Positive tipping points for accelerating adoption of regenerative practices in African smallholder farming systems: what drives and sustains adoption?

Abstract

Mass adoption of regenerative agriculture (RA) practices could improve the resilience and increase the productivity of African smallholder farming systems in the face of growing climate change pressures. However, mechanisms to rapidly and sustainably scale up these RA practices are not yet well understood. Recent research suggests that rapid system transitions towards sustainable practices such as RA can be driven by amplifying feedback loops, and if these are sufficiently strong, the system could reach a tipping point of self-propelling change. Moore et al. (2015) contended that scaling up, out, and deep is essential for wide-scale system change but identified a gap in the understanding of how to achieve the three-way scaling goal, let alone achieve it quickly. To address this gap, we combine Lenton et al.’s (2022) framework for operationalizing positive tipping points with Moore et al.’s (2015) conceptualization of scaling to understand triggers for rapid scaling in the case of The International Small group and Tree planting programme (TIST) in East Africa. We present three key insights: 1. It is essential to work with centrally positioned actors capable of and motivated to influence changes in policy and norms towards scaling the intervention such as the smallholder farmers for TIST. 2. These different dimensions of scaling continuously interact, influenced by feedback loops. For sustained scaling, it is key to create enabling conditions to trigger reinforcing feedbacks. 3. The rate of scaling is a factor of the reinforcing feedbacks at play in a particular location. Therefore, identification of these feedbacks and the appropriate leverage points is key in addressing location-specific scaling challenges, thus emphasizing the need for context-specific data.