Framing agriculture and climate in Kenyan policies: a longitudinal perspective

Climate change threatens Kenyan agriculture and the environment, and jeopardizes people's livelihoods and food security. The 2017 Kenya Climate-Smart Agriculture Strategy claims to guide a transformation of Kenya's agricultural system through an integrated approach to agriculture, climate change, development, environment, and food security. By undertaking a longitudinal analysis of policy frames, this study temporally contextualizes climate-smart agriculture (CSA) policy adoption to understand whether CSA is a transformative tool versus business-as-usual. A policy frame analysis of the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment between 2002 and 2017, complemented with in-depth interviews addresses the question how policy frames for agriculture, climate change, development, environment and food security have evolved over time, and which factors contributed to policy frame development in Kenya. Findings demonstrate that (a) CSA in Kenya is an incremental shift away from existing policy frames rather than a radical transformation, (b) a discrepancy exists between Strategic Plans and sectoral policies; and (c) policy frames are influenced by donors, regional and global fora and personal networks. This study suggests that CSA's relevance is limited to those contexts that acknowledge a complex relationship between agriculture, climate change, development, environment, and food security prior to CSA policy adoption

Cross-boundary policy entrepreneurship for climate-smart agriculture in Kenya

Many initiatives to address contemporary complex challenges require the crossing of sector, domain, and level boundaries, which policy entrepreneurs are believed to facilitate. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how, why, and with what effect such entrepreneurs operate to cross boundaries. As this requires an account of both entrepreneurial strategy and the surrounding policy environment, we embed entrepreneurship in the policy frameworks of multiple streams, advocacy coalitions, and punctuated equilibrium. We use qualitative methods to analyse policy development for climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Kenya. CSA is a cross-cutting strategy to sustainably increase agricultural productivity, resilience, and food security while curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. Our results demonstrate that policy entrepreneurs target varying ideas, interests, and institutions across boundaries in order to establish cross-boundary linkages, but this requires additional resources including connections, funding, and time. Simultaneously, this process offers opportunities, for instance, regarding choice of audience and potential resources to tap. Cross-boundary entrepreneurial strategies include venue shopping to soften up communities; framing CSA in multiple ways to address different audiences; demonstrating brokerage between coalitions through impartial leadership and creating a neutral institutional setting; and process manipulation to bypass complexities arising from the scattered policy environment. Although entrepreneurs managed to realize the adoption of a Kenya CSA strategy, the process displays limited changes in policymakers’ ideas; the policy remains the main responsibility of the agriculture ministry alone and receives limited support from local authorities. This raises questions regarding the cross-boundary nature and implementability of this strategy

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur