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

科学家警告说，未来几十年，随着环境冲击加剧，农业越来越容易受到干扰，粮食安全只会变得更加严峻。在有关环境变化和粮食生产的新的紧迫感中，政策制定者正在决定如何在气候智能农业(CSA)的旗帜下分配发展援助，以改善粮食系统。CSA旨在成为一种试验性和数据驱动型方法，重点是在小规模农民中引入新技术、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，美国是气候智能概念的早期采用者，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，将官方发展援助直接用于其他地方的气候智能农业(CSA)项目。到目前为止，气候智能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调查。学术界和发展实践者都对气候适应能力的实际要求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、实证的数据收集和分析方法的培训，探索了气候智能农业与与粮食安全相关的做法之间的关系。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，并通过向参与农业发展和粮食安全问题的组织广泛传播研究成果来增强公众的科学理解。Serena Stein将在普林斯顿大学的Joao Biehl博士的指导下，通过对东南部非洲莫桑比克正在开展的三个气候智能项目的扎根研究，研究如何重新制定农业援助，并对小农产生实验、关系和伦理影响。莫桑比克是在实践中评估气候智能农业的合适地点。历史上和现在投入的大量发展援助，特别是在可持续发展领域的投资，使其成为纵向评估气候智能农业的理想实验室。气候智能承诺是通过与美国等传统捐助国以及巴西等新兴捐助国和私营公司建立双边援助伙伴关系来实现的。研究人员将使用参与者观察法和对农民受益者和发展实践者的访谈的民族志方法，研究当围绕气候智能范例动员农业援助时，发展话语、技术转让和耕作实践是如何重新配置的。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。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.