Farmer-centric on-farm experimentation as everyday transformative change for climate adaptation: a systematic review

A growing proportion of the agricultural research community has been calling for a systemic restructuring of farmer-researcher relationships to accelerate learning and facilitate transformations toward a climate-resilient food system. One set of approaches, farmer-centric on-farm experimentation (OFE), is gaining ground as a renewed means for scientists and other agri-food system actors to co-create knowledge with farmers about their own farms through their everyday adaptation practices. Despite increasing interest, there has been little systematic assessment of how farmer-centric OFE principles and processes transform farmers’ everyday adaptive capabilities to better adapt to climate change. This study fills this gap by drawing from second-order action-oriented transformation research essentials, which aim to facilitate transformative change by shifting how knowledge is produced in scientific research. We examined 39 peer-reviewed articles by considering how farmer-centric OFE supports transformative change in relation to climate change adaptation through these research essentials. Our results confirm substantial variation between OFEs in their definitions of transformative change, methods used, and participation levels of different actors. We identify two major approaches to OFE, one grounded in reflexivity, which explicitly recognizes transformation, and another based on adoption-based reasoning. We highlight the importance of co-learning as a meaningful shift from scientist-led research by repositioning the role of scientists to purposively work with farmers for transformative change. We then suggest pathways for researchers utilizing farmer-centric OFE to incorporate action-oriented transformation research essentials into their approaches, most notably by better integrating social sciences and processes into agricultural innovations.