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The interactive relationships of farmers with institutions and other individuals create the context of succession intention – “farm embeddedness”. This context shapes in long-term self-efficacy of farmers. The main goal of this paper is to study the contextual drivers of the choice of succession paths in small-scale farms which dominate in Eastern European countries. The studied pathways, ordered by farmers’ self-efficacy are “no succession”, “conditional succession”, “unconditional internalised succession” and “unconditional externalised succession”.

We used a sample of 1,683 small farms from three Eastern European emerging markets: Romania, Moldova and Serbia. The likelihood of choosing a given succession path is analysed using a multinomial logit model; contextual drivers of succession are selected based on the theory of embeddedness.

We found that more-educated and more-efficient small-scale farmers are less likely to pass on their farms because of a kind of “glass ceiling”, so they do not want such a difficult future for their children. The most important determinant of unconditional/internalised succession is the successor formation through “training on the farm”. Some formal institutions operating in the agricultural sector hinder self-efficacy and thus unconditional succession.

Most of the papers lack a theoretical background while demonstrating that economic drivers are crucial to succession. The embeddedness theory argues that economic activities are always anchored in a social structure. We contribute to this theory by showing that the embeddedness in social networks is more important than economic factors when smallholders transfer their farms to successors in post-socialist countries. In addition, we attempt to identify which particular types of social networks are most relevant to the multi-stage process of farm transfer, and we outline several transfer scenarios using the concept of self-efficacy.