Browsing by Author "Luigi, Piemontese"

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    Barriers to scaling sustainable land and water management in Uganda: a cross-scale archetype approach
    (Resilience Alliance, 2021) Luigi, Piemontese; Rick Nelson, Kamugisha; Joy Margaret Biteete, Tukahirwa; Anna, Tengberg; Simona, Pedde; Fernando, Jaramillo
    In African small-scale agriculture, sustainable land and water management (SLWM) is key to improving food production while coping with climate change. However, the rate of SLWM adoption remains low, suggesting a gap between generalized SLWM advantages for rural development across the literature, and the existence of context-dependent barriers to its effective implementation. Uganda is an example of this paradox: the SLWM adoption rate is low despite favorable ecological conditions for agriculture development and a large rural population. A systemic understanding of the barriers hindering the adoption of SLWM is therefore crucial to developing coherent policy interventions and enabling effective funding strategies. Here, we propose a cross-scale archetype approach to identify and link barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. We performed 80 interviews across the country to build cognitive archetypes, harvesting stakeholders’ perceptions of different types of barriers. We complemented this bottom-up perspective with a spatial archetype analysis to contextualize these results across different social-ecological regions. We found poverty trap, overpopulation, risk aversion, remoteness, and post-conflict patriarchal systems as cognitive archetypes that synthesize the different dynamics of barriers to SLWM adoption in Uganda. Our results reveal both specific and cross-cutting barriers. Ineffective extension services emerges as a ubiquitous barrier, whereas gender inequality is a priority barrier for large supported farms and farms in drier lowlands in northern Uganda. The combination of cognitive and spatial archetypes proposed here can help to overcome ineffective “one-size-fits-all” solutions and support context-specific policy plans to scale up SLWM, rationing resources to support sustainable intensification of agriculture.
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    Investing in sustainable intensification for smallholders: quantifying large-scale costs and benefits in Uganda
    (IOP Publishing Ltd, 2022-03-18) Luigi, Piemontese; Rick Nelson, Kamugisha; Jennie, Barron; Joy Margaret Biteete, Tukahirwa; Nicole, Harari; Fernando, Jaramillo
    In Uganda, upgrading smallholder agriculture is a necessary step to achieve the interlinked sustainable development goals of hunger eradication, poverty reduction and land degradation neutrality. However, targeting the right restoration practices and estimate their cost-benefit at the national scale is difficult given the highly contextual nature of restoration practices and the diversity of small-scale interventions to be adopted. By analysing the context-specific outcomes of 82 successful case studies on different sustainable land and water management (SLWM) in Uganda, we estimated that out-scaling of existing successful practices to 75% of agricultural land would require a one-time investment of US$ 4.4 billion from smallholders. Our results show that, besides the many social and environmental benefit commonly associated to SLWM, a wide outscale of SLWM could generate US$ 4.7 billion every year, once the practices are fully operational. Our context-specific estimates highlight the profitability of investing in smallholder farming to achieve the sustainable development goals in Uganda, with geographical differences coming from specific social-ecological conditions. This study can guide sustainable intensification development by targeting the most suitable SLWM practices and plan for adequate financial support from government, investors and international development aids to smallholder farming.