Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evaluating Technological Innovation in Agriculture and Food Security

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Scientists warn that food security will only become more challenged in the coming decades as environmental shocks intensify and agriculture grows increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Amid a new sense of urgency regarding environmental change and food production, policymakers are deciding how to allocate development aid to improve food systems under the banner of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). CSA aims to be an experimental and data-driven approach, with a focus on introducing new technologies, improved and transgenic seeds and novel farming techniques among small-scale farmers to mitigate the effects of rapid environmental change more efficiently. The United States is an early adopter of the climate-smart concept since 2010 but has only recently started to direct official development aid toward expressly climate-smart agricultural (CSA) programs elsewhere, in conjunction with international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and multinational corporate partners. To date, the technological and relational content of climate-smart agriculture in practice has received little in-depth scholarly investigation. Both academics and practitioners of development puzzle over what climate resilience actually entails and how its success can be achieved and measured. This study, which trains a graduate student in methods of rigorous, empirical data collection and analysis, explores the relationship between climate-smart agriculture and practices related to food security. Further, this project will build capacity and scientific infrastructure through international scientific cooperation, and enhance public scientific understanding by broadly disseminating findings to organizations engaged in issues related to agricultural development and food security. Serena Stein, under the supervision of Dr. Joao Biehl of Princeton University, will investigate how agricultural aid is remade with experimental, relational, and ethical implications for smallholder farmers, through a grounded study of three unfolding climate smart projects in Mozambique in southeastern Africa. Mozambique is an appropriate site for assessing climate-smart agriculture in practice. The high volume of development aid invested historically and currently, especially in the area of sustainable development, makes it an ideal laboratory for evaluating climate-smart agriculture longitudinally. Climate-smart commitments take place via bilateral aid partnerships with traditional donors such as the United States, as well as emerging donors like Brazil, and private corporations. Using ethnographic methods of participant-observation and interviews with farmer beneficiaries and development practitioners, the researchers will examine how development discourse, technology transfer and farming practice is reconfigured when agricultural aid is mobilized around the climate-smart paradigm. Of particular interest are the ways that women farmers respond to these initiatives, and the local perceptions and lived experiences of environmental change, land rights and food security that emerge in the context of these interventions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.