Digital technologies in the lifeworld of smallholder farmers: A hermeneutic phenomenological critique of adoption-centric digital agriculture research

Digital agricultural technologies are increasingly promoted as solutions to the challenges confronting smallholder farming, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, much of the research in this field remains anchored in adoption-centric frameworks that conceptualise technology use as a rational and measurable decision shaped by factors such as perceived usefulness and ease of use. While these models have generated valuable empirical findings, they provide only a partial account of how farmers encounter and live with digital tools in everyday practice. This paper critically interrogates the conceptual and ontological assumptions embedded within adoption-centric research. Drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology, the study reorients analysis toward farmers’ lived experience, everyday practice, and processes of meaning-making. Rather than presenting new empirical fieldwork, the study undertakes a critical interpretive synthesis of global and African digital agriculture scholarship. This literature is read through phenomenological theory to illuminate dimensions of engagement that remain underexplored. The analysis shows that adoption-centric frameworks marginalise key dimensions of digital engagement, including temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, language, historical memory, and infrastructural instability. In practice, farmers’ engagement with digital technologies is often negotiated, intermittent, and shaped by shifting social and material conditions. Technologies may be adopted, adapted, reinterpreted, or abandoned in ways that exceed explanation through behavioural intention alone. Digital tools are not neutral instruments but acquire meaning within specific social and material lifeworld contexts. Understanding digital agriculture, therefore, requires moving beyond the question of adoption toward exploring how digital technologies are experienced within everyday farming life. By foregrounding lived experience, this paper contributes to debates on the limits of adoption-centric approaches in agricultural research and rural development and argues that phenomenologically informed inquiry can complement quantitative adoption studies while supporting more context-sensitive policy, design, and intervention strategies.