Hermans, TDG orcid.org/0000-0003-1481-1552, Whitfield, S orcid.org/0000-0002-3040-778X, Dougill, AJ et al. (1 more author) (2020) Bridging the disciplinary gap in conservation agriculture research, in Malawi. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 40 (1). 3. ISSN 1774-0746
Abstract
Conservation Agriculture has emerged as a popular form of climate smart agriculture aimed at enhancing climate change resilience for smallholder farmers across Africa. Despite positive biophysical results, adoption rates remain low. It has been acknowledged that improved understanding of farmer decision-making is needed due to the variation in socio-economic and agro-ecological contexts which drives the research agenda to answer the question ‘what forms of Conservation Agriculture work, where, and why?’. To fully understand this question, we need to approach the study of Conservation Agriculture within complex farming systems by collating and integrating different forms of knowledge. In this paper, we discuss (1) a comparison of disciplinary approaches to evaluating Conservation Agriculture in Malawi, (2) the identification of the knowledge gaps that persist at the intersection of these disciplines and (3) recommendations for alternative and interdisciplinary approaches in addressing these knowledge gaps. With a focus on published studies from Malawi, we show that the Conservation Agriculture literature represents two distinct approaches to addressing the question ‘what forms of Conservation Agriculture work, where, and why?’, namely agro-ecological and socio-economic and that neither of these approaches can address the full scope of this question, in particular its ‘why’ component. To overcome these challenges, there is a need for access to compatible, comprehensive data sets, methodological approaches including farmer participation and ethnography, through on-farm trial research as a middle ground between disciplinary approaches.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Farming systems; Climate-smart agriculture; Southern Africa; No-tillage; Malawi |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BBSRC BB/P027784/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 03 Feb 2020 14:54 |
Last Modified: | 03 Feb 2020 14:54 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Verlag |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s13593-020-0608-9 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:156360 |
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