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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]

Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are particularly vulnerable to climate change, given dependence on agricultural production and limited adaptive capacity. Based on farm household and Participatory Rural Appraisal data collected from districts in various agroecological zones in Kenya, this paper examines farmers' perceptions of climate change, ongoing adaptation measures, and factors influencing farmers' decisions to adapt. The results show that households face considerable challenges in adapting to climate change. While many households have made small adjustments to their farming practices in response to climate change (in particular, changing planting decisions), few households are able to make more costly investments, for example in agroforestry or irrigation, although there is a desire to invest in such measures. This emphasizes the need for greater investments in rural and agricultural development to support the ability of households to make strategic, long-term decisions that affect their future well-being. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]