moreover, we believed that more and more scholars will employ case study methodology to analyze agricultural ecological compensation in specific systems, regions, or circumstances in the future.