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.
Highlights
IntroductionConservation Agriculture (CA) has been widely promoted across Africa as a way of improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, combining increased climate change resilience
We systematically review existing literature focused on Malawi on the question ‘what forms of Conservation Agriculture (CA) work, where, for whom, and why?’ We map out the approaches that are commonly taken to address this question and the contributions that have been made across a broad and growing body of literature
Our analysis demonstrated that there is a sub-clustering in the agronomic studies, where some studies include an economic analysis with the biophysical metrics
Summary
Conservation Agriculture (CA) has been widely promoted across Africa as a way of improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers, combining increased climate change resilience. Further literature has shown its potential to enhance soil fertility, heat and dry spell resilience, and crop productivity (Thierfelder and Wall 2010a; Thierfelder et al 2015c; Steward et al 2018). Extrapolating from this evidence of soil and yield improvements, narratives of socio-economic benefits, such as labour saving, women’s empowerment, food security and improved rural livelihoods, have become mainstreamed into the promotion of CA (Whitfield et al 2015b).
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
