Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evaluating Technological Innovation in Agriculture and Food Security

科学家警告说，随着环境冲击加剧，农业越来越容易受到破坏，粮食安全在未来几十年只会面临更大的挑战。在对环境变化和粮食生产产生新的紧迫感之际，决策者正在决定如何在气候智慧型农业（CSA）的旗帜下分配发展援助，以改善粮食系统。CSA旨在成为一种实验性和数据驱动的方法，重点是在小农中引入新技术、改良和转基因种子以及新的耕作技术，以更有效地减轻快速环境变化的影响。自2010年以来，美国是气候智慧型概念的早期采用者，但直到最近才开始与国际组织、慈善基金会和跨国公司合作伙伴一起，将官方发展援助直接用于其他地方的气候智慧型农业（CSA）项目。迄今为止，气候智能型农业在实践中的技术和相关内容几乎没有得到深入的学术研究。学者和发展领域的实践者都对气候适应能力究竟意味着什么以及如何实现和衡量气候适应能力的成功感到困惑。该研究旨在培养一名研究生掌握严谨的实证数据收集和分析方法，探讨气候智慧型农业与粮食安全相关做法之间的关系。此外，该项目将通过国际科学合作建设能力和科学基础设施，并通过向从事与农业发展和粮食安全有关问题的组织广泛传播研究成果来增强公众的科学理解。在普林斯顿大学Joao Biehl博士的指导下，瑟琳娜·斯坦（Serena Stein）将通过对非洲东南部莫桑比克三个正在展开的气候智能项目的实地研究，调查农业援助如何在实验、关系和伦理方面对小农产生影响。莫桑比克是评估气候智能型农业实践的合适地点。历史上和目前投入的大量发展援助，特别是在可持续发展领域，使其成为纵向评估气候智能型农业的理想实验室。气候智能型承诺通过与美国等传统捐助国以及巴西等新兴捐助国和私营企业建立双边援助伙伴关系来实现。研究人员将利用参与者观察和访谈农民受益者和发展实践者的民族志方法，研究在围绕气候智慧型范式动员农业援助时，如何重新配置发展话语、技术转让和农业实践。特别令人感兴趣的是女性农民对这些倡议的反应方式，以及在这些干预措施的背景下出现的当地对环境变化、土地权利和粮食安全的看法和生活经验。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Scientists warn that food security will only become more challenged in the coming decades as environmental shocks intensify and agriculture grows increasingly vulnerable to disruption. Amid a new sense of urgency regarding environmental change and food production, policymakers are deciding how to allocate development aid to improve food systems under the banner of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). CSA aims to be an experimental and data-driven approach, with a focus on introducing new technologies, improved and transgenic seeds and novel farming techniques among small-scale farmers to mitigate the effects of rapid environmental change more efficiently. The United States is an early adopter of the climate-smart concept since 2010 but has only recently started to direct official development aid toward expressly climate-smart agricultural (CSA) programs elsewhere, in conjunction with international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and multinational corporate partners. To date, the technological and relational content of climate-smart agriculture in practice has received little in-depth scholarly investigation. Both academics and practitioners of development puzzle over what climate resilience actually entails and how its success can be achieved and measured. This study, which trains a graduate student in methods of rigorous, empirical data collection and analysis, explores the relationship between climate-smart agriculture and practices related to food security. Further, this project will build capacity and scientific infrastructure through international scientific cooperation, and enhance public scientific understanding by broadly disseminating findings to organizations engaged in issues related to agricultural development and food security.Serena Stein, under the supervision of Dr. Joao Biehl of Princeton University, will investigate how agricultural aid is remade with experimental, relational, and ethical implications for smallholder farmers, through a grounded study of three unfolding climate smart projects in Mozambique in southeastern Africa. Mozambique is an appropriate site for assessing climate-smart agriculture in practice. The high volume of development aid invested historically and currently, especially in the area of sustainable development, makes it an ideal laboratory for evaluating climate-smart agriculture longitudinally. Climate-smart commitments take place via bilateral aid partnerships with traditional donors such as the United States, as well as emerging donors like Brazil, and private corporations. Using ethnographic methods of participant-observation and interviews with farmer beneficiaries and development practitioners, the researchers will examine how development discourse, technology transfer and farming practice is reconfigured when agricultural aid is mobilized around the climate-smart paradigm. Of particular interest are the ways that women farmers respond to these initiatives, and the local perceptions and lived experiences of environmental change, land rights and food security that emerge in the context of these interventions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.