Considering the challenges of population growth, changing human consumptions patterns and climate change, it is assumed that farming systems in Africa will have to increase their productivity, sustainability and resilience. Conservation Agriculture (CA) is an approach that has shown promising results in reducing soil degradation, water evaporation, while contributing to biodiversity and reducing climate vulnerability of agriculture. However, CA has not been innovated in Africa on a larger scale.
The ERAfrica-project INnovative Conservation Agriculture Approaches: Food Security and Climate Action Through Soil and Water Conservation (INCAA) aimed at contributing to an innovation of CA by
- assessing the benefits and adaptations of CA;
- fostering joint learning and co-innovation around CA adaptation;
- integrating institutional and individual dimensions into tools that assess the applicability of CA;
- designing a learning process involving all stakeholders towards innovation of CA.
The CDR-BOKU team contributed to INCAA objectives 2, 3 and 4 by
- extracting a solid concept of communicative action and transformative learning in natural resource management from the literature;
- translating these insights into a learning process that was tested in Burkina Faso;
- integrating the theoretical and empirical work on communicative action and transformative learning to submit a scientific publication; and
- making the developed learning process available to a wider audience in the form of 3 instructional videos.
