Co-Production of Climate Smart Services

1. Co-Production ofClimate Smart Services W.-L. Bartels, E.R. Carr, L. Some, A.S. Moussa, S.H. Rao, A. Tall, P.C.S. Traore, K. Venkatasubramanian

2. Initial writing team • W.-L. Bartels, wendylin@ufl.edu • E.R. Carr, edwardrcarr@gmail.com • A.S. Moussa, a.s.moussa@cgiar.org • S.H. Rao, sheilahrao@farmradio.org • L. Some, someleopold@fasonet.bf • A. Tall, a.tall@cgiar.org • P.C.S. Traore, p.s.traore@cgiar.org • K. Venkatasubramanian, kalpanasa@gmail.com

3. Goal, Objectives • Opportunity addressed: more participatory processes and trans-disciplinarity in the development and deployment of climate-smart services from communities to regions • Goal: build a design & deployment framework for climate-smart services • Timeline: 2013-2015

4. How will farmers and rural communities benefit • Project intervention areas: • Direct involvement in service design (organic process) • Beyond project intervention areas: • Community of Practice around multi-stakeholder process design • Scaling through aggregate levels of intervention (districts to regions) – phase II

5. Where will they benefit • 12n+ Communities (~ homogeneous livelihood) • For each district, a set of intervention and control communities selected following a rigorous, stratified random sampling process taking account of • 12+ Districts (~ homogeneous climate) • For each country, at least 2 districts representing contrasted climatic conditions (e.g. Koutiala and Bougouni in Mali) • 6 Countries (~ homogeneous extension) • For each region, 2 countries representing contrasted experience and capacity related to climate services (e.g. Mali and Ghana in West Africa) • 3 Regions (~ homogeneous policy) • West & Central Africa, East & Southern Africa, Southern Asia

6. Good practices / overarching concepts • Participatory action-research • Climate services  climate-SMART services (climate as one component of a greater system of services, not a standalone ) • Balanced paradigm to effectively embed environmental goals within development goals (vulnerability AND competencies, constraints AND opportunities, resilience AND intensification) • Rigorous M&E system for impact assessment of process-based interventions

7. How to get started? Next steps? • Writeshop meeting • Purpose: write full project proposal • Rationale: extend the participatory process design to also include proposal writing • 10-12 people involving core team members + representatives from farmers, NGOs, ag/extension services, met. Services, agro-dealers, private sector, policy • towards end of Q1 2013, using USAID seed funds • Assessment of knowledge, opportunities, and demand • Purpose: take stock, assess potential for engagement, by whom, where and for what (blueprinting) • Rationale: organically start the process from the bottom up • Farmer & Community level (keep in mind social differentiations) • Institutional level (met, academia/research, boundary institutions: communication, extension, intermediaries, policy level) • Open the space for dialogue (CoP) and build platforms for interactions between identified actors • Purpose: migrate from blueprint to “assembly line” – nuts and bolts of the participatory process design including innovation platforms, agricultural & communication technologies etc. • Sustain the platforms for continued, iterative co-production of climate-smart services (interactions between farmers and multi-disciplinary technical services) • Design mechanism to showcase best practices related to process design • Vertical farmer exchange visits here?

8. Measuring success • Success: climate-smart services have been identified, demonstrated good practices • Set up an experimental design where co-produced services are compared with non co-produced services • Identification of tools for dialogue/bridging the gap between farmers, agr and met research communities appropriate for each scale of intervention (community, subnational, national, regional and global) • Iterative M&E protocol with counterfactuals (controls) – rigorous RCT design ported from the technology to the process level • Indicators measuring the intensity in exchange of tools and methods across the various levels of granularity (communication methods / radios)

9. Other ideas for consideration • Level of ownership of CCAFS is variable • Need to engage people who want to be engaged • Avoid becoming a ‘gender’ thing • Support different teams in starting a new process design from beginning to end • What’s the buy-in for this process (where are all the national stakeholders?) • Our specificity: we are proposing a framework to design processes of engagement that will ultimately lead to climate-smart services ( building capacity for teams within the CCAFS community to design these processes) • Learn from participatory plant breeding & selection • Assessing the barriers to some of these participatory processes