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During the 20th century, the proliferation of agricultural innovations and research led to significant increases in yield, improvements in food security and human health, poverty reduction, and a raise in economic outputs (Rosegrant et al., 2023;Nin-Pratt Thornton et al., 2018).At a time where the international community was increasingly acknowledging the interactions between climate change and agriculture, such as during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP)15 and COP16, the concept was quickly adopted and promoted by a variety of global-level stakeholders (Newell, 2017). Research to assess which agricultural practices deliver on the "triple win" quickly popularized, providing evidence on trade-offs between practices and rapidly increasing awareness of context sensitivity for implementation (Smith et al., 2020). International research organizations and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) contributed to evidence of generation and capacity-building. For example, FAO's Climate-Smart Agriculture Sourcebook (2013) provided guidance for countries on CSA policymaking and implementation. The CGIAR, particularly the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) program, promoted the idea through country profiles, toolkits, and research-policy engagement.Multilateral institutions then translated this evidence into policy recommendations, aligning it with financing mechanisms, and establishing measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) systems (Freed et al., 2023). Multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, mainstreamed CSA through lending instruments and climate finance mechanisms. Bilateral donors, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Union (EU), funded pilot programs and capacity-building initiatives that further embedded CSA into national policy frameworks.The concept came to influence national public policies and international agreements. Elements of CSA increasingly appeared in National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and multilateral funding programs (Campbell et al., 2016). Global South countries, such as Brazil, India, Kenya, and Ethiopia, incorporated its principles into national sustainable agriculture programs. The result is that CSA ceased to be a technical FAO agenda and became a reference for low-carbon and climate-resilient agricultural policy-making.Despite its broad adoption, CSA has also been subject to critical scrutiny. The flexibility that makes CSA attractive as a policy framework has been criticized for allowing heterogeneous interpretations, uneven ambition levels, and, in some cases, limited accountability regarding mitigation outcomes (Newell, 2017;Totin et al., 2018). These critiques highlight that CSA is not a prescriptive solution, but rather a governance framework whose effectiveness depends on institutional design, monitoring capacity, and alignment with farmers' economic incentives.3 The Brazilian ABC Plan: The scientific-institutional translation of CSA into national policyThe ABC Plan (Plano Setorial de Mitigação e de Adaptação às Mudanças Climáticas para a Consolidação de uma Economia de Baixa Emissão de Carbono na Agricultura, or "Low-Carbon Agriculture Plan") is an example of how Global South countries can translate and implement international climate narratives into public policies rooted in local contexts. Although formulated before the consolidation of the CSA concept, the ABC Plan already reflected the central pillars of the climate-smart agriculture framework: sustainable productivity increases, enhanced adaptation and resilience, and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (Lipper et al., 2014). What makes the Brazilian experience particularly relevant is the centrality of tropical scientific knowledge accumulated over decades, combined with sustained public investment, institutional coordination, and credit-based policy instruments. Without these conditions, similar outcomes would be unlikely to emerge in other contexts. As demonstrated in various economic analyses, the Plan not only responded to international agendas but anticipated them by transforming scientific evidence into financing, credit, and governance instruments (Paixão Silva Harvey et al., 2014). By placing income and resilience at the center, the ABC Plan avoided the common mistake of "carbonfirst" policies, often unable to gain traction among producers.The ABC Plan adopts a governance strategy based on State Management Committees (CGE/SSCs) that enables its scaled implementation. These committees bring together federal and state governments, research and technical assistance institutions, as well as organized civil society (MAPA, 2023). Their role is to mobilize producers through technology transfer that promote the adoption of the ABC's sustainable practices (Bragança et al., 2022;Vinholis et al., 2021). The CGEs also allow for adapting implementation to local operational conditions, resource availability, and long-term development dynamics in each Brazilian state (MAPA, 2023;Vinholis et al., 2021).Despite the advances, the Brazilian experience also highlights structural limitations in implementing climate-smart policies in the Global South. Persistent challenges include barriers to credit access, regional disparities in technical capacity, concentration of resources in the Center-South, and institutional weaknesses that limit uptake in the North and Northeast parts of the country (Lovato et al., 2020;Gianetti, 2021). These findings underscore the need for climate-smart policies to have national-level coherence combined with tailored implementation strategies for different regional contexts, robust monitoring systems, qualified technical assistance, and alignment between banks, research, and territorial governance. Technology alone is not sufficient: institutions, coordination, and state capacity matter as much as the suggested technical package (Conceição, 2022). This article does not aim to provide a causal impact evaluation of the ABC Plan. Instead, it offers an institutional and policy analysis of how national research systems contribute to translating global climate frameworks into scalable public policies. Importantly, the Brazilian experience should not be interpreted as a readily transferable model. Its outcomes reflect specific historical, institutional, and scientific trajectories, reinforcing the argument that CSA implementation pathways must be nationally grounded rather than globally standardized.International development organizations were crucial in shaping the policy-making agenda, financing mechanisms, and monitoring frameworks of CSA. International frameworks such as CSA and regenerative agriculture tend to circulate globally in an asymmetric manner, reflecting the scientific, economic, and normative interests of the Global North (Sabourin et al., 2021). The ABC Plan operates as a counterpoint to this dynamic. Far from being a mere recipient of external models, Brazil hybridized the principles of CSA with its tropical scientific base, its productive realities, and its development objectives. In doing so, it not only translated global concepts into applicable policies but contributed to reconfiguring them.Brazil's experience shows that national agricultural research systems have an important role in generating innovations, monitoring implementation, and scaling for maximizing impact across the CSA pillars. There needs to be greater recognition of the role of national systems in advancing the food systems transition and their capacity to generate context-specific innovations and scale climate-smart solutions across different regions. The Brazilian trajectory also demonstrates that successful climatesmart transitions in the Global South emerge from the combination of local science, institutional innovation, and policies designed based on farmers' priorities.We therefore call for a Global South-led agricultural research agenda, supported by increased investment from national governments and international development funders, to ensure that global standards and priorities reflect the ecological and socio-productive realities of the region's most central to the future of global food systems. However, investments in agricultural research systems alone will not efficiently transform food systems (Nin-Pratt & Stads, 2023). System-level funding and knowledge exchange between countries are essential to unlock human capacity and research systems, enabling their success in producing, implementing, and scaling innovation.
Cincurá et al. (Tue,) studied this question.