Scaling up climate-smart agriculture: lessons learned from South Asia and pathways for success
This World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) working paper builds on a series of workshops and eight of the latest climate-smart agriculture case studies from South Asia. It identifies seven key ‘ingredients’ and several pathways for successfully scaling up climate-smart agriculture. The paper aims to help policy makers and rural development practitioners strategically plan scaling up of successful climate-smart agriculture practices. Seven key elements provide practical guidance for thinking through challenges and opportunities in the process of scaling up CSA: (1) landscape analyses and approaches, (2) context-specific drivers and spaces, (3) partnerships and knowledge management, (4) strategic and adaptive participatory project management, (5) multidimensional monitoring and evaluation, (6) capacity development through co-learning within a research in development paradigm (7) focus on gender and other disadvantaged groups. One of the key messages of the paper is that scaling up CSA is complex because it involves more than scaling up technological innovations in agriculture. Envisioning, implementing and monitoring CSA requires integrating biophysical, socioeconomic and institutional dimensions, with careful attention to the issues and interactions of these dimensions at different scales.