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Abstract Climate Smart Agriculture promises to increase the resilience and productivity of vulnerable agricultural systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the narrow focus on technological adoption rather than on the systematic and uneven distribution of CSA benefits often results in implementation falling short of expectations. This editorial synthesizes the special issue on CSA interventions in five African countries, going beyond conventional narrative accounts of impact to explore critical and unexplored dimensions. Overall, the findings suggest that adoption is a dynamic process, driven by climate shocks and opportunity costs, and not a linear decision-making process. Although CSA may generate macroeconomic benefits, the benefits are often reaped by wealthier, urban actors, which exacerbates rural inequality. Importantly, the performance of technologies is highly contextual and success depends on complementary investment and institutional support. Studies also show that joint decision-making between spouses within the household leads to better results and that pastoral systems require integrated, socially embedded interventions. We argue that an effective CSA cannot be a one-size-fits-all technical solution. Instead, it must be re-framed as a transformative process centered on equity, collaborative institutions, and pluralistic methodologies that co-produce knowledge with farmers. 

While many Global South contexts rely on community-based natural resource management, out-migration has the potential to change rural peoples’ incentives to participate in such management. We argue that remittance income from out-migration reduces dependence on natural resource commons, which may in turn weaken the voluntary participation upon which community-based natural resource management initiatives depend. We studied this relationship empirically in Nepal, a country with a largely community-based model for the governance of its forests. In analyzing nationwide survey data that spanned nearly one decade, we fit a household-level fixed-effects regression model, which showed that households that received more remittance income were less likely to rely on commonly held forests compared to households in the same village that received less remittance income. Using a similar estimation approach and more detailed survey data from the districts of Mustang and Gorkha, we also showed that larger remittance incomes predicted less participation in forest governance and management activities. These results suggest that the remittances associated with out-migration from rural areas can weaken incentives for local participation in natural resource management among the people left behind. If remittance income has these effects, policymakers may need to reconsider how to sustain community-based resource management in countries or regions that are experiencing widespread rural out-migration. Future research is needed to establish causality, validate the results cross-nationally, and explore new policy innovations that could support resource governance in contexts where many resource users receive remittances. 

Abstract Agricultural technologies are vital for farmers adapting to climate change. However, while efforts have focused on improving access and initial adoption, little attention has been given to social disparities in rates of adoption and the benefits derived from these technologies. Our study investigates the adoption of groundwater irrigation technology in India, a transformative innovation that has historically enhanced productivity and food security, and helped agricultural households adapt to a changing climate. We use a nationwide household survey sample that spans nearly a decade, capturing a key period of groundwater expansion in India. Our analysis reveals that members of highly marginalized social groups are less likely to adopt groundwater irrigation technologies, and less likely to sustain their use of the technologies for long periods of time. Furthermore, the household-level benefits of the technologies–operationalized through the relationship between technology adoption and income–appear lower for households belonging to historically marginalized groups compared to the historically advantaged. Our study underscores the importance of addressing social inequalities in both adoption as well as the sustained utilization of agricultural technologies and other climate adaptation tools. Disparities in the utilization of these technologies can hinder farmers’ ability to access new innovations and adapt to increasing threats from climate change. Targeted policies and interventions are essential to not only provide historically marginalized groups access to technological innovations, but also facilitate their effective utilization. 

Boundary organizations have a crucial function in environmental governance by facilitating the processes through which scientists and decision-makers generate, exchange, evaluate, and utilize knowledge to identify societal problems, propose potential solutions, and make decisions on appropriate courses of action. This support for evidence-informed decision making is essential in addressing environmental challenges effectively. Despite the growing popularity of boundary organizations, there remains a significant challenge in designing information dissemination platforms to bridge the communication divide between scientific experts and non-experts. To address this gap, we used natural language processing tools to analyze the communication strategies of a specific boundary organization – the Nebraska Water Center – and examined how these strategies evolved over time to address relevant water policy issues in the state. We identified three prominent topics in the Center’s periodicals between 1970 and 2018: policy and planning, water quality and quantity, and public engagement and workforce development. The prevalence of each topic changed over time, reflecting changes in both federal and state legislative priorities and subsequent responses from the scientific community. Our results also demonstrate how boundary organizations can design information exchange platforms that consider perspectives and needs of not only scientists and policymakers but also more diverse groups of actors. These findings are critical for developing strategies for bridging science and policy in environmental governance. 

Abstract Social connections among individuals are essential components of social‐ecological systems (SESs), enabling people to take actions to more effectively adapt or transform in response to widespread social‐ecological change. Although scholars have associated social connections and cognitions with adaptive capacity, measuring actors' social networks may further clarify pathways for bolstering resilience‐enhancing actions.We asked how social networks and socio‐cognitions, as components of adaptive capacity, and SES regime shift severity affect individual landscape management behaviours using a quantitative analysis of ego network survey data from livestock producers and landcover data on regime shift severity (i.e. juniper encroachment) in the North American Great Plains.Producers who experienced severe regime shifts or perceived high risks from such shifts were not more likely to engage in transformative behaviour like prescribed burning. Instead, we found that social network characteristics explained significant variance in transformative behaviours.Policy implications: Our results indicate that social networks enable behaviours that have the potential to transform SESs, suggesting possible leverage points for enabling capacity and coordination toward sustainability. Particularly where private lands dominate and cultural practices condition regime shifts, clarifying how social connections promote resilience may provide much needed insight to bolster adaptive capacities in the face of global change. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog. 

Abstract Unreliable public water supplies cause human hardships and are still common worldwide. Households often deal with the issue by adopting various coping strategies that are representative of economic decentralization (e.g., using private wells, sourcing from third‐party vendors) and political decentralization (e.g., making petitions to a public provider). There is growing interest in these user‐level decentralized coping strategies, but their relative effects on provider's behavior and the long‐term sustainability of public water supply remain unclear. This puzzle has not been tackled using an experimental approach. This study reports a controlled behavioral experiment conducted to test the relative effectiveness of different coping strategies on infrastructure quality and users‐provider cooperation in the context of agricultural water supply. We tested experimental treatments involving two classes of coping strategies:exitandvoice. The exit option represents users' shift to an alternative water source. The voice option represents users' direct effort to influence a public irrigation service provider. We recruited 272 human subjects into our 4‐player experiment (one provider and three users) and observed and compared their decisions under four treatments (exit, voice, their combination, and no options). The results show that the voice option leads to improved outcomes compared to other choices that include the exit option, suggesting that contrary to previously thought, the exit option can be detrimental to users‐provider cooperation. We also observed that a user tends to cooperate more (pay and use the public service) when other users do the same. 

We develop a two-stage model to study the strategic interaction between a politician (the principal) and a bureaucrat (the agent) over the level of infrastructure provision with uncertainty about possible weather shocks. The bureaucrat chooses how much effort to contribute to infrastructure maintenance and the politician offers either a lump-sum wage (non-corrupt) contract or proportional bribe (corrupt) contract to induce effort. The degree of uncertainty about weather shocks, the size of the fixed wage, and the level of external monitoring to detect corruption all interact to affect (a) the politician's choice of contract and (b) whether this choice improves infrastructure outcomes. Our results suggest that curbing corruption is most likely to yield improvements in infrastructure provision when climate uncertainty is low and when bureaucratic wages are relatively high. If climate uncertainty is high, increasing monitoring has an unambiguous negative effect on infrastructure provision. Previous literature has focused either on public goods provision but not corruption or on bribery in a regulatory context that lacks public goods provision. We extend both literatures by analyzing how bribes between government officials affect a principal's ability to more effectively incentivize public goods provision by her agent.