Participation in Landcare Groups: the Relative Importance of Attitudinal and Situational Factors

Landcare groups are largely autonomous groups of people, mainly land users in rural areas, whose objectives are to deal with problems of land degradation and to develop more sustainable farming systems and land-management practices. Given the rapid growth in the number of landcare groups in Australia in recent years, this paper examines the extent to which theories on the adoption/diffusion of innovations help to explain participation in such groups. Data from a mail survey of a nation-wide sample of Australian farmers (N = 1755) indicate that although landcare group membership has bivariate associations with various attitudinal and situational variables, including several of those identified in adoption/diffusion theories, some of these linkages become non-significant under logistic regression. The data are consistent with the proposition that attitudinal variables are especially important in explaining or predicting landcare group membership in the movementʹs early stages; but that as the proportion of farmers participating increases, situational variables become increasingly important.