Economics, Business and Management: Recent Advances Vol. 4

The green agricultural transition requires investment in practices that can improve environmental performance while sustaining farm livelihoods. Yet financing is frequently treated as a sufficient explanation for adoption, despite differences between short-term liquidity shortages, uninsured risk, uncertain private returns and uncompensated public benefits. This critical narrative review integrates agricultural development economics, sustainable finance and environmental incentive research to examine when credit, risk-sharing instruments and environmental payments can support sustained technology adoption. Literature published from 2008 to 1 August 2026 was selected through targeted scholarly searching, citation tracing and bibliographic verification. Evidence was differentiated by research design, unit of analysis, adoption stage and environmental outcome. Randomised agricultural finance experiments demonstrate that seasonal liquidity, payment timing and risk allocation can affect investment, but many measure input use or production rather than environmental improvement. Conversely, studies explicitly labelled as agricultural green finance frequently rely on aggregate observational indicators that do not identify farm-level causal mechanisms. Environmental payment experiments provide more direct evidence, including the importance of advancing funds before farmers incur compliance costs. However, initial participation is not equivalent to persistent adoption, and practice adoption does not guarantee additional environmental benefits. Carbon payments face further constraints arising from measurement uncertainty, baseline selection, permanence and transaction costs. An integrated interpretation distinguishes financing, which shifts resources across time, from funding, which determines who ultimately pays for environmental services. It supports matching instruments to demonstrable constraints rather than maximising labelled lending volumes. Seasonal credit, service-based access, credible risk sharing and targeted environmental payments can be complementary, but their combination requires evaluation of farmer welfare, public subsidy costs and independently measured environmental outcomes. Priority research should connect financial contracts to multi-season adoption and landscape-scale impacts while examining distributional effects. Green agricultural finance is most defensible as a conditional institutional arrangement, not a presumption that additional capital is inherently sustainable.