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

Initial writing team W.-L. Bartels, E.R. Carr, A.S. Moussa, S.H. Rao, L. Some, A. Tall, P.C.S. Traore, K. Venkatasubramanian,

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:

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

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

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

How to get started? Next steps? 1.Writeshop meeting 1.Purpose: write full project proposal 2.Rationale: extend the participatory process design to also include proposal writing people involving core team members + representatives from farmers, NGOs, ag/extension services, met. Services, agro-dealers, private sector, policy 4.towards end of Q1 2013, using USAID seed funds 2.Assessment of knowledge, opportunities, and demand 1.Purpose: take stock, assess potential for engagement, by whom, where and for what (blueprinting) 2.Rationale: organically start the process from the bottom up 3.Farmer & Community level (keep in mind social differentiations) 4.Institutional level (met, academia/research, boundary institutions: communication, extension, intermediaries, policy level) 3.Open the space for dialogue (CoP) and build platforms for interactions between identified actors 1.Purpose: migrate from blueprint to “assembly line” – nuts and bolts of the participatory process design including innovation platforms, agricultural & communication technologies etc. 4.Sustain the platforms for continued, iterative co-production of climate-smart services (interactions between farmers and multi-disciplinary technical services) 5.Design mechanism to showcase best practices related to process design 1.Vertical farmer exchange visits here?

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)

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