Rice is a crucial crop in Cambodia, serving as both a staple food and an export commodity. Promoting rice exports to meet growing international demand is a central policy interest of the Cambodian government, with a target of 1 million tons of rice. However, the intensification of rice production faces multiple environmental and socio-economic challenges. To address these challenges, rice stakeholders have developed incentive mechanisms to promote sustainable practices. Incentive mechanisms refer to the structures or systems designed to motivate individuals or entities to take specific actions or exhibit desired behaviors. In our case, we represent these behaviors as either maintaining existing agroecological practices or changing farming practices towards more sustainable ones. This presentation aims to evaluate the effectiveness of these incentive mechanisms for rice production through a comparative analysis. Our objectives are twofold: 1.To build a framework to analyze incentives to agroecological practices. 2.To test this framework in the case of the rice sector in Cambodia. We analyzed actors-network involved in designing and implementing incentive mechanisms. Drawing on actor-network theory, we used a broad definition of incentive networks and mechanisms, including both human and non-human entities, such as guidelines and farming practices. The incentives function as hubs (or negotiation/adaptation spaces) where social processes and political dynamics take place. Prioritizing connections over individual and isolated factors allowed to better understand power dynamics, which are not inherent to the properties of actors but rather to the relationships established among them. In total, we studied 12 incentives through 17 semi-structured interviews, using an interactive system of actor mapping. Several actors involved in research and development projects, national and international organizations, rice-millers, union of agricultural cooperatives, farmers organizations were interviewed. The comparative analysis of the incentives highlights the differences and similarities of the mechanisms, characterizes their evolution in time and institutional trajectories, turning points in the implementation and the indicators that players use to define their successes or failures. Our findings suggest that the existing economic incentives, in their current shape, are not influencing significant changes in farmers' practices towards agroecology. We posit that incentives should extend beyond economic values to include others intrinsic values of rice farming, such as cultural value, farmers’ wellbeing, food safety, etc. Value-based incentives should be discussed among stakeholders in dedicated adaptation spaces before they are implemented, otherwise they face the risk of not being implemented by so-called beneficiaries on the ground. These findings will feed future research about the future of rice farming in Cambodia as a stepping stone to co-design relevant incentive and intervention mechanisms towards sustainable rice practices.
