Appel à candidatures pour un contrat post-doctoral

Decision support tools for strengthening family farmers’ capacity to design climate smart options in Colombia

Scientific context

Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) has emerged as a new framework that links climate change and agriculture development initiatives and aims to establish agriculture systems that simultaneously increase productivity, enhance resilience, and reduce emissions (FAO, 2010). The CSA concept explicitly addresses the tradeoffs between these three goals, aiming to achieve food security objectives equitably and sustainably. Innovating around the CSA concept has the potential to generate new models for climate change planning and new investment pathways for agriculture from the local to global levels in the face climate change and climate variability.

The transition to climate smart faming systems implies helping farmers acquiring new knowledge, attitude, and skills to analyze the complex consequences of climate change at the farm level and to understand the impact of technical changes on the pillars of CSA (productivity, resilience, attenuation). Furthermore innovation is generally enabled or constrained by the social, economic, and institutional environment.  Interactions between actors (farmers, researchers, technicians, trainers, private sector partners, and other local stakeholders) need to be strengthened in order to facilitate organizational change that enables innovation (Kilelu et al., 2013). Multi-actor innovation platforms can enable these interactions.

In these platforms, research can shift from conventional to participatory action research playing an active role not only in documenting the outcomes of the innovation platforms, but also by proposing new ideas, practices, tools, or boundary objects to improve interactions between actors (Cash et al., 2003; Trompette & Vinck, 2009). For example socio-economic and climate scenarios were used for strategic planning and investment decisions in multi stakeholder platforms. They helped stakeholders, mainly at national and regional levels, establish more robust plans, policies and strategies and provide “no-regrets” options in the face of diverse futures (Vervoort et al., 2015). Modeling tools at the farm level can also be such boundary objects (Andrieu et al., 2012) used to create a shared vision and understanding of the problem and to facilitate the ex-ante analysis of potential solutions. In this case modelling tools operate as a “cognitive” mediator (Trompette & Vinck, 2009).  

Main objective

The overall objective of this proposal is to co-design with family farmers involved in a broader participatory research conducted in Colombia and Honduras, decision tools permitting to strengthen their capacities to (1) analyze the impact of climate change on their farms (2) be able to propose by themselves technical and organizational changes improving their adaptation to climate change, and to (3) facilitate their interactions with other local actors involved in a multi-stakeholder innovation platform. 

Milestones (M.) and deliverables (D.)

M1. Diagnosis done

D1. A list of the types of farming systems according to their initial strategies, knowledge, attitudes, and skills to face climate change

M2. Scenario defined and model developed

D1. A literature review of the tools used in participatory processes intended to improve capacity of farmers to adapt to climate change

D2. A list of climate-smart indicators is defined with stakeholders

D3. At least two climate and socio-economic scenarios are defined with stakeholders

D4. A model able to simulate the effect of climate-smart options under scenarios is available

D5. One paper submitted in Agricultural systems on the adapted modelling tool

M3. Model used by farmers

D1. A list of the alternatives that were simulated by the different types of farmers is defined

D2. One paper submitted in Climate and Developement on the adapted modelling tool and the strategies proposed and simulated by farmers to face climate change

M4. Final assessment of the methodology

D1. Final knowledge, attitude, and skills to face climate change are characterized in the study site

D2. One operational methodology for the ministries agriculture of Honduras and Colombia

D3. One paper submitted in International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability on the effect of innovation platforms and the specific tools used on change in farmers’ knowledge

Characteristics

Duration: 18 months

Location:

• 1 month in Montpellier, France 
• 9 months in Cali, and Los Cerillos (Popayan), Colombia
• 8 months in Montpellier, France

QUALIFICATIONS, EXPERIENCE AND COMPETENCIES

 The candidate should have the following qualifications, experience and competencies:

-          A PhD in Agriculture or other closely related field.

-          Demonstrated experience in systemic agronomy and farming system modelling

-          Demonstrated understanding of climate change challenges and CSA

-          Demonstrated experience in scientific publication

-          Interest in participatory research

-          Excellent English communication and writing skills;

-          Excellent Spanish communication and writing skills;

-          Demonstrable analytical skills;

-          Strong independent working skills

REPORTING AND SUPERVISION

The postdoc would report to the Project Leader (Nadine Andrieu), and Project Coordinators (Eduardo Chia, Ana Maria Loboguerrero). Monthly progress meeting will be made with the supervisors. She/ he would make sure to submit the deliverables accordingly and allow time for internal and external comments. It is expected that all information used for the development of the tools would be available to the CIRAD and CIAT team, should that be necessary.

SELECTION PROCESS

Interested candidates should send to nadine.andrieu@cirad.fr  their CV and a motivation letter no more than 2 pages explaining (1) why they are interested in this research and (2) their views on how to implement activities before 29th of February.