Climate change adaptation and digitalization: a critical review towards equal and just agricultural transformations

In this viewpoint, drawing on a critical lens in both climate change adaptation and digital agriculture studies, we scrutinize how adaptation, digitalization, innovation and participation are discursively represented, understood and imagined in existing peer-reviewed literature as enabling equal and just agricultural transformations. Reviewing digital-agriculture-adaptation literature between 2010 and 2023, we find that most studies are ambiguous about how they define adaptation and how they frame it under digitally driven development narratives such as Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA). Digital technologies are mostly introduced as tools and services in a top-down way by business and state actors, or researchers who are external to local communities. There is limited evidence on how and whether farmers are consulted or on how they take initiatives in technological innovations for agricultural adaptation. We argue that the literature conceptually and methodologically integrating agricultural adaptation and digitalization is still lacking, and existing debates are fragmented and siloed. Future research should narrow in on politics, situated context and farmers' perspectives, lived experiences and subjectivities to counteract the current preponderant top-down, development agenda and techno-fix. Towards this goal, ongoing debates in digital geographies, critical agrarian studies and feminist political ecology can help cross-pollinate the subfield of digitally mediated agricultural adaptation to climate change.