Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension

Profound change and systems innovation is needed to combat poverty, enhance public health, secure safe food production, and stimulate sustainable development worldwide. In taking initiatives and implementing measures, people, profit and planet issues need to be balanced. Communication and competence development are crucial processes for bringing about innovation in domains related to agriculture, food and natural resource use. Innovations in these domains consist not only of new technology, but also of new human practices, altered modes of thinking and novel forms of organisation and co-ordination in multi-stakeholder networks. Thus, new individual and collective competencies are not just pre-conditions for technical change, but constitute an integral component of societal innovation. Moreover, the occurrence and facilitation of communication and learning among stakeholders, scientists and policy makers is crucial for the development of shared understandings, visions and agreements that can serve as a basis for innovation design and implementation. Such processes are supported nowadays by an increasingly pluralistic set of organisations, and not just by conventional publicly funded agricultural research, extension and education institutes.
The JAEE aims to publish authoritative and well-referenced scientific articles on the dynamics in innovation support structures, and on the human aspects of change trajectories. It considers articles dealing with a broad spectrum of problem fields and approaches, without confining itself to specific theoretical, methodological or political lines. The JAEE strives to reach wider audiences of academics, researchers and professionals interested in multi-disciplinary issues regarding communication, competence development, education, extension, human resource development, learning, skills development and work-related education for innovation in agriculture, environmental management, fisheries, food production, nature management, rural development, natural resource use, and related domains.