Synthesis

INTRODUCTION

The concept of resilience has risen prominently over the last decade as a central focus for framing and addressing multiple and unpredictable drivers of change that food and agricultural systems are facing. Applications of resilience to specific systems or contexts, e.g., farming systems, focus on how such social-ecological systems can cope with and adapt to different perturbations or initiate structural transformations when recovery from shocks or stresses is untenable (Walker et al. 2004, Darnhofer et al. 2010, Béné et al. 2016, Urruty et al. 2016, Meuwissen et al. 2019, van der Lee et al. 2022). Today, major international development organizations have embraced resilience as a guide for the design of interventions to support smallholder farming systems in low-and-middle income countries deal with multiple stressors and shocks and to improve well-being (FAO et al. 2017, Bryan et al. 2023, Lindgren and Lang 2023). Smallholder farming systems in Africa are dominated by smallholder farmers who rely on rain-fed agriculture; occupy land sizes considered small for their production; use little or no mechanization; and rely on family labor for production (FAO 2014). These farmers face enormous and intersecting pressures that affect their ability to maintain productivity and to achieve food security. These pressures range from climate change (Ifejika Speranza 2010, Adhikari et al. 2015, Magesa et al. 2023), outbreaks of pests and diseases, soil degradation (Lal et al. 2016), and various forms of social differentiation, shaped by gender dynamics, power relations, and resource entitlements (e.g., land), which not only determine the resilience capacity of individual farmers and rural households but the potential for them to benefit (or not) from agricultural development interventions (Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner-Kerr 2015, Vercillo 2022, Bryan et al. 2024).

Although there is consensus around the need to strengthen resilience in smallholder farming systems, there is also growing debate about how best to do so. On one hand, international development agencies promote Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) as a key approach to build the resilience of agricultural systems, enhance food security, and improve the sustainability of farming livelihoods (Lipper et al. 2014). CSA was launched in 2009 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as a global strategy to advance “triple-win” objectives: to sustainably increase food production and incomes; build adaption and resilience to climate change; and reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions, where possible. Key organizations promoting CSA, such as the World Bank, emphasize an operational approach that combines technology transfer with institutional innovations and policy coordination to deliver multiple resilience outcomes at the farm-level, across landscapes and at national levels (World Bank 2015, CCAFS 2023). Many agricultural development initiatives implementing CSA in Africa prioritize addressing the biophysical aspects of climate change, focusing on field-and-farm level management practices that can increase or maintain productivity and increase incomes in the face of climate-related risks, such as droughts, heat, floods, and changes in rainfall patterns (Zougmoré et al. 2014, Bedeke et al. 2019, Mutenje et al. 2019, Mkwambisi et al. 2021). Key technologies promoted in CSA interventions include improved crop varieties and livestock breeds, early warning systems (climate information services), nano fertilizers, and nano pesticides (Herrero et al. 2020), which are often used in combination with changes in farming practices.

On the other hand, critical food studies scholars^[1] raise concerns over the framing and application of resilience in major agricultural development interventions, including CSA (Carr 2019, Clay and Zimmerer 2020, Mikulewicz and Taylor 2020, Clay 2023). These scholars argue that climate-development interventions in Africa take a depoliticized and decontextualized approach that frames resilience as the mitigation of biophysical risks and as a result promote technocratic solutions that prioritize input-led intensification. The problem with this approach, as Clay (2023) explains, is that it can create uneven resilience, which favors wealthier farmers who are already integrated into cash economies while undermining the “everyday forms of climate adaptation practiced by [poorer] semi-subsistence producers” (p. 242) as illustrated in Rwanda. In response, critical food studies scholars emphasize (re)framing resilience around socio-political stressors that equally drive vulnerability and “maladaptation” alongside climate-related risk (Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner-Kerr 2015, Boillat and Bottazzi 2020, Hellin et al. 2023). These scholars draw attention to locally based co-created innovations comprising a range of social and technological innovations developed from farmer-extension-research collaborations (Davies and Moore 2016, Zougmoré et al. 2014). Among these are soil and water conservation practices, community seed banks, locally developed biopesticides, and social movement advocacy actions to address people’s access and control over production resources. Co-created innovations generally leverage the agency and knowledge of rural stakeholders in decision making pertaining to the development, testing, and implementation of agricultural development interventions (Nyamwanza et al. 2023).

This scoping review contributes to these debates by examining how the concept of resilience is framed and empirically applied in agricultural development interventions focused on Africa’s smallholder farming systems. The paper also contributes to an emerging number of scoping and systematic reviews related to the resilience of Africa’s farming sectors and rural livelihoods. These range from broader scoping reviews of development resilience as applied to individual or household well-being in low-and middle-income countries (e.g., Barrett et al. 2021) to systematic reviews that are more focused on smallholder farmers’ adaptation strategies to climate change impacts in Africa (Jellason et al. 2021, Magesa et al. 2023).

RESILIENCE OF SMALLHOLDER FARMING SYSTEMS AND CLIMATE SMART AGRICULTURE

The literature on the resilience of smallholder farming systems is generally organized around the analysis of two different approaches. The first adopts a systems approach where the emphasis is on building social-ecological resilience at multiple levels, including the farm, community, and landscape levels through a combination of intervention strategies that maintain and increase agricultural productivity, improve livelihoods, and foster policy and institutional change (Bailey and Buck 2016, Hellin et al. 2018). The second adopts an actor-based approach where the focus is on livelihood resilience and on the capacity of individuals to respond to various stressors and shocks by investing in their access to a diversity of assets/capital (financial), as well as in social processes of change centered around human agency and human rights, empowerment, and individual and collective action (Tanner et al. 2015, Pelletier et al. 2016, Quandt 2018). These different analytical approaches in turn shape perspectives around the types of intervention strategies that are prioritized, e.g., adoption of technological innovations or transformation of socio-political structures and power relations (World Bank 2015, Carr 2019, Clay and Zimmerer 2020, Charatsari et al. 2022, Hellin et al. 2023).

The analytical approach of livelihood resilience pays close attention to individual and household coping and adaptive capacities (or lack thereof). This literature provides important insights into how local sites, including households, oftentimes embody heterogeneous interests and various forms of social differentiation such as age, education, marital status, income, and decision-making power, which shape how different people experience climatic and no-climatic risks and benefit (or do not) from new innovations (Fisher and Carr 2015, Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner-Kerr 2015, Mutenje et al. 2019). Conceptually, livelihood resilience draws insights from sustainable livelihoods and its set of indicators—physical, natural, financial, human, and social capital—to offer solutions that might help people cope with and recover from stress and shocks or enhance their capabilities (Chambers and Conway 1991, Serrat 2008, Quandt 2018). In smallholder farming systems such solutions can include a diversification of crops and livestock, soil and water conservation practices, selection of stress tolerant crop varieties, temporal adjustments of cropping patterns, and diversifying income from farm and non-farm activities (Shiferaw et al. 2014, Béné et al. 2016, Isaacs et al. 2016). Increasingly, livelihood resilience also emphasizes the role of human agency, rights, and justice as integral to building people’s capacities to respond to stressors and shocks (Tanner et al. 2015). A rights-based framework in livelihood resilience places a duty on nation states to transform socio-political structures, such as through enacting legislation to address existing social and gender disparities in resource entitlements or through facilitating access to assets/capital as a precondition to enhance and exercise capabilities (Tanner et al. 2015, Quandt 2018).

Although nation states have an important role to play in building rights-based livelihood resilience, many countries in Africa lack adequate capacity to provide development assistance to rural populations, including social protection, financial services, and early warning systems (Pelletier et al. 2016). Further, the frequency and variability of climate events linked to El Niño-Southern Oscillation, such as extreme drought conditions in East and Southern Africa (Shiferaw et al. 2014, Sazib et al. 2020, Palmer et al. 2023), increasingly pose severe constraints on smallholder farmers’ traditional coping and adaptation strategies. Since 2005, for example, drought frequency in this region has doubled from once every six years to once every three years (Sazib et al. 2020), exacerbating capability failures of households and national economies alike (Shiferaw et al. 2014). As such, international agricultural development donors and organizations will continue to play a crucial role in efforts to enhance adaptation and resilience in smallholder farming systems (Conti et al. 2024). However, these agricultural development partners can draw important insights from livelihood resilience and other relevant literature to ensure that their innovations are designed in ways that are more responsive to the needs and capacities of diverse groups of smallholder farmers.

Dominant agricultural development initiatives focused on resilience building, such as CSA, can be characterized as more closely linked to a broader systems approach to social-ecological resilience. Indeed, CSA originated in a context of international climate policy debates in the 1990s regarding the need to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (for ecological resilience) while advancing sustainable agriculture practices to ensure food security (social resilience; Lipper and Zilberman 2018). This era spawned international carbon offset markets, initially established as part of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism to meet GHG reduction targets through carbon sequestration projects in developing countries. Soil carbon offset projects in agriculture followed shortly after, around the mid-2000s, notably under the World Bank’s Biocarbon Fund (Lipper and Zilberman 2018). One such project was the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project (KAC), considered among the first CSA initiatives, which sought to generate “triple wins” co-benefits via soil carbon sequestration from agro-forestry practices; resilience on farms through farm-level diversity; and increases in crop yields and as well as income from sales of carbon credits (World Bank 2014, Biocarbon Fund 2024).

CSA’s initial links to carbon soil markets, however, have been a source of controversy since its inception (Lipper and Zilberman 2018). Critics were concerned that mitigation objectives put the burden of reducing GHG emissions on developing countries and poor farmers, while some practices such as agroforestry can limit the amount of space utilized to grow food crops, risking the food security of farmers with small landholdings (Stabinsky 2012, Castagné et al. 2020). More recent controversies pertain to the framing and application of CSA (Anderson 2014, Newell and Taylor 2018, Taylor 2018, Hellin et al. 2023), which encompass a broad array of technologies and practices from drought-tolerant seed varieties and inorganic fertilizer to soil and water conservation practices. Critics argue that such broad applications lack meaningful criteria to guide the sustainable changes needed in agricultural systems, including how CSA might advance social dimensions of resilience related to equity and justice (Karlsson et al. 2018, Hellin et al. 2023). Further, CSA has been associated with a (problematic) strategy that accommodates and enrolls as many powerful actors as possible to attract new streams of finance (Newell and Taylor 2018). Since its inception, various agro-corporations have embedded themselves into various CSA partnerships, which has led to a push for intensive farming practices, e.g., the use of herbicides, pesticides, and mineral fertilizer, and an emphasis on private sector led modernization in some intervention contexts (Westengen et al. 2018).

In assessing CSA’s resilience-building efforts, we are interested in understanding what types of measures were taken (if any) to ensure that the development and delivery of new agricultural innovations leverage collaboration in the areas of knowledge mobilization and social learning, and with formal and informal networks and institutions in intervention contexts (Pelletier et al. 2016). Fundamentally, measures that promote inclusiveness, responsiveness, and reflexivity in the design and implementation of innovations (Stilgoe et al. 2013), can help to generate agricultural development outcomes that are more demand-driven and relevant to local conditions. As mentioned earlier, key development agencies that support CSA, such as the World Bank and the CGIAR, also essentially emphasize collaborative measures in social, institutional, and policy contexts to not only deliver more responsive technologies for diverse smallholder populations but to stimulate institutional behavioral shifts in ways that help communities increase their adaptive capacity (CCAFS 2023).

METHODS

In this paper we seek to advance the research on building resilience of smallholder farming systems in Africa through a scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature. A scoping review is similar to a systematic review in that they both follow a systematic approach to collect evidence on a topic and to identify patterns around main concepts, theories, and knowledge gaps. The difference is that systematic reviews typically focus on a well-defined research question and apply deductive methods to assess evidence concerning the effects of a given intervention, whilst scoping reviews provide a narrative or descriptive account of available research, drawn from multiple data sources (Arksey and O’Malley 2005, Tricco et al. 2018, Lockwood et al. 2019). Because of the complexities associated with measuring or assessing resilience in agro-ecosystems (Cabell and Oelofse 2012, Quinlan et al. 2016), a scoping review was more appropriate for this study to synthesize knowledge around how best to strengthen the resilience of smallholder farmers and to contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (CGIAR 2021). Furthermore, scoping reviews can help to limit existing biases that authors might have toward interventions under investigation (Barrett et al. 2021).

This study’s scoping review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) method to systematically review peer-reviewed literature (Moher et al. 2009, Acevedo et al. 2020). The PRISMA-ScR protocol offers guidance on a minimum set of items for reporting, including description of processes used for literature search and categorizing evidence (Lockwood et al. 2019). This comprises five main steps: (1) define the main research question, (2) identify inclusion and exclusion criteria for literature search, (3) perform selection of relevant papers, (4) chart the data, and (5) collate, summarize, and report the results (Arksey and O’Malley 2005, Petticrew and Roberts 2006, Barret et al. 2021).

Figure 1 summarizes the literature search strategy for this scoping review. The study targeted peer-reviewed articles covering theory and empirical evidence on agricultural development resilience-building efforts in Africa’s smallholder agriculture, published from 1999 to early 2023. This period coincides with growing applications of the concept of resilience to social-ecological systems, including agro-ecosystems (Adger 2000, Holling et al. 2002, Walker et al. 2006, Darnhofer et al. 2010, Ericksen et al. 2010). Academic databases including Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were used to gather relevant publications, with assistance from a librarian. A pre-defined search string of keywords (Africa, agriculture, technolog*, and resilien*) was used to search for potentially relevant articles using the advanced search functions of databases in the title, abstract, or keywords of studies.

This initial literature search generated a total of 542 articles that were uploaded into Covidence, an article screening software, which removed 56 duplicates resulting in a total 486 unique articles. Title and abstract screening were completed by two reviewers following the criteria outlined in Figure 1, resulting in the removal of 393 articles. The first author undertook a full-text screening of the reminder of the articles, focused on the selection criteria elaborated below. A total of 43 articles were removed because they did not adequately address resilience, provided little to no evidence on how the described innovation/intervention builds or strengthens resilience, and those for which we could not find a full text. This resulted in a final sample of 50 articles that were reviewed as part of this scoping review.

We recognize that there are limitations in our scoping review’s focus on agricultural development resilience-building interventions and the search terms used here to capture key processes or mechanisms (e.g., technological innovations). This approach potentially omits a large body of literature that could enrich our understanding of resilience in smallholder farming systems, such as farmers’ own livelihood resilience strategies or broader social-ecological resilience measures facilitated by national and local level institutions and actors by excluding articles that fail to include the term resilience. Although these insights may have proven valuable, a broader analysis would have exceeded our capacity in terms of time and resources. Such a task may be an area for future research. Nonetheless, our engagement with the broader resilience literature offers meaningful insights into major applications of resilience in smallholder farming systems. Further, the focus of our analysis responds to a need for international development partners to better understand dynamic social and ecological processes in smallholder farming systems, and to design and deliver more responsive context-relevant interventions that can help communities cope and adapt to a range of adverse changes and vulnerabilities (Ericksen et al. 2010, Brown 2016, Hertel et al. 2021).

The analysis of the data was guided by a coding frame that collected details about (1) the different types of agricultural innovations (e.g., improved technologies and practices, institutional options, livelihood strategies) that were implemented; (2) key elements and attributes of resilience that were targeted for strengthening (i.e., absorptive [coping] capacity, adaptive capacity, and transformative capacity of smallholder farmers or farming systems (Béné et al. 2016), and (3) and the types of resilience outcomes (or impacts) that were prioritized or realized. The selected papers were reviewed using an inductive coding process to uncover patterns and extract key details around these themes.

RESULTS

The results of this review are summarized below and generally reveal that although the concept of resilience has been prominent over the last 20 years, applications to agricultural development have developed more recently, with more than half of the of the reviewed papers having been published after 2018 (Fig. 2). Nearly all the reviewed literature focused attention on enhancing resilience against adverse impacts of climate change, particularly on the effects that the frequency and severity of climate extremes, such as droughts, heat, floods, and changes in rainfall patterns, pose on crop yields, food security, and agricultural incomes (Tambo 2016, Bedeke et al. 2019, Mutenje et al. 2019, Mkwambisi et al. 2021). Evidence from this scholarship and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) demonstrates (with high confidence) that climate-induced warming and water stress is reducing soil moisture and organic matter content, and altering the growth, flowering, and grain filling of crops, which puts enormous pressure on the capacity of farming populations to produce adequate food that meets their consumption needs, generates income from farm produce sales, or maintains their livelihood assets (Ifejika Speranza 2010, Bedeke et al. 2019, IPCC et al. 2022). Overall, the reviewed articles fall within (one of) two distinct categories for building or strengthening resilience in smallholder farming systems. Some articles foreground the bio-physical elements of climate changes as the locus of building resilience, primarily through CSA, while others focused on social equity dimensions as the engine to improve resiliency, emphasizing co-created agricultural innovations with a potential to transform social dynamics. Many of the articles reviewed here were also empirical, focused on assessing the impact of, or reporting on the evidence from, resilience-building interventions.

Table 1 provides an overview of the two different approaches to strengthening resilience in Africa’s smallholder farming systems evident from the reviewed literature. Articles that prioritized addressing biophysical stresses and shocks associated with climate change dominated this literature, with at least 30 articles promoting CSA to enhance adaptation and build resilience in smallholder farming systems, including the adaptive capacity of rural communities. Meanwhile, a smaller selection of articles (n = 13) highlighted social equity considerations, with eight of these showcasing co-created innovations that sought to affect social change. These articles generally contextualized agricultural interventions in relation to the structural inequalities and power imbalances that underlie persistent shocks and stressors, which alongside biophysical aspects of climate change equally affect smallholder farmers’ adaptive capacity and resilience.

1. Building resilience to biophysical risks of climate change via CSA

Thirty-seven of the reviewed papers focused attention on addressing the biophysical risks of climate change, with 33 of these reporting on CSA. As mentioned earlier, CSA has become an important agrarian approach promoted to advance the “triple win” objectives (Lipper et al. 2018). The notable increase in publications on resilience in Africa’s smallholder agriculture after 2018 is linked to recent implementation of CSA activities, and the time it takes to undertake empirical research to assess impact from such interventions. Geographically, the reviewed papers covered a broad range of countries, with some seeing three or more studies, such as Ghana (4), Kenya (5), Malawi (4), Rwanda (3), and Uganda (3). Other studies focused on multiple countries or targeted sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.

Papers focused on CSA primarily reported on how farm-and-field-level management practices within specific farming systems might contribute to increases in productivity and enhance adaptation/resilience objectives (Thierfelder et al. 2017, Makate et al. 2019, Branca et al. 2021). For example, Mutenje et al. (2019) used productivity and adaptive capacity indicators such as yields, net benefit, return on labor per hectare, yield stability across seasons, etc. to assess the economic viability of CSA technologies and practices (assessed through an ex-post cost-benefit analysis) at the household level in Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique. Their results found that CSA options that combined management practices, e.g., conservation agriculture mixed with cereal-legume intercropping, and used improved crop varieties (e.g., drought-tolerant maize varieties), offered the most benefits in terms of increases in yields, profitability, resource use efficiency, and buffer against adverse climate effects (Mutenje et al. 2019). Other empirical studies showed similar results (Akrofi-Atitianti et al. 2018, Bedeke et al. 2019, Mkwambisi et al. 2021, Shikwambana et al. 2022).

A few papers spoke directly to the conceptual design and empirical experience of collaboration efforts in the design and delivery of CSA (Zougmoreé et al. 2014, Nkiaka et al. 2019, Bayala et al. 2021, Jellason et al. 2021, Khoza et al. 2021, Yeleliere et al. 2022). Conceptually, CSA promotes participatory processes of innovation design and experimentation with farmers and other stakeholders in local contexts (Aggarwal et al. 2018). The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program of CGIAR, for instance, is among the key organizations that promoted participatory action research to co-create and implement CSA innovations in Africa, notably in the context of Climate Smart-Villages^[2], where local stakeholders are invited to be part of project teams to help generate context-relevant technologies and practices that build upon the knowledge and technical capacities of farmers (Zougmoreé et al. 2014, Recha et al. 2017, Aggarwal et al. 2018, Bayala et al. 2021)

In multiple interventions contexts in West Africa, as well as East Africa, CCAFS and partners collaborated with local teams comprising National Research and Extension Systems, national meteorological services, and local radio programs, among others to generate robust climate information to help prioritize climate-smart options based on the three pillars of CSA: productivity, adaptation, and GHG mitigation (Bayala et al. 2021, see also Recha et al. 2017). Subsequently smallholder farmers at these sites and others were trained to use climate information to guide their farm activities, such as to adjust the planting calendars in response to climate variability or to adopt drought-tolerant seed varieties if seasonal forecasts call for dry conditions (Nkiaka et al. 2019). This illustrates that CSA resilience-building efforts in some contexts, especially when guided deliberately by key organizations such as CCAFS, can leverage collaborative and participatory measures to develop and deliver a suite of locally relevant technologies and practices for farming communities.

At the same time, multiple papers that reported on CSA also acknowledged the challenges associated with working in Africa’s diverse agro-ecologies, smallholder farming systems, as well as the heterogeneous socio-cultural and socioeconomic conditions of its farming populations (Tambo 2016, Nyasimi et al. 2017, Makate et al. 2019, Mutenje et al. 2019). Research findings from these papers show that the benefits associated with adopting CSA were often subject to social differentiation dynamics, comprising household characteristics (gender, education level, access to credit, farm size, asset endowments, and dependence ratio), social capital (e.g., group membership in farmer associations), as well as to market access (distance to input and output markets), and access to extension services (Assan and Sibanda 2015, Tambo 2016, Mutenje et al. 2019, Khoza et al. 2021). In response, the CSA literature recommends catalyzing public-private investments that can help to facilitate greater access to CSA extension information, agricultural credit institutions, and farm inputs, particularly among poorer and women-headed households (Thierfelder et al. 2017, Makate et al. 2019). This literature also highlights that addressing macro-level factors to help create conducive market and investment policies that deal with market failure and building local institutions and their personnel as crucial to improve adoption and the effective scaling-up of CSA innovations in Africa (Makate et al. 2019, Branca et al. 2021).

2. Improving resilience through social equity considerations

There was also a growing literature that links climate change adaptation responses to social equity considerations across different scales, at household and community levels and to global agri-food value chains that shape livelihood outcomes in smallholder farming systems (e.g., Nyantakyi-Frimpong and Bezner-Kerr 2015, Clay and Zimmerer 2020, Mikulewicz and Taylor 2020, Alare et al. 2022). Thirteen of the 50 papers in the scoping review brought an equity or social justice lens to assess resilience and adaptation measures in agricultural development interventions in Africa, drawing insights from critical social theory to argue for structural changes to how technology development and transfer occurs. Out of these papers, eight presented results on bottom-up, co-created innovations that sought to address power relations, agency, access, and control over resources, or to affect change in socio-political processes to foster transformative resilience measures in smallholder farming systems. Some authors highlighted innovations that emerged from local-national level initiatives (Boillat and Bottazzi 2020, Nyamwanza et al. 2023). Others drew experiences from farmers’ own livelihood strategies, providing important lessons for international development institutions and donors to broaden their resilience agenda in Africa’s smallholder farming systems (Tittonell 2014, Davies and Moore 2016, Alare et al. 2022).

Boillat and Bottazzi (2020), for instance, apply the notion of resilience justice to highlight institutional and social structures that undermine vulnerable groups’ capacity to adapt, buffer, anticipate, or cope with ongoing social-ecological degradation, while also supporting the agency of individuals and communities of those who are affected by these processes. In this case study, researchers from Senegal and Switzerland initiated a knowledge co-production process with a local farmer union, the Federation of Diender Agropastoralists in the Niayes coastal region of Senegal. Their collective efforts drew attention to processes of resource appropriation (land and water access), the institutions and actors that mediate the appropriation processes (national legal framework on property and land buyers), and social movement responses to promote agroecology practices and advocacy efforts to address land rights (land registration for smallholder farmers and reinforcing local governance of commons; Boillat and Bottazzi 2020).

The human agency espoused in this literature centers on the ability of groups or collectives to mobilize access to information and resources and to shape quality of life outcomes that matter to them as opposed to individual action (Nyamwanza et al. 2023). In South Africa for instance, a local non-governmental organization (NGO) focusing on social and environmental justice worked with previously marginalized elderly women (Makhadzis or “rainmakers”) to integrate them into community decision-making structures for the purpose of protecting sacred forests, biodiversity, and cultural heritage in Vembe, Limpopo province, in the context of climate change (Kaya 2016, as cited in Nyamwanza et al. 2023). Restoring the roles of Makhadzis as traditional custodians of natural ecosystems has resulted in critical advances in biodiversity conservation and community livelihood resilience (Nyamwanza et al. 2023). This illustrates that meaningful participation efforts that seek to increase the decision-making power of “vulnerable groups,” i.e., through affording them an equal opportunity and voice to affect change in natural resource management and production decisions, can contribute to greater empowerment and improved development outcomes.

Several papers highlighted the enduring persistence and resilience of Africa’s farming systems, which they attribute to the diversity of livelihood strategies employed by smallholder farmers to cope with and adapt to climatic and non-climatic stressors (Tittonell 2014, Davies and Moore 2016, Alare et al. 2022). Such livelihood strategies symbolize rural populations’ flexible adaptation and continuity in the face of socio-environmental fluxes across time and space. A recognition of their capacities and skills, strategic responses, and agency not only challenges the deterministic notions that view rural populations as vulnerable, passive victims (Tschakert 2007) but offers valuable lessons for agricultural development agencies. Davies and Moore (2016) illuminate how such agency has allowed farming communities in Pokot and Marakwet, Kenya to adapt to climatic and non-climatic fluctuations through their “cultural resilience” across generations and through historical time. Cultural resilience is described as a set of contextually emergent attributes (i.e., types of knowledge, behaviors, values, and resources) that intersect across different social networks, identities, scales, and institutions (Davies and Moore 2016). In Kenya and across Africa, smallholder farming communities have historically employed a diverse range of social and technological institutions to manage ecological resources, through irrigation systems, terracing, mulching, and other forms of soil conservation, as well as flexibilities in innovation improvisation through incorporation of new crops and forms of exchange (Davies and Moore 2016, Zougmoré et al. 2014). Today, various soil and water conservation practices in CSA interventions are built directly from smallholder farmers’ own indigenous practices (Zougmoré et al. 2014, Zougmoré 2018, Bayala et al. 2021).

The heterogeneous nature of smallholder farming populations, however, also suggests that there are wide variations in the capacity of individuals and households to make changes to their farming practices, and the significance or intensity of such changes. Tittonell (2014) draws on the work of Dorward et al. (2009) to characterize household livelihood typologies as shaped by agro-ecological potential, market connectivity, social capital, and local institutions. These are (1) “Hanging in,” where households engage in activities to maintain their current livelihood (subsistence farming) and tends to arise in situations of poor natural resource potential and market opportunities; (2) “Stepping up,” where households expand investments in current production activities (semi-commercial farming), typically in situations of high agricultural potential, and (3) “Stepping out,” when activities are used to accumulate assets that may allow moving into different activities, not necessarily farming (i.e., migration to cities and/or local engagement in non-farm activities; Dorward et al. 2009:242-243). In a large-scale study examining progress on adaptation in smallholder farming systems in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, Thornton et al. (2018) found that most households were “hanging in,” 57% across all regions, while only 16% were “stepping up” and 14% “stepping out” (p. 39). The authors described an additional 13% of households who were “food insecure” (worse off than “hanging in”). Where farmers made changes, most, according to the study, were incremental and piecemeal. This suggests that many smallholder farming households are struggling to effectively adapt to climatic and non-climatic stresses and pressures (see also Leichenko and O’Brien 2008). The different characterizations in particular contexts, which speak to an analytical approach of livelihood resilience, can inform agricultural development interventions about the types of support measures that might be suitable for various farming households (Thornton et al. 2018).

DISCUSSION

The results illustrate two different approaches to the conceptual framing and application of resilience-building in agricultural development interventions focused on smallholder farming systems. The first approach foregrounds the biophysical risks of climate change as a basis to provide empirical evidence about the problem as well as decision-making for interventions that can enhance adaptation and resilience for farming systems and farmers heavily reliant on rain-fed agriculture (Mashizha 2019). Most reviewed papers focused on this approach to promote CSA applications, emphasizing a combination of farm-and-field level management technologies to increase or maintain the buffering capacity of agricultural systems to sustain yields in the face of changes in rainfall quantities, patterns, and intensities, increases in temperature, and higher severity of pests and diseases (Ifejika Speranza 2010, Thierfelder et al. 2017). The second approach considers biophysical drivers of vulnerability in conjunction with socio-political causes of risk, making visible relational processes that shape adaptation practices and resilience outcomes in Africa’s smallholder farming systems across space and time. The literature that supports this approach emphasizes socially just pathways for change, with several papers leveraging the agency of rural populations to co-create innovations that build farm-level resilience, e.g., agroecology, as well as social equity in people’s access to productive resources though advocacy efforts (Boillat and Bottazzi 2020, Nyamwanza et al. 2023).

There has been growing frustrations with resilience-building applications that prioritize biophysical risks of climate change, particularly CSA. Critics argue that their overly technical programs are driven by outside objectives and knowledge systems and do not sufficiently consider the social and political dimensions of vulnerability in interventions contexts (Khoza et al. 2021, Hellin et al. 2023). Evidently, failure to address relational and structural drivers of vulnerability for some categories of farmers undermines CSA’s contribution to reducing rural poverty and social inequity (Hellin et al. 2023). Although this critical literature addresses important and longstanding concerns within international agricultural development, we argue for more constructive dialogue around what each of the two approaches might offer to contribute to improving resilience on a range of adverse social-ecological changes in Africa’s smallholder farming systems.

Nightingale et al.’s (2020) concept of ontological pluralism offers useful guidance to deal with the tensions arising from different conceptions and responses to climate change and vulnerability as evident in the two approaches outlined in this review. Ontological pluralism promotes multiple perspectives to understand how the climate problem is made and experienced in diverse settings, and to embrace the uncertainties that arise (Nightingale et al. 2020). Although the authors are more critical of techno-scientific approaches because of their inability to transform power relations in knowledge production, we emphasize the importance of valuing the complementarity contributions that both technocratic-focused and social equity-centered approaches offer toward building or strengthening resilience in Africa’s smallholder farming systems. None of the different approaches on their own is up to the task.

For instance, CSA as part of the approach that focuses on building resilience to biophysical aspects of climate change aim to increase agricultural productivity by promoting locally appropriate technologies in farming contexts where food security remains a pivotal challenge (Lipper et al. 2014, Girvetz et al. 2019). Further, CSA has become a major vehicle to attract climate adaptation finance from various international and regional organizations and has facilitated collaborations between different stakeholders toward climate action in developing country contexts (Dinesh et al. 2017). Meanwhile, social equity-focused resilience approaches, unlike CSA interventions, often lack political agency and financial autonomy to influence existing institutional structures in Africa’s socio-political contexts (Martiniello 2015, Shilomboleni 2018). However, CSA collaborative partnerships can have significant power differentials between different stakeholders involving international-national-local partners and farmer beneficiaries because of (real or perceived) asymmetries in resources, influence/status, and expertise/knowledge (Yeleliere et al. 2022). As such, achieving meaningful participation of less powerful/influential stakeholders, such as smallholder farmers, can be especially challenging (Khoza et al. 2021).

The social equity approach can offer valuable insights to help address unequal participation in collaborative agricultural development partnerships. This is because social justice-oriented interventions such as those promoting co-created innovations tend to be more people-centered rather than output-driven, with an underlying principle to promote advocacy action around farmers’ rights. Thus, they have a greater capacity to identify and consider a broad diversity of thoughts, roles, interests, and experiences among stakeholders, allowing real concerns about local realities and priorities to emerge (Yeleliere et al. 2022). Such interventions, and the approach focused on social equity they are embedded in, also offer insights into the heterogeneous nature of smallholder farming populations, highlighting distinctions in individual and household capabilities to cope and adapt to a range of social-ecological changes or to “step up” in agriculture or “out” because of socioeconomic endowments, livelihood opportunities, and ecological potential (Tittonell 2014).

Evidence from this approach also shows that local-national development interventions can stimulate changes in everyday agricultural extension systems, as was the case in Limpopo province, South Africa (Nyamwanza et al. 2023). A joint learning initiative between farmers, local extension workers, and researchers from the provincial department of agriculture led to the co-development of a biopesticide that was more affordable and accessible compared to modern pesticides available on the market (Nyamwanza et al. 2023). However, these locally driven agricultural development interventions are scarce as many rural institutions in Africa are underfunded and often struggle to provide adequate extension support to farmers. Nonetheless, they provide opportunity for dialogue and potential collaboration with internationally driven agricultural development interventions focused on addressing biophysical aspects of climate change. Principles of ontological pluralism can bring the two approaches together to foster stronger reflexivity in their knowledge mobilization and stakeholder arrangements to ensure a generation of demand-driven and responsive agricultural innovations.

CONCLUSION

The concept of resilience has gained prominence in recent years, helping to shape our understanding of issues affecting food and agricultural systems and inform the design of solutions. We used a scoping review to uncover insights into the discursive framing and empirical applications of resilience to agricultural development interventions in Africa smallholder farming systems. The results found that the literature was largely dominated by resilience-building interventions that prioritized addressing biophysical stresses and shocks associated with climate change, particularly through CSA. However, there is also an emerging body of research focused on advancing social equity goals as the engine to improve resiliency with climate-related adaptation measures as one component. This literature presented several co-created innovations that sought to affect social change by leveraging the agency of rural stakeholders to collectively shape the adaptation strategies that affect them.

The different conceptions and responses to climate and non-climate related risks and vulnerability in this literature has also revealed growing tensions. Specifically, there is strong criticism around resilience building interventions, such as CSA, which prioritize bio-physical aspects of climate change, viewed to emphasize technical solutions at the expense of farmers’ own livelihood risk management strategies or transformational adaptation responses. The discussion engaged with this debate, drawing insights from ontological pluralism to foster meaningful dialogue about the most pertinent contributions from the two approaches to achieve impact on a range of adverse social-ecological changes in Africa’s smallholder farming systems. Stronger reflexivity to promote multiple perspectives on key areas of tension such as knowledge mobilization and stakeholder arrangements can bring the two different approaches together to ensure a generation of demand-driven and responsive resilience-building innovations in Africa’s smallholder farming systems.

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^[1] These scholars critically examine issues of power, equity, and justice in agri-food systems between different actors (e.g., smallholder farmers, agro-corporations, donors, and development practitioners) and across multiple scales (e.g., local, regional, and global) and how these result in negative outcomes for food security and sustainability (Mayer and Anderson 2021).
^[2] CCAFS and partners have helped to establish 35 Climate Smart-Villages (CSVs) in 20 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Aggarwal et al. 2018). At CSV sites, smallholder farmers experiment with different CSA innovations on their farms and at community demonstration fields and partake in learning exercises with relevant stakeholders to assess their suitability in relation to agro-ecological conditions as well as to ascertain the interest and capacity of farmers and local government partners to adopt such technologies (Recha et al. 2017, Khatri-Chhetri et al. 2019).

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