This study advances an institutional perspective on climate-security dynamics by examining how climate action can foster conflict or collaboration under different governance settings. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, local adaptation is conceptualized as an “action arena” where communities and organizations negotiate responses to climate threats within institutional constraints. Fieldwork was conducted across 14 climate-affected communities in Kenya, Senegal, Zambia, Guatemala, and the Philippines. A fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 31 action arenas assessed how combinations of five institutional conditions shape conflict and collaboration: nested institutions, resource tenure clarity, legitimacy, capacity, and multiplicity. Results show that no institutional condition consistently prevents conflict across contexts. Instead, collaboration and conflict emerge through multiple institutional pathways. Institutional legitimacy was found to be a central factor, being present across all collaborative pathways and absent from all conflict pathways. The findings further show that the effects of institutional capacity, tenure arrangements, nested governance, and institutional multiplicity depend on the broader institutional configurations in which they operate. These results highlight the importance of conjunctural causation in climate-security dynamics and suggest that conflict-sensitive adaptation requires attention to how institutional conditions interact, rather than focusing on individual governance characteristics in isolation.

Policies in sub-Saharan Africa are constrained by a limited knowledge of climate change extremes and a focus on agricultural production rather than nutrition supply. Here we model the impacts of future extremes on national-level calorie and nutrient supply in Zambia for production and nutrition focused policy scenarios. We identify the specific cropland, yield and import increases required to achieve climate-resilient nutrition security and highlight policy options.

The abundance of renewable energy in East and Southern Africa offers considerable opportunities for countries to transition towards green economies. In particular, green plant nutrition could help to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer and food production, and deliver environmental, balance of trade and climate resilience benefits while helping to meet future food demand. Here we discuss the viability of a green nutrition transition in the region in relation to current constraints and bottlenecks in different locations. A green nutrition transition will require careful management so that knowledge and assets can be shared in ways that neither marginalise some agricultural producers and input suppliers nor worsen power asymmetries in communities. Inclusive and participatory processes will be required to help align often competing narratives and objectives at local and national levels and, where feasible, to modify institutional and power structures for the common good. We outline several concrete actions that could contribute to the green nutrition transition, including filling evidence gaps and carrying out ex ante and ex post impact studies, bringing together the public and private sectors in convenings to design and implement pilot studies, and exploring agricultural input subsidy realignment and other incentives with national governments and the private sector. Initiatives such as the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan and regional climate action plans provide solid frameworks for a wide range of activities, and the continent could lead the way in greening plant nutrition to the benefit of people and planet.

Agroecological transitions represent strategic pathways for transforming agricultural systems to meet urgent global sustainability goals. These transitions encompass fundamental changes in social-ecological relationships, knowledge systems, and power dynamics within food systems. However, the mechanisms facilitating such transitions remain insufficiently understood, particularly regarding the diversity and efficacy of pedagogical models employed in existing agroecological initiatives. This knowledge gap is especially pronounced within Global South contexts, especially Latin America, where decolonial approaches hold particular relevance and tradition within effective agroecology initiatives. Using a decolonial lens, this study explores the pedagogical models used in community-led agroecological initiatives in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Drawing on semistructured interviews and workshops (n 140), alongside participant observations, we applied a qualitative archetypes analysis to examine three community-led agroecology initiatives. We identified three distinct but interconnected contextual narratives: a. Living Pedagogies; b. Resistance Pedagogies; and c. Hybrid Pedagogies. Despite these different contextual narratives, they share clear patterns, which allowed us to identify one major archetype - the South pedagogies archetype. The decolonial pedagogy found can be fundamental to accelerate agroecological transitions. Traditional communities in Colombia and Peru have preserved and evolved their agroecology knowledge systems through generations of collective learning, offering profound insights into sustainable food production that transcend the limitations of Western scientific methodologies. In parallel, decolonial pedagogies in the Brazilian case were essential to promote urban agroecological transition that started during the 2000s. These findings inform agroecological transition development based on learning processes that value multiple ways of being.

The Virtual Special Issue: Social Equity published by Current Research in Environmental Sustainability focuses on the importance of social equity for climate adaptation in land, water and food systems in the Global South. Emphasizing that theory is ahead of practice and that empirical examples are vital for learning, we introduce the set of articles, which each present the results of empirical research relevant to equity considerations. The papers demonstrate how vital is transdisciplinary research that engages critical social science perspectives and addresses how different actors give meaning to social equity, fairness and justice based on their experiences and lived realities. Taken together, they reinforce the need for further learning on how social equity can be fostered within transformative adaptation.

Faced with the growing climate crisis, there are calls for transformative adaptation, a climate response that addresses the root causes of vulnerability and requires radical change in food systems. Transformation of food systems is hence essential to deal with the ongoing climate crisis and to fulfil wider sustainability and development challenges from local to global scales. Transformed food systems must minimise vulnerability to shocks while delivering environmental, social and economic benefits. This need can only be met by embracing food system transformation as a process of social and individual change that contributes to transformative adaptation. The scale of this societal and environmental challenge demands an equally grand vision-one that integrates climate, sustainability and systems thinking with human psychology, beliefs and values, and shared understandings. Such a vision, with community and individual transformation at its core, has the potential to deliver multiple benefits to society through transformative food system change, livelihood resilience and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Fostering conditions that support both individual transformation and the development of collective understanding therefore needs to be a core part of any strategies to transform food systems. In this opinion piece, we provide a framework to guide this transformative drive towards societal climate resilience.

In 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with the aim of ending poverty in all its forms.Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were underpinned by the pledge that "no one will be left behind".The achievement of many SDGs is dependent on the fostering of climate-resilient food, land and water systems, and by ensuring that sustainable development is equitable and inclusive [1].This particularly applies to Indigenous Peoples who continue to be the poorest among the poor irrespective of the poverty-line used [2].This in turn raises the issue of climate justice [3] and, as part of this, ensuring that Indigenous Peoples' right to full and effective participation in policy processes is upheld in climate change fora, especially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [4].PLOS Climate has published several Opinion articles about Indigenous People's active participation in climate change processes e.g.[5][6][7].We build on these by stressing the importance of a more granular approach to climate justice and Indigenous Peoples' participation in climate policy processes.We argue that a more explicit focus on and context-specific understanding of social equity allows for greater participation of the most vulnerable within Indigenous communities.This necessitates attention to historical and contemporary relations of power and oppression, ones that frame the lives of Indigenous Peoples worldwide.By implication, it mitigates the dangers of maladaptation within these communities and gives greater credence to the pledge to leave no one behind.The importance of social equity highlights a key research development and evidence gap ahead of the 2024 Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UNFCCC (COP29). Representation in previous climate change processesIndigenous Peoples have been portrayed as highly vulnerable to climate change while at the same time possessing skills and knowledge that are critical to the climate response.Indigenous Peoples' participation in environmental governance is one of several key pathways through which they actively engage "with management of and relationships to nature" [2].Indigenous Peoples' contributions, however, have been underrepresented in previous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nationally Determined Contributions [8], and in COPs.These processes are fundamental to the emergence of climate-resilient food, land and water systems.

Although social learning (SL) conceptualization and implementation are flourishing in sustainability sciences, and its non-rigid conceptual fluidity is regarded as an advantage, research must advance the understanding of SL phenomenon patterns based on empirical data, thus contributing to the identification of its forms and triggering mechanisms, particularly those that can address urgent Anthropocene socio-ecological problems. This study aims to discover fundamental patterns along which SL in natural resources management differs by identifying SL archetypes and establishing correlations between the SL process and overall geopolitical conditions. Using a systematic literature review comprising 137 case studies in the five continents, content analysis, and correlations were performed. Results show two main archetypes of social learning (endogenous and exogenous). Their occurrence was linked, to where social learning occurs and how venues/preconditions for social learning are placed. In the Global South, endogenous SL should be better potentialized as a catalyzer of deliberative processes for sustainable natural resources management.

Approaches to operationalising the linkages between climate, peace and security are increasingly demanded by international organisations. Yet, there is a limited understanding of what effective programming practices that address climate-related security risks entail. Critical voices argue that programme designs often rely on analyses that ignore structural and cultural realities on the ground, leading to technocratic understandings of risks, and prescriptions for action that do not relate to people’s experiences, perceptions and values. Advised by social learning theory, this study developed and evaluated a participatory appraisal method to guide the design of environmental peacebuilding programming strategies meant to address climate-related security risks. The method was evaluated across nine rural locations in Kenya, Senegal and Guatemala, involving 221 participants. Based on a critical evaluation of the method, opportunities and challenges for the use of social learning approaches to advise environmental peacebuilding programming are discussed. Results indicate that appraisal processes of collective reflection can support jointly articulated and context-relevant understandings of climate-related security risks. This shared knowledge can then support local communities in the design of climate adaptation strategies that potentially contribute to sustainable peacebuilding. Settings characterised by low political legitimacy and the unwillingness of conflictive actors to engage in dialogue are identified as barriers for the development of feasible programming strategies.

Global climate policies recognize the urgent need to address the inequitable impacts of climate change on smallholder agricultural communities, but there is limited understanding of how to accomplish this in practice. We contribute to closing this gap through the design of a participatory qualitative methodology intended to nurture locally-led “transformative adaptation pathways” that strengthen social equity and sustainability. Our conceptual framework draws upon theories of social equity and justice rooted in participatory parity—values and norms that encourage people to interact with one another as equals and synergistically nurture recognitional, distributional, representational and intergenerational equities. Recognizing that social equity is enhanced when poor and vulnerable people gain decision-making power that expands their access to resources and opportunities, we question how people understand and experience social equity and its relationship to their capacity to adapt. We also ask how norms about gender, generation, and socio-economic status shape people's understandings and experiences of social equity and adaptation. To address these questions, we illustrate the methodological approach with evidence gathered from pilot tests conducted in smallholder communities of Kenya and Philippines. Our findings show how understandings of fairness provide a basis for learning, eliciting comparative and contextualized findings that can inform community-based adaptation. Overall, we demonstrate that in the face of social processes that typically fuel inequities, participatory tools and learning tactics can serve to empower low-income women and men to identify, contribute to, and monitor actions that nurture their community's progress towards strong and equitable climate adaptation capacity.

OPINION article Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 07 May 2024Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems Volume 8 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2024.1398079

Knowledge is a critical enabling factor for healthy agri-food innovation systems (AIS). AIS and related knowledge management (KM) frameworks face significant implementation challenges. We review applications of KM to AIS, the current state of the art and shortcomings and present a new KM framework, Agricultural Knowledge Management for Innovation (AKM4I). Previous agricultural KM frameworks do not integrate innovation pragmatically, use linear, reductionist, top-down pathways to innovation, and do not explicitly incorporate issues of power, politics, ownership, and trust when combining scientific and local knowledge across multiple stakeholders. The AKM4I framework addresses systemic interactions favouring innovation outcomes by formalising flows and management of information and knowledge between diverse sets of stakeholders; and explicitly considering previously unresolved practical and relational barriers aiming to facilitate more equitable, rapidly evolving, and actionable knowledge generation and management for innovation and transformational change. An agricultural case study serves as an example of the implementation of AKM4I.

In response to the climate crisis, there has been much focus on climate-smart agriculture (CSA); namely, technologies and practices that enhance adaptation, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and contribute to food security; the so-called triple win. Success has tended to be measured in terms of the number of farmers adopting CSA with less focus given to the impacts especially on human development. CSA can inadvertently lead to 'maladaptation' whereby interventions reinforce existing vulnerabilities either by benefitting powerful elites or by transferring risks and exposure between groups. Such maladaptive outcomes often stem from overly technical adaptation programming that is driven by external objectives and discounts the social and political dynamics of vulnerability. Increasingly a more nuanced picture is emerging. This reveals how a failure to contextualize CSA in relation to the structural socio-economic dynamics associated with agricultural systems that render some categories of farmer especially vulnerable to climate change, undermines CSA's contribution to reducing rural poverty and increasing equity. In response, there is a growing focus on transformative orientations that pursue a more deep-seated approach to social, institutional, technological and cultural change in order to address the structural contributors to vulnerability and differential exposure to climate risk. Addressing these questions requires a robust consideration of the social contexts and power relations through which agriculture is both researched and practiced. For agriculture to be transformative and contribute to broader development goals, a greater emphasis is needed on issues of farmer heterogeneity, the dangers of maladaptation and the importance of social equity. This entails recognizing that resilience encompasses both agro- and socio-ecological dimensions. Furthermore, practitioners need to be more cognizant of the dangers of (i) benefiting groups of already better off farmers at the expense of the most vulnerable and/or (ii) focusing on farmers for whom agriculture is not a pathway out of poverty. The success of these approaches rests on genuine transdisciplinary partnerships and systems approaches that ensure adaptation and mitigation goals along with more equitable incomes, food security and development. The greater emphasis on social equity and human well-being distinguishes climate-resilient from climate-smart agriculture.

CONTEXT: To contribute to building sustainable and effective climate change adaptation solutions avoiding usability gap, it is largely recommended to engage in the process of co-production, integrating expertise and knowledge from various academic and non-academic actors.OBJECTIVE: We want to learn if and how co-production, believed to effectively link knowledge and decision -making, and thus suggested as the best practice in building decision-support frameworks, is really applied in the frameworks that are being implemented on the ground.METHODS: A literature review allowed us to identify integrated decision-support frameworks for climate-change adaptation in agriculture developed and used over the period of the last 10 years and involving non-academic stakeholders. To analyse them, we chose as an assessment tool the four co-production principles proposed by Norstro center dot m and colleagues: context-based, pluralistic, goal-oriented and interactive.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The useful entry points for incorporating co-production in the design of decision -support that we found in the reviewed frameworks include among the others adequate participants selection strategy, building on existing interaction spaces, developing a theory of change with the participants, and involving participants in the design of different elements of the method. The architectures of the analyzed frameworks contained more elements that responded to pluralistic and interactive principles than to context -based and goal oriented principles, we have also identified gaps in the design, such as taking into account the personal characteristics of researchers that could strengthen a framework's implementation and its impact, or attempts at bridging different levels of decision making, to cover the triad of science, policy and practice. A detailed look at the decision-frameworks that are actually being applied allows for a critical reflection whether and how we as researchers use what we preach as an effective way of responding to sustainability challenges in agriculture. Co-production principles turn out to be a useful tool for analysis and we suggest they can be used as a check-list when designing decision-support frameworks for climate-change adaptation.SIGNIFICANCE: This papers offers useful examples of how to shift the research-led processes of decision-support towards more co-production with non-academic actors, to increase chances of bridging the gaps between science, policy and practice.

The severity of the climate challenge requires a change in the climate response, from an incremental to a more far-reaching and radical transformative one. There is also a need to avoid maladaptation whereby responses to climate risk inadvertently reinforce vulnerability, exposure and risk for some sections of society. Innovative technological interventions are critical but enabling social, institutional and governance factors are the actual drivers of the transformative process. Bringing about this transformation requires inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, and the embracing of social equity. In this Perspective, we unpack what this means for agricultural research and, based on our collective experience, we map out a research agenda that weaves different research components into a holistic and transformative one. We do not offer best practice, but rather reflections on how agricultural research can more readily contribute to transformative adaptation, along with the personal and practical challenges of designing and implementing such an agenda.

Farmer adoption of sustainable rice farming technologies and practices is critical for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Often adoption is investigated in isolation focusing on factors influencing farmer decision making and overlooking the effects of technology adoption on farmers’ livelihoods and perceptions of change. Therefore, the present study investigated technology adoption and its effects on farmers with a special focus on additional revenue allocation and perception of social, economic and environmental change. Using a digital survey platform, 153 farmers (21.6% female) were interviewed in three sub-districts of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. On average, farmers adopted two technologies or practices, adopted high-yielding rice varieties, and increased their revenue from US$105 to US$122 per hectare per season. Barriers to adoption included time constraints, unsuitability for field conditions and incompatibility with cropping systems. Farmers invested the extra income in farming business and improved diets. Furthermore, farmers perceived changes in social and human capital and also poverty reduction due to technology adoption. This study highlights the importance of including an analysis of social impact in agricultural research.

Climate risk management is part of the response to the threat of climate change. Much effort has focused on the promotion on climate-resilient agriculture. There continues to be undue focus on technology solutions per se and not enough attention on the coupling of technologies and socio-economics and how they become embedded in ecological systems underpinning smallholder agriculture. In this perspective, we argue that an intertwined social–ecological–technological systems approach to climate risk management is needed to ensure that climate-resilient agriculture contributes more to the realization of goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Furthermore, in line with broader policy thinking on the need for transformative change toward sustainably living on the planet and “leaving no one behind,” a greater focus on transformative adaptation is required. Transformative adaptation tackles the root causes of vulnerability including unevenly distributed power relations, and extant networks of control and influence. There are, however, relatively few examples of moving from the theory of transformative adaptation to practice. Three recent practical examples of transdisciplinary approaches, that we have direct experience of as researchers, provide lessons for initial ways forward as part of climate risk management initiatives. Examples from Vietnam, East and Southern Africa, and Guatemala illustrate the importance of inter- and transdisciplinary responses whereby the inequalities underlying unequal power structures may be addressed, enabling farmers to pursue climate risk management pathways that contribute to climate resilience and human development, as epitomized by the Sustainable Development Goals.