Agricultural policies in Kenya aim to improve farmers’ livelihoods. With projected climate change, these policies are short of mechanisms that promote farmers’ adaptation. As a result, smallholders are confronted with a variety of challenges including climate change, which hinders their agricultural production. Local knowledge can be instrumental in assisting smallholders to cope with climate change and variability. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that demonstrates local knowledge, perceptions and adaptations to climate change and variability amongst smallholders of Laikipia district of Kenya. A Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) calculated for one station is compared with smallholders’ perceptions. Data was collected using qualitative and quantitative methods in Umande and Muhonia sub-locations. Qualitative data included 46 transcripts from focus group discussions and key informant interviews. Quantitative data is derived from 206 interviewees. We analyzed qualitative and quantitative data using Atlas-ti and SPSS respectively. According to smallholders’ perceptions, climatic variability is increasingly changing. Local perceptions include decreasing rainfalls, increasing temperatures, increasing frosts and increasing hunger. The PDSI shows a trend towards severe droughts in the last four decades, which is in accordance with farmers’ perceptions. Smallholders use a combination of coping and adaptation strategies to respond to variability, including, among others, diversification of crop varieties, migration and sale of livestock. Significant relationships exist between drought perceptions and some adaptations such as migration and sale of livestock. Farmers have an in-depth knowledge of climatic variability, which they use to inform their coping and adaptation strategies. Knowledge of climatic perceptions and adaptations are vital entry points for decision makers and policy makers to learn how and where to enhance the adaptive capacity of smallholders in rainy and drought periods.

The transition of farmers from subsistence to market-oriented agriculture is meant to reduce hunger, increase wellbeing and accelerate rural economic progress. While an impressive extant literature has analysed agricultural commercialisation effects on welfare from an income, expenditure and consumption perspective, authors place less attention on the implications on asset holdings, which is a more robust long-term measure of welfare. Using chickpea production in Ethiopia as a case, we assess the effects of chickpea commercialisation on household asset ownership and livestock holdings of smallholder farmers. We employ a household fixed-effects estimator to control for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity and account for possible endogeneity using an instrumental variable approach. For comparison purposes, we also evaluate the income effects of chickpea and examine impact heterogeneity using quantile regressions. Our results indicate a positive impact of agricultural commercialisation on assets, livestock ownership and income. We found commercialisation to benefit all farmers in terms of impact heterogeneity, though with higher gains for asset-rich households. Despite this rising asset inequality, we conclude that increased agricultural commercialisation can contribute to economic development of households and reduce rural poverty.

Uganda is the largest producer of organic commodities in Africa. While most of the literature associate the start of organic agriculture in Uganda with the first certified project, no accounts exist about non-certified organic agriculture before 1993. Both in Europe and in the USA, pioneers drove non-certified organic agriculture as a response to economic, ecological and social crises. Uganda suffered two decades of civil war ending in 1986 causing multiple crises. We explore how post-war conditions influenced the emergence of organic agriculture in Uganda. We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 12 organic agriculture experts from Central and Southwestern Uganda. Interviews were held in English using interview guides informed by a transition theoretical perspective. Interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using deductive and inductive coding. Our analysis shows that the degraded environment, food insecurity and economic instability after the war created a sense of urgency for the rehabilitation of livelihoods. Pioneers, including civil society activists, farmers, entrepreneurs and researchers, responded by promoting low-cost, resource-conserving technologies and agronomic practices to smallholder farmers. Economic liberalization, decentralization and institutional vacuum eased pioneers’ activities, despite facing opponents from the government and research. Through experimental learning, demonstration farms and cooperation with the Catholic Church, public extension services, researchers and international development-oriented non-governmental organizations, pioneers reached out to farmers in Eastern, Central and Southwestern Uganda. As challenging as post-war crises may be, they offer opportunities for changing development trajectories. Therefore, reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts can accommodate sustainability concerns and allow the introduction of course-changing measures in any sector.

Despite a broad consensus on the necessity of fundamental change, endeavors to transform food systems appear to have reached an impasse. Greater engagement with the uncertainty of food systems could open up new ways of triggering transformation directed towards achieving more sustainable and inclusive outcomes. As a way of reorienting current food system change efforts to better embrace uncertainty, we propose a framework for a transformative learning system that serves two aims. First, the framework highlights the importance of locally led action, experimentation, and learning, providing a way of focusing on the core capacities and skills needed to act in the face of uncertainty. Second, it outlines the different types of learning functions that need to operate at different scales of food systems to trigger disruptive, coordinated, and more democratic change processes. The operationalization of this framework necessitates shifts in roles and ways of working across the landscape of food system interventions. The discussion will address the who and how of this potential change, as well as its subsequent impact on the operational modalities of individuals, the process of change itself, and the structures and institutions involved in the process. We argue that embracing uncertainty and the focus on learning has the potential to facilitate a more agile and locally relevant change process. This would allow actors to learn from decentrally pursued food systems reforms, leading to the emergence of diverse pathways that complement on-going efforts and potentially accelerate transformation efforts.