Access to and usage of smartphones for agricultural purposes amongst small-scale farmers in rural areas of developing countries is still limited. Smartphones may provide an opportunity to develop farmers' capacities with specific applications offering fast access to continually updated and reliable information. This study develops a framework to investigate the cognitive and affective behavioural drivers of smallholder farmers´ intention to use a smartphone in a developing country context. For this, survey data was collected from 664 randomly selected small-scale farmers in Bihar State, India in 2016. The analysis included a partial least square estimation of the behavioural model. The results confirm positive influences on the intention to use a smartphone for agricultural purposes through subjective norms, attitude, self-control, as well as positive and negative anticipated emotions. There is no evidence that negative anticipated emotions related to failure outweighed other factors. These results extend the academic literature with new conceptual insights and provide application-oriented implications for stakeholders, such as NGOs, extension services and research institutes.

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Capacity development through agricultural training is a proven approach to enhance the management skills of small-scale farmers in developing countries, aiming to increase their standard of living in the long run. Yet, little is known about their preferences for different types of agricultural training as well as the impact of trainers' qualification on participants' learning success and satisfaction. Moreover, modern information and communication technologies are increasingly promoted as means to spread agricultural knowledge because of their large technical possibilities, wide coverage, and high exchange rate of information. In particular, the use of smartphones is discussed as a new way to train farmers in developing countries. However, the drivers of smallscale farmers' intention to use smartphones still seem largely under-explored. Besides modern technologies, innovation platforms also called learning alliances are another method to develop farmers' capacities, where all stakeholders involved into agricultural production try to solve problems and improve the value added for everybody. Yet, frameworks to evaluate these alliances are rare. Against this background, this dissertation presents four papers, which focus on capacity development from small-scale farmers' perspectives regarding their preferences, intentions to use smartphones, learning success, satisfaction and trust.Capacity development in agriculture still follows standardised top-down models driven by the public sector in most developing countries. In contrast, in industrialised countries training activities are increasingly privatised and service provision demand-driven. This is due to the increasing specialisation and industrialisation of agricultural production in recent decades. The trend is prompting researchers and other stakeholders to re-think the contextual fit of capacity development models whereby small-scale farmers in developing countries are passive knowledge recipients rather than holders of traditional know-how and capacities that can be exploited and further developed in customised training. To analyse this research gap, paper one examines the preferences of small-scale farmers for agricultural training with respect to training method, trainer, duration and location of training, and additional offers. A discrete choice experiment was conducted with 664 randomly selected farmers in Bihar state, India, in 2016. The data obtained are analysed using a mixed logit model in a willingness-to-pay space, including analyses for different subgroups.Based on their particular willingness-to-pay for the studied attributes, the analysis depicts smallscale farmers' preference for training activities that include demonstrations, additionally offered inputs (seeds, fertilisers, credit) and an academic trainer.2 Analysing small-scale farmers' preferences for capacity development activities in developing countries -an experimental approach 1