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Socio-economic characteristics influencing farmers’ willingness-to-adopt domestic biogas technology in rural Pakistan

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Abstract

Worldwide, biogas programs fail to achieve broad acceptability because of failure to account for socio-economic constraints during program design and implementation. This paper attempts to revisit the relationship between socio-economic characteristics of rural households and adoption of biogas technology at the household level in Pakistan by using a predicted willingness-to-adopt approach in addition to considering energy-related variables which have been rarely accounted for in previous literature. The study is based on primary data collected from 200 households across eight villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Province. A chi-square test of association is applied to determine the relationship between farmers’ socio-economic characteristics and their willingness-to-adopt domestic biogas technology. Results confirm that socio-economic factors such as education, total landholdings, cost of energy consumption, duration of electric shortfalls, occurrence of smoke-related diseases, and possession of livestock had a significant relationship with farmers’ willingness-to-adopt biogas technology. The study concludes that for the successful deployment of biogas technology in rural areas, it is imperative to account for the socio-economic conditions of the population.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Dr. David Orden and Andrew Comstock, the USA, for technical and language editing. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their candid comments and suggestions which certainly helped to improve this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through the Competitive Grants Program (CGP) of the Pakistan Strategy Support Program (PSSP) (grant number CGP 3 no. 532, 2014).

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  1. Institute of Development Studies (IDS), The University of Agriculture Peshawar, Peshawar, Pakistan

    Inayatullah Jan

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I. Jan is the sole author of the paper and has contributed in all sections of the paper.

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Correspondence to Inayatullah Jan.

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Jan, I. Socio-economic characteristics influencing farmers’ willingness-to-adopt domestic biogas technology in rural Pakistan. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 20690–20699 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12042-x

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