Political will and public will for climate-smart agriculture in Senegal: Opportunities for agricultural transformation

Purpose: Agriculture must transform as climate change progresses. The international community has promoted climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as a set of solutions. Previous analyses of opportunities for scaling up CSA have not looked closely at building political and social support for policies, practices and programs. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap in the case study country of Senegal. Design/methodology/approach: The study applies the conceptual definitions, operationalizations and assessment targets from the political will and public will (PPW) approach to social change. Semi-structured interviews and documents constitute the sources of data and information. Findings: The analysis identifies opportunities to generate political will for supplying an enabling environment for the widespread adoption of CSA. On the public will side, the analysis identifies opportunities to generate and channel demand for CSA. Research limitations/implications: Researchers investigated some definitional components more completely than others due to resource and access constraints. Further, the context specificity of the components limits generalizability of certain findings. Social implications: Social structures may need to change for successful adoption of certain CSA innovations, but improved agricultural outcomes are likely to result. Originality/value: This examination of crucial elements for scaling up CSA efforts constitutes the most extensive application of the PPW approach to date, thus providing an example of this generalizable method.