Prioritizing climate‐smart agriculture: An organizational and temporal review

Abstract

Extant systematic literature reviews on the topic of climate smart agriculture (CSA) have mainly focused on two issues: reviewing framing of the CSA discourse in the academic and policy literature; and policy initiatives in the Global South that enhance the adoption of climate‐smart agricultural practices. Yet, there is little systematic investigation into how international organizations can help smallholder farmers manage agricultural systems to respond to climate change. Analyzing these organization's priorities and highlighting their knowledge gaps are crucial for designing future pathways of CSA. We intend to use this article to identify overarching CSA themes that can guide large international organizations to focus their CSA agenda in the hope of achieving goals associated with food security and sustainable intensification. We specifically ask the following question: How have the key CSA topics and themes emerged in the gray literature of international organizations between 2010 and 2020? We adopted a topic modeling approach to identify how six international organizations engaged with several topics related to CSA. Following the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach, we identified eight topics in the documents, representing four overarching themes: gender research, weather and climate, CSA management and food security. We found that there is insufficient discussion on the issues relating to governance measures and gender mainstreaming, with a larger focus on techno‐managerial measures of CSA. We conclude that research and training related to CSA must offer opportunities for marginalized and disproportionately vulnerable populations to participate and raise their voices and share innovative ideas at different levels of governance. This article is categorized under: Climate and Development > Social Justice and the Politics of Development Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation

Finding climate smart agriculture in civil-society initiatives

“…Document review analysis was applied to each report, which consisted of extraction of project objectives and theory of change (where available) followed by keyword search and manual thematic analysis (Bowen 2009). Document review is a valid methodological approach for understanding the underlying foundations of a particular research or policy topic (Grant and Booth 2009;Snyder 2019) and has been applied in other climate smart agriculture discourse analyses (Chandra et al 2018;Gardezi et al 2022). We first coded project objectives and change theories against the three major pillars of the FAO framework to determine the extent of alignment with CSA principles.…”

“…The most recent United Nations Food Systems Summit saw the World Economy Forum and the World Bank explicitly advocate for CSA. To understand how CSA has permeated global institutions, Gardezi et al (2022) analysed documents from major international organisations at the forefront of CSA research and financing in developing countries. Their analysis indicates, as others have indicated, a continuous alignment between 2010-2020 of CSA with techno-managerial interventions, and an absence of attention to CSA governance and effectiveness to address its core aims.…”

“…Despite the growth in publication and investments in CSA, it remains unclear how CSA is actually designed, conceptualised, and embedded into agricultural development projects (Gardezi et al 2022). The diversity of climate scenarios for different agricultural regions, coupled with socio-political structures, makes CSA a complex development activity with interacting global drivers and localised operational politics (Newell et al 2018;Silberberger and Kimengsi 2021).…”

“…This civil society group has the role of 'observer' in the Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture and actively seeks to reflect on the extent to which they form part of the climate-smart discourse (World Vision International 2022). Furthermore, much empirical analysis of CSA has focused on large projects rolled out by public and private institutions and less on civil society groups (Gardezi et al 2022;Lipper et al 2017).…”

A literature review of climate-smart landscapes as a tool in soil-water management in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Hence, according to FAO, [28, p. 557], climate-smart agriculture is a triple win. This is because it sustainably increases productivity [29][30], increases resilience and adaptation [31], reduces greenhouse gases [32], and enhances achievement of the national food security and development goals [20].…”