‘They adopt, I also adopt’: The neighborhood effects and irrigator farmers’ conversion to adopt water-saving irrigation technology

Promoting water-saving irrigation technology (WSIT) has long been recognized as an effective measure to reduce irrigation water use and alleviate regional water poverty. Neighbours are the groups with the most interaction, the most intensive contact and the most frequent communication in agricultural production. In this paper, based on a field survey of irrigator farmers of China, experiments were conducted to evaluate the contribution of neighbour effect to farmers’ WSIT behaviour and its moderating mechanism between neighbour effect and technology adoption. The results show 26.7 % farmers adopt water-saving technology and these farmers often have strong neighborly relationships. In particular, neighbor effect significantly promote WSIT adoption by 42.1 % and farmers with strong neighborly effects apply significant higher technology compared to farmers with weak neighbourly effects. Furthermore, mechanism results indicated that neighbour effects indirectly influence farmers' adoption of water-saving irrigation technology through three pathways: reducing information search costs, mitigating agricultural production risks and benefiting from the demonstration effect. Moreover, the heterogeneous results report that higher-income, lower digital and lower training frequency farmers will benefit more from the NE in terms of WSIT. Overall, this research provides a micro foundation and policy implications for the promotion of WSIT, and sheds light upon how the government can formulate relevant policies to promote the sustainable development of agricultural water resources.