A social realist account of the way smallholder farmers exercised their agency in the adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices in degraded landscapes in Machubeni, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Authors:   , Mbengo Idah 
Published: December 2024

Over the last two decades, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been promoted as a way to address the challenges of climate change for smallholder farmers' productivity, food security and livelihoods. Given concerns about climate change, many studies have contributed to developing an understanding of resilience building and crop and livestock systems adaptation. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of CSA practices, several studies report on their limited uptake by farmers involved in various projects. The reasons for low rates of adoption remain unclear. In this context, the study on which this thesis is based drew on Bhaskar’s critical realism and Archer’s social realism to explore the way smallholder farmers in five villages in a rural area in South Africa were enabled and constrained as they exercised their agency in a project intended to introduce them to CSA practices. The study was not about adaptation and resilience building per se but rather, following Bhaskar and Archer, sought to identify the generative mechanisms enabling and constraining the adoption of CSA practices. Bhaskar’s critical realism posits a view of reality as layered. The topmost layer of reality is the Empirical. This consists of observations and experiences of the world around us and is understood to be relative. The second layer, the Actual, is the layer of events from which observations and experiences located at the level of the Empirical emerge. Events at the level of the Actual and experiences and observations at the level of the Empirical emerge from an interplay of mechanisms at the deepest layer of reality identified by Bhaskar, as the Real. In positing a layered ontology, critical realism allows for the relativity of experiences and observations while, at the same time, acknowledging the reality of structures and mechanisms, which cannot be directly observed but nonetheless exist. Archer’s work on agency accords personal powers and properties (PEPs) to all individuals. Although all individuals have the power to act in relation to the world around them, they are nonetheless conditioned by their previous histories and experiences as they do so. As individuals set about exercising their agency, they are enabled or constrained by structures and mechanisms in two domains at the level of the Real which are understood to possess their own powers and properties: the structural domain and the cultural domain. In addition to drawing on Archer’s conceptualisation of the interaction between agency, structure and culture, the study also uses her “morphogenetic framework” which allows for the identification of ‘whose conceptual shifts are responsible for which structural changes, when, where and under what conditions’ (Archer, 1998: 361) and for understanding change as a series of never-ending cycles. The first phase of Archer’s morphogenetic framework, entitled T1, involves social and cultural conditioning. In the study, T1 was understood to be the time until 2017 when the project on which the study focused began. The second phase, T2 to T3, is the phase of social and cultural interaction as agents exercise their PEPs to pursue concerns they have identified for themselves and encounter structural emergent powers and properties (SEPs) and cultural emergent powers and properties (CEPs) of mechanisms located in the domains of structure and culture as they do so. The final phase of the framework, T4, allows for an evaluation of what has changed and what has not changed. My claim is that the uptake of CSA practices is impacted by different forms of consciousness or ways of experiencing the world, which is the result of the social and cultural conditioning of different groups involved in the project at T1, and clashes between them. The use of the framework drawing on critical realism and social realism allowed for the identification of these different forms of consciousness in different social groups (project facilitators, elderly farmers and the youth). These different forms of consciousness were understood to condition the agency of the three groups and thus enable or constrain the introduction of CSA practices and how they were taken up. Elderly women in the project had been conditioned to be caregivers and to see their roles tending kitchen gardens as part of their identity. This consciousness led to the uptake of CSA practices in their home gardens. By contrast, young people engaged with the project shared a very different way of experiencing the world. They were better educated and had been socialised into using social media and watching films on electronic devices from a young age. As a result, they valued the role of money in accessing consumer goods and the good life and thus valued paid employment rather than working on the land to provide subsistence. This led to a limited uptake of CSA practices. It is envisaged that insights from the study will offer new ways of understanding what might otherwise be seen as resistance to adopting CSA practices as well as new ways of engaging with different groups of agents involved in projects in the future. The study demonstrates the explanatory power of critical realism and social realism to analyse a climate change adaptation project.