• Energy Research

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) conceptually has the potential to contribute to the sustainable development goals of achieving zero hunger, reducing land degradation, eliminating poverty, tackling climate change, and promoting gender equality. The scaling-up needed to achieve goals of CSA represents a challenge, as it entails understanding synergies between often opposing socioeconomic and environmental priorities and trade-offs over temporal and spatial scales. In this paper, we tested new approaches to support scaling-up of sustainable food production through investigating the contribution of systems thinking as a conceptual approach and complex adaptive system (CAS) attributes as a framework for analysis of CSA. This was done through examining (i) to what extent CSA represents a CAS and (ii) what contribution systems thinking and CAS attributes can make to understanding and scaling-up sustainable food production systems through CSA. The CSA situation was conceptualized through systems thinking sessions with women farmers in the climate-smart village (CSV) of Doggoh-Jirapa, northern Ghana, and was guided by the Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) framework. Systems thinking, and CAS attributes provide system-wide understanding of elements, dynamics and trade-offs over temporal and spatial scale in selected agri-food systems. As such it could aid horizontal and vertical scaling-up by informing policy developoment and selection of a context-specific portfolio of technologies and practices at landscape and farm levels to achieve synergies between goals. In this study, systems thinking enabled women farmers in the CSV to identify income-generating and tree planting activities, with desirable simultaneous system-wide impact. The paper calls for further testing of tools, approaches, and methods that enable dynamic systems thinking to inform scaling-up efforts, while embracing the transdisciplinary nature and complexity of CSA as a constituent of the food production system.

AbstractAt the 2002 International Sustainable Development Research Conference in Manchester, a great number of the 53 papers presented addressed exciting methodological developments associated with action research. Many of these initiatives can be linked with the rich tradition of operational research (OR). OR and environmental planning for sustainable development share three traditions: first, both have wide boundaries in terms of clientele, range of methodological approaches used and attention to multiple (and often conflicting) values; second, both traditions have an interest in fostering interdisciplinarity; third, both OR and environmental planning are concerned with the implementation, as well as the design, of planning strategies. Given these shared traditions, we recently engaged in a systemic intervention project to explore the possibilities of improved collaboration between OR practitioners and environmental planners. In a literature review and interviews with stakeholders, three generic issues were found to recur: complexity and uncertainty (regarding the unpredictability of natural and social phenomena); multiple and often conflicting values (of those involved in environmental planning) and political effects (on those not involved in planning processes, including non‐human nature). This paper reveals a pattern of how these generic issues are perceived in the public, business and voluntary sectors, and explains how, through a series of workshops and a mini‐conference, three interrelated agendas for future action took shape. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.