Integrated innovations and recommendation domains: Paradigm for developing, scaling-out, and targeting rainwater management innovations

The technical, economic, and ecological aspects of rainwater management are interlinked and spatially bounded. Developing, scaling-out, and targeting rainwater management innovations as adaptive strategies to upgrade rainfed agriculture are therefore preferably best approached through integrated innovations and recommendation domains as a paradigm. At the level of scenario development, the integrated innovations paradigm helps to understand and address integrity between technical, economic, and ecological issues that affect technology adoption, impact, and sustained use. At the level of scaling-out and targeting, recommendation domains provide the spatial dimension that embraces the economic, institutional, biophysical, and agro-ecological conditions in which integrated rainwater management innovations can be accommodated to address heterogeneity. This paper reviews Ethiopia's experience in rainwater management (adoption, performance, and impact) to get insights about the proposed paradigm and the factors entering the paradigm. The findings suggest that integrated innovations and the conditions of success embraced in a recommendation domain provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for a successful rainwater management intervention at a landscape level.