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This research paper assesses the coherence of policy measures and documents related to low emission dairy development (LEDD) initiatives at different levels with a focus on Kenya. To analyse coherence, an innovative stepwise approach was employed including sampling of measures, assessing for vertical and horizontal coherences, and detecting areas of synergies for prioritisation of measures. Six international level documents, six national level sectoral documents, and two local level documents were analysed to extract a total of 145 measures. These measures were then thematically coded and assessed for coherence with LEDD. The findings reveal that while some policy documents reinforce and enable each other, others show limited coherence in supporting LEDD. The study highlights the importance of classifying coherence among measures and documents to prioritise options for policy makers. The paper identified four key documents as strategic for reinforcing LEDD measures across other policy measures comprising the Kenya Green Economy Strategy and Implementation Plan (KGESIP), the Medium Term Three Big Four Agenda (B4A), the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), and the World Bank Climate Smart Agriculture (WB CSA). The paper identifies that policy documents structured to support implementation at the local level tend to be more synergistic. Further, the paper identifies that measures which provide forward-looking pathways, and builds agency among stakeholders, are likely to promote synergistic coherence. This paper contributes to the existing body of knowledge by shedding light on the level of coherence among policy measures and documents in the context of sustainable agriculture in Kenya. It provides insights and recommendations to facilitate effective implementation of LEDD initiatives at national and local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the climate-development interface, research for development gained a strong interest in climate-smart agriculture and sustainable forms of intensification. Moreover, the urgency to respond to climate change stimulates a strong and sometimes exclusive focus on mitigation, driven by research-based agricultural practices. In the livestock sector, this materialises in strategies to lower emissions from livestock, which centralises the adoption question: what can we do to stimulate the use of best practices by smallholder farmers? This paper flags the risk that this outlook may overlooksmallholder farmers' capacities to navigate sub-optimal conditions of drought or scarcity. The paper applies an alternative lens for understanding 'agriculture-as-performance' and highlights smallholder cattle owners' agency and resourcefulness. It aims to create a conceptual space to examine how adaptive capacities are grounded in the rhythms of agriculture under suboptimal conditions. Empirically, the study focuses on the cattle-feeding practices of five farming households evolving through seasons and lifetimes in a sedentary agricultural system in Kenya. Our frame identifies diverse affordances, conceptualised as opportunities for actions, emerging and disappearing in the immediate material environment, and we portray cattle feeding as a networked response anchored in practices of giving, sharing, and receiving. We use our insights into the dynamics and performance of entangled socio-technical practices to sketch the contours of an alternative pathway for agriculture for development. We argue in favour of a shift from an exclusive focus on the adoption of predefined optimal solutions to a diagnostic and catalytic approach integrating situated adaptive performances through which farming households respond to action opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluation in complex programs assembling multiple actors and combining various interventions faces contradictory requirements. In this article, we take a management perspective to show how to recognize and accommodate these contradictory elements as paradoxes. Through reflective practice we identify five paradoxes, each consisting of two contradicting logics: the paradox of purpose—between accountability and learning; the paradox of position—between autonomy and involvement; the paradox of permeability—between openness and closedness; the paradox of method—between rigor and flexibility; and the paradox of acceptance—between credibility and feasibility. We infer the paradoxes from our work in monitoring and evaluation and action research embedded in 2SCALE, a program working on inclusive agribusiness and food security in a complex environment. The intractable nature of paradoxes means they cannot be permanently resolved. Making productive use of paradoxes most likely raises new contradictions, which merit a continuous acknowledging and accommodating for well-functioning monitoring and evaluation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small and medium size business enterprises (SMEs) are the linchpin in systems of food provisioning in sub-Saharan Africa. These businesses occupy the middle of the agri-food chain and face a food security conundrum: they must ensure that smallholder producers of limited means can operate under fair terms while low-income consumers are supplied with affordable and nutritious food. This task becomes even more challenging when resources are scarce. This paper explores how resource-constrained SMEs arrange the terms on which both farmers and consumers are included in agri-food chains. To this end, it combines the concept of inclusion with that of frugality. We use the case of a Kenyan SME to demonstrate how a focus on frugality can advance our understanding of how business practices create thriving business relationships with smallholders while simultaneously ensuring access to affordable food for consumers. We additionally identify what conditions for inclusion emerge from this type of dynamic business practices. Our perspective departs from assessing induced organisational interventions, such as contract farming or cooperatives, which deliberately shorten the agri-food chain, thereby overlooking the skilful practices being employed by business actors in the middle of the chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The triangle of dairy intensification, commercialisation and market formalisation is promoted to address the challenges of food and nutrition security (FNS) and climate change. This article questions the need for formalisation to reach intensification and commercialisation objectives in Kenya. Moving beyond the binary perception of milk markets as either 'formal' or 'informal', we investigate a repertoire of milk-collection practices and address the following question: 'What enables diverse intermediary practices to ensure a consistent flow of milk from grass to glass?' Sampling, data collection and analysis were guided by a qualitative research design for an empirical exploration of the practices of owner-operated (N = 13) and corporate (N = 4) milk collectors. Iterative analysis of observations revealed three main themes constituting milk-collection practices: (1) buying milk, (2) managing milk (quantity and quality measurement) and (3) selling milk to the next buyer. These practices were enabled and sustained by the diverse options available for each aspect of milk collection, and by the capacity of collectors to accommodate variety in their practices. We invite scholars and practitioners to conduct deeper explorations of how to accommodate events in practice to enhance the success of ambitions relating to FNS and climate change through pathways of intensification and commercialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pressure from the public and non-governmental organisations is pushing lead companies in the cocoa and chocolate sectors towards becoming more environmentally sustainable and socially just. Because of this, several sustainability programmes, certification schemes and delivery initiatives have been introduced. These have changed the relationship between chocolate companies, cocoa exporters, and small-scale farmers. This paper observes how large companies in the cocoa export and consumer markets are shifting away from their traditionally remote position in the cocoa sector. The pressure to ensure sustainability and justice has provoked more mutually dependent relationships with cocoa producers. Our analysis outlines the implications this emerging reconfiguration of global-local relationships has for procedural justice principles of interdependence and refutability, and the distributive justice principles of need and equity. These principles are important because they enable the different dimensions of inclusion: ownership, voice, risk, and reward. This paper highlights and qualifies arrangements surrounding these justice principles that manifest in the way five service delivery initiatives - associated with sustainability programmes and led by major buying companies in Ghana’s cocoa sector – are implemented. We show inclusiveness as an outcome of dynamic global-local relationships that are constantly reworked in response to smallholder farmers’ agency and state regulations. Portraying inclusiveness as an outcome of interactions changes its conceptualisation from a predefined ethical standpoint included in the design of standards to a result of unfolding mutual dependencies, which refashion how inclusive agriculture value chains work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organising smallholder farmers into groups or co-operatives is widely promoted as a strategy to connect farmers to markets and turn them into price makers rather than price takers. This pathway usually combines co-operative organisational models, based on collective ownership and representation in internal governance, with measures to shorten the agri-food chain, shifting the ownership of intermediary sourcing, aggregating and trading functions to the group. The underlying assumption is that this improves smallholder farmers' terms of inclusion in markets. To scrutinise this assumption, our study compares two examples of farmer-led auctions facilitating trading in the chilli market in Java, Indonesia. The auctions' ownership, management and performance evolved differently: one was run by a group and the other by a family. The comparison brings nuance to the prevalent emphasis on co-operative ownership structures. By researching practices central to collective trading at the chilli supplier–trader interface, this study unravels four dimensions—ownership, voice, reward and risk—capturing smallholder chilli farmers' terms of inclusion in both the auctions and the market. Our comparative analysis suggests that shared ownership and control of the trading function, a central feature of co-operative models, does not necessarily ensure favourable terms of inclusion for smallholder farmers with little capacity to take risks. The capacity to reconfigure the terms of market inclusion for vulnerable smallholder farmers involves direct payment modalities and risk taking. A collectively owned trading organisation does not necessarily imply an inclusive business concept when the organisation cannot acquire sufficient working capital to pay its suppliers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) are central to sustainability standards and certification programmes in the global cocoa chain. Pruning is one of the practices promoted in extension services associated with these sustainability efforts. Yet concerns exist about the low adoption rate of these GAPs by smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana. A common approach to addressing this challenge is based on creating enabling conditions and offering appropriate incentives. We use the concepts of inscription and affordance to trace the vertically coordinated travel of recommended pruning from research to extension and farming sites, and to describe how pruning is carried out differently at each site. Our analysis suggests that enactments of pruning at the extension site reduce the number of options and space for interactions, and this constrains making the practice meaningful to farmers' repertoires. The conventions guiding and legitimising actions at this site, reinforced by sustainability standards, certification schemes and associated inspections and audits, favour standardised recommendations and consequently narrow room for context-specific diagnostics and adaptions. Therefore, we reframe the adoption problem as a matter of fit between different sites in the 'agricultural research value chain' embedded in the operational cocoa chain. Our contribution problematises the dominant framing of low adoption and highlights that the movement of pruning and the sequential enactment at different sites constrain the affordances available for rendering the practice meaningful to farmers' repertoires. Consequently, addressing the low uptake of GAPs requires institutional work towards conventions that can construct a fit between sites along the agricultural research value chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluations of private sector development programmes look at what changed to the workings of the system, and whether these changes are scalable, resilient, and sustainable. We present an evaluation lens that primarily qualifies changes to the systemic nature of food provisioning in markets. It converts theoretical frameworks into 'antennae' receptive to early signs of systemic effects of inclusive agribusiness that fosters food and nutrition security. The tools for this theory-informed approach were developed and applied in 2SCALE, a Dutch-funded programme aiming to incubate inclusive agribusiness and contribute to food and nutrition security goals in Africa. The article reflects on what to monitor to detect early signs of systemic effects and how monitoring can be embedded in unfolding business and partnering processes. It concludes that taking a theory-informed approach gives directionality to strategising and planning, and enhances capacities of partners in inclusive business projects to lead actions towards realising systemic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The private sector has become an important partner in development interventions that aim to make market systems more favourable for smallholders and low-income consumers of food. How to evaluate these inclusive business programmes is the central theme of this IDS Bulletin. It presents real-world experiences of practitioners and academics using theory-based evaluation. This introductory article highlights the approaches and methods used to assess systemic change and provide learning for adaptive management. It acknowledges the limits to attributing outcomes to programmes alone and proposes a way to generalise about effectiveness where outcomes are highly contingent on a specific contextual embedding. The article explores the synergy of the iterative reflections on the theory of change, the analytical approach of realist evaluation, and the conceptualisation of changes in firms' practices as emerging from behaviour systems where the motivations, opportunities, and capabilities of firms are not equally distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: TR4; Panama wilt; disease management; research priorities; pandemic EN TR4 Panama wilt disease management research priorities pandemic N.PAG N.PAG 6 01/13/21 20210111 NES 210111 The Topic This Research Topic contains a selection of papers dealing with Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), also known as Panama disease, that investigate (i) the epidemiology, distribution, infection biology, and diversity of the pathogen, (ii) management practices, and (iii) ways to identify and screen for resistance. The export sector represents the more salient part of the worldwide banana sector; however, the consequences of TR4 for banana producers, traders and consumers in local food provisioning systems is also severe. In Conclusion The emerging theme of this Research Topic is the reminiscence of the decline of "Gros Michel" due to FWB Race 1 and the current threat of TR4 to global banana cultivation overly dependent on Cavendish cultivars. TR4 affects Cavendish cultivars grown in large scale export-oriented plantations and confronts major banana companies with a recurrent disease problem. [Extracted from the article]

Context: This article focuses on partnerships working on inclusive development and food security in agri‐food chains and agribusiness clusters that may feature institutional arrangements reinforcing inequality or inducing exclusion. Research question: The article develops a theory‐driven capacity framework for investigating how intervention strategies related to partnering generate developmental outcomes. Methods: Building on action–research and drawing on complementary literature streams, the framework distinguishes four specific capacities that individually and in configuration contribute to processes of inclusive development triggered by partnering processes. The framework is applied to two case examples targeting inclusive development in agri‐food chains and agribusiness clusters in domestic food markets in Benin and Nigeria. Results: Four capacities that enable partnerships to contribute to inclusive development are distinguished: deliberative, alignment, transformative and fitting capacity. Processes of inclusive development emerge from mobilizing and combining these complementary capacities. Capacities emerging in evolving joint actions, negotiations and deliberations in partnering processes generate developmental outcomes, which are not self‐evident results of partnerships. Presence of the four capacities propels the partnership's influence on transforming the terms of inclusion for specific groups. Policy implications: The differentiation of specific capacities embedded in partnering processes contrasts with generic partnership formulas focusing on the formalized and organizational features of partnerships and emphasizing sharing of resources and inputs. For partnerships to make a development impact, new capacities need to be developed and mobilized. This underscores the importance of skilful and experienced facilitators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An integrative management approach to the spread and emergence of global plant diseases, such as the soil-borne fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 (Foc TR4), entails a combination of technical measures and the responsiveness and awareness of area-specific constellations supporting conditions conducive to interactions and coordination among organizations and actors with different resources and diverse interests. Responses to banana diseases are mostly studied through technical and epidemiological lenses and reflect a bias to the export industry. Some authors, however, indicate that cross-sector collaboration is crucial in responding to a disease outbreak. Earlier studies on the outbreak of diseases and natural disasters suggest that shared cognition and effective partnerships increased the success rate of response. Hence, it is important not to focus exclusively on the impacts of a pathogen at farm or field level and to shift attention to how tasks and knowledge are coordinated and shared. This paper aims to detect whether and how the emergence of Foc TR4 is a driver of coordination. The case study focuses on the interactions between a variety of banana producers and among a range of public and private actors in southern Philippines. The analysis identifies distinct forms of coordination emerging in the context of three organizational fields responding to Foc TR4, which underlie shared capacity to handle and understand the spread of a global plant disease. The research is based on qualitative key informant interviews and document analysis and on observations of instructive events in 2014–2017. Analysis of the composition and actions developed in three organizational fields leads to distinguishing three theory-driven forms of coordination: rule-based, cognition-based, and skill-based. The combination of these three forms constitutes the possibility of a collaborative community, which conditions the implementation of an integrative management approach to mitigate Foc TR4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Agriculture is the property of EDP Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The increased use of sustainability standards in the international trade in cocoa challenges companies to find effective modes of service delivery to large numbers of small-scale farmers. A case study of the Sustainable Tree Crops Program targeting the small-scale cocoa producers in Côte d’Ivoire supplying international commodity markets shifts attention from mechanisms of private governance to the embedding of service delivery in the institutional dynamics of the state. It demonstrates that, despite a recent history of violent conflict and civil unrest, the introduced Farmer Field Schools programme achieved a surprising scale in terms of numbers and geographical spread. The analysis of this outcome combines political science and anthropological studies of effective and developmental elements in the state with the interest in institutional work found in organization science. The scaling of a new form of service delivery is explained by the skilful practices of institutional work by managers of a public–private partnership. They have been professionally associated with the sector for a long time and had the capacity to embed new forms of service delivery in persistent pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness in a failed state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of RAE: Revista de Administração de Empresas is the property of Fundacao Getulio Vargas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sustainability standards and certification schemes have been promoted as a market-driven instrument for realising development impacts and receive public funding. As a result, companies, NGOs and supporting donors and governments want to know if these ambitions have been fulfilled. Their tendency is to commission household surveys to assess net effects of certification in areas such as poverty, productivity and food security. This article argues that, rather than trying to measure precise net effects on farmer income, the focus should be on detailed measurement of more immediate outcomes in terms of knowledge and implementation of good agricultural practices. Contribution analysis is proposed as an overall approach to verify the theory of change, combining survey-based net-effect measurement of these immediate and intermediate outcomes with less precise, lean monitoring of indicators to verify the contributory role of these outcomes that are outside the span of direct influence, such as household income and poverty alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development impacts are often framed in terms of the effects of exogenous inputs, such as finance or technologies, on measurable ultimate outcomes for a specified group of beneficiaries, for example increased income. This case study of sourcing, processing, and trading shea butter and kernels by a Malian women's cooperative emphasizes intermediate outcomes, specifically early signs of institutional change, as measures for assessing the development impacts of access to finance. The cooperative succeeded in obtaining working capital provided by a microfinance organization. The impact of this arrangement was most visible in how the provision of working capital catalysed emerging institutional practices within the cooperative, particularly in sourcing and stocking, which altered relations with non-members and traders. Hence, access to finance achieved an impact in terms of the interaction between the evolving strategies of the cooperative and the activities of people not directly included in the group-based activity itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food safety is a widely recognized concern in Vietnam. Public officials, companies and consumers find different ways to address risks of pesticide residues and bacterial contamination related to the use of fresh vegetables in daily diets. The response of the government to these food safety risks includes the modernization and regulation of the food retail system. However, reforms that aim to offer a controlled and predictable provision of fresh vegetables through supermarkets seem to contrast with the daily consumer practices in a dynamic city as Hanoi; over 95% of vegetables is still being purchased at long-established open-air markets, importantly the informal and unhygienic street markets. Using a practices theory approach, this paper aims to explain this persistence of street-market shopping for vegetables. Detailed accounts of consumer practices, case studies at different retailing sites and daily logbooks of consumers demonstrate that the way consumers cope with food safety risks is largely shaped by the temporal and spatial constraints of their daily shopping practices. We identified how vegetable shopping is either enjoyed as social interaction within the local community or is regarded a time-consuming activity that conflicts with other activities in everyday life. Our findings indicate how these constraints constitute a reinforcing mechanism for the persistence of uncontrolled and unhygienic street markets. To make policy responses to food safety risks both more realistic and effective, it is essential to connect to and accommodate the daily realities of consumers managing time and space in a modernizing city rather than to impose an ideal, typical market exclusively driven by the wish to control food safety risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partnerships between companies and non-governmental organizations that aim to incorporate smallholder farmers into value chains are increasingly being promoted as a way of pursuing development goals. This article investigates two case studies of such partnerships and the outcomes they achieved in order to refine the rationale underlying such interventions. In two case studies in Uganda and Rwanda, we documented the sequences of events within such partnership interventions, their context, and the intermediate outcomes, identified as the new rules and practices that generate institutional change. By portraying both the configuration of events within a partnership intervention and the contextual factors, these case studies reveal how the interventions produced outcomes that were situated in changing contexts, such as changes in market demand, government policy or business strategy. The research approach made it possible to disentangle partnership interventions and contextual processes, and to give participants a firmer idea of the potential and limitations of value chain partnerships to achieve developmental targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decades-old conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines, is often framed as a Muslim-Christian conflict and reinterpreted as such within the US-led global war on terror, with the Muslim secessionist movement standing accused of providing a hub for international jihad. In the meantime, global economic integration has made it easier to ignore the agrarian roots of violent conflict in Mindanao, enabling national and sub-national actors, including the international community and the Muslim or Moro separatists, to dismiss the issue of agrarian justice. We counter these arguments by using an agrarian political economy framework to uncover the roots of resilient violence in Mindanao, using historical narratives of the region from the end of the nineteenth century that accentuate the links between state-making, control of land and labour, and processes of agrarian modernization. We emphasize the critical role played by the Muslim landed elites who shaped processes of state-making by brokering the interests of their clans with exogenous actors at the national and international level. We shed light on emerging state policies and competing interests among other landed and agribusiness elites that resulted in the spread of a parallel underground economy, renewing opportunities for violence and crime within semi-autonomous social worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationalisation of agro-food chains offers agricultural sectors in developing economies prospects in profitable and competitive international markets. Market access strategies often seem to assume poverty alleviation as one of the outcomes. This paper aims to be more precise about the required conditions for linking smallscale farmers and micro and small enterprises to markets and agri-food chains from a pro-poor perspective. In particular, the increasingly strong emphasis on compliance with strict performance requirements, as a response to visible and outspoken stakeholders with a direct impact on firms—consumers, NGOs, media or public authorities—seems to work against development endeavours recognising (rural) poor as capable players. Also, technology and knowledge is out of reach for smallscale farmers, due to a lack of resources, capacity, knowledge and network linkages. This paper analyses this problematic based on empirical findings in the coffee and flower sector. Next, it builds on the bottom-of-the pyramid (BOP) approach to explore opportunities for re-engineering or reconfiguring private sector-led innovation strategies for development. It looks for socially embedded development of technology and innovative products and services enabling small-scale farmers and micro and small enterprises to comply with the performance requirements governing export-oriented agri-food chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]