Climate-smart agriculture: what is it good for?

Abstract

Leading international organisations presently argue that a transition to ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) is an obligatory task to ensure food supply for an anticipated nine billion people by 2050. Despite the rubric’s newfound importance, the conceptual underpinnings of CSA are often left unclear. Focusing on the World Bank’s framework, this paper critically interrogates the principles and concepts that underpin CSA. It argues that while CSA provides greater policy space for more holistic approaches to agriculture, it nonetheless operates within an apolitical framework that is narrowly focused on technical fixes at the level of production. This depoliticised approach to the global food system tends to validate existing policy agendas and minimise questions concerning power, inequality and access. By highlighting four strong tensions that permeate the CSA framework, the paper extols the need to greatly widen the scope of debate. To this end, it proposes an alternative ‘climate-wise’ framework to foreground the inherently political dimensions of food and agriculture in an era of climatic change.

Keywords:

• climate change
• climate-smart agriculture
• world bank
• agriculture
• global food system
• resilience
• sustainability
• agroecology

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jennifer Clapp, Peter Newell and Zoe Brent for their greatly appreciated work in bringing the issue together. The collection editors and two reviewers provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as did Philip McMichael, Sébastien Rioux and Eli Scheinman. All remaining errors are those of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These include its initial 2011 Call for action; its May 2015 report, Ending poverty and hunger by 2030: an agenda for the global food system; and its follow-up October 2015 report, Future of food: shaping a climate-smart global food system (World Bank 2015b, 2015c). In addition, I draw upon the framing document for the Africa Climate Business Plan (World Bank 2015a), and the CGIAR's related dossier on Climate-smart success stories from around the world (CGIAR 2013).

2 See in particular the critiques of the Bank’s 2008 World Development Report edited by Tania Murray Li in The Journal of Peasant Studies 36(3).

3 See Taylor (2015) for a longer discussion of how the climate question articulates with the agrarian question of classic and contemporary agrarian political economy alongside new approaches within political ecology.

4 Through personal communication with the appropriate World Bank department, I was advised that this was an important issue that they haven’t had time to address yet. At the time of writing, a methodology document has not yet been made public despite the CSA profile process being well advanced.

5 See the statement by La Via Campesina available at http://www.climatesmartagconcerns.info/cop21-statement.html (accessed 10 December 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marcus Taylor

Marcus Taylor is an associate professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. His most recent books are The political ecology of climate change adaptation (Routledge, 2015) and – with Sébastien Rioux – Global labour studies (Polity, 2017).