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变得更加严峻。在环境变化和粮食生产的新的紧迫感中，决策者正在决定如何分配发展援助，以改善气候智能型农业（CSA）的旗帜下的粮食系统。CSA旨在成为一种实验性和数据驱动的方法，重点是在小规模农户中引进新技术、改良种子和转基因种子以及新的耕作技术，以更有效地减轻环境快速变化的影响。自2010年以来，美国是气候智能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明确的气候智能型农业（CSA）计划。迄今为止，气候智能型农业的技术和相关内容在实践中很少得到深入的学术研究。学者和发展实践者都对气候适应力实际上意味着什么以及如何实现和衡量其成功感到困惑。这项研究对一名研究生进行了严格的实证数据收集和分析方法的培训，探讨了气候智能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，并通过向从事农业发展和粮食安全相关问题的组织广泛传播研究成果来提高公众的科学认识。Serena Stein将在普林斯顿大学Joao Biehl博士的监督下，调查如何通过实验性、关系性、和道德的影响，小农户，通过接地研究三个开展气候智能项目在莫桑比克在非洲东南部。 莫桑比克是评估气候智能型农业实践的适当地点。历史上和当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方以及巴西等新兴捐助方和私营公司的双边援助伙伴关系来实现。利用参与者观察和与农民受益者和发展实践者访谈的民族志方法，研究人员将研究当围绕气候智能范式动员农业援助时，发展话语，技术转让和农业实践如何重新配置。特别令人感兴趣的是女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、土地权和粮食安全的看法和生活经验，这一奖项反映了全国基金会的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.