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Innovation systems and affordances in climate smart agriculture

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Title Innovation systems and affordances in climate smart agriculture
 
Creator Smith, Harriet E.
Sallu, Susannah M.
Whitfield, Stephen
Gaworek-Michalczenia, Martha F.
Recha, John W.M.
Sayula, George J.
Mziray, Sylvester
 
Subject climate change
agriculture
agricultural innovation systems
smallholder
affordances theory
 
Description There is significant international investment and effort in the development, piloting and upscaling of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), with particular emphasis on delivering benefits to smallholder farmers through programmes of CSA interventions. However, there is poor understanding of how smallholder farmers access beneficial outcomes from changes in agricultural practices, beyond narrow and simplistic metrics, such as adoption rates and yield increases. Furthermore, binary notions of adopters and non-adopters provides a poor basis for understanding innovation within complex farming systems. By integrating an innovation systems perspective with the theory of affordances, we explore how agricultural innovation happens in the context of two CSA interventions in the Tanga Region of Tanzania, to examine who has access to, and is able to benefit from interventions, who does not, and why. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data involving over 200 participants, we demonstrate how innovation processes in this context are diverse and non-linear, and discuss how potential outcomes derived from programmes are shaped by farmers’ affordances. We argue that common programme reporting metrics fail to account for the dynamic and nonlinearity of innovation processes and risk overlooking unintended outcomes of interventions. We propose that interventions should be conceived with an appreciation of context and affordances from the outset, to support how they engage with the least capable from the very beginning.
 
Date 2021-10
2022-02-08T17:02:47Z
2022-02-08T17:02:47Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Smith HE, Sallu SM, Whitfield S, Gaworek-Michalczenia MF, Recha JW, Sayula GJ, Mziray S. 2021. Innovation systems and affordances in climate smart agriculture. Journal of Rural Studies 87:199–212.
0743-0167
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/118011
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.09.001
 
Language en
 
Rights Copyrighted; all rights reserved
Limited Access
 
Format 199-212
 
Publisher Elsevier BV
 
Source Journal of Rural Studies