17 pages, The creation of commercialization opportunities for smallholder farmers has taken primacy on the development agenda of many developing countries. Invariably, most of the smallholders are less productive than commercial farmers and continue to lag in commercialization. Apart from the various multifaceted challenges which smallholder farmers face, limited access to extension services stands as the underlying constraint to their sustainability. Across Africa and Asia, public extension is envisioned as a fundamental part of the process of transforming smallholder farmers because it is their major source of agricultural information. Extension continues to be deployed using different approaches which are evolving. For many decades, various authors have reported the importance of the approaches that effectively revitalize extension systems and have attempted to fit them into various typologies. However, there is a widespread concern over the inefficiency of these extension approaches in driving the sustainability of smallholder farming agenda. Further, most of the approaches that attempted to revolutionize extension have been developed and brought into the field in rapid succession, but with little or no impact at the farmer level. This paper explores the theory and application of agricultural extension approaches and argues the potential of transforming them using digital technologies. The adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and the internet which are envisaged to revolutionize existing extension systems and contribute towards the sustainability of smallholder farming systems is recommended
Online via keyword search of UI Library e-catalog., Analysis of the concepts of "communication" and "development" in relationship to each other within the role of "development communication" in support of rural and economic development.
7 pages., Via online journal., Recent GHG emissions trends are in stark contrast with the Paris Agreement’s target to hold the increase in average global warming to “well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to stay below 1,5 °C” by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times. This disconnect has further unveiled the limitations of current knowledge production and communication processes in Southern European countries, where fast institutional changes are needed to address the potential impacts as well as the opportunities for transformation derived from High-End Climate Change (HECC). The prevailing knowledge deficit-model – aimed at producing ‘more knowledge’ about climate impacts, vulnerabilities and long-term scenarios to decision makers – has long proven inadequate in tackling the many complexities of the present socio-climate quandary. The growing emphasis on assessing and implementing concrete solutions, demand new and more complex forms of agent interactions in the production, framing, communication and use of climate knowledge; and in particular, explicit procedures able to tackle difficult normative questions regarding assessment of solutions and the allocation of individual and collective responsibilities. To explore these challenges, we analyse the views of 30 Spanish knowledge contributors and users of the latest UN IPCC AR5 report and share the insights gained from the implementation of a participatory Integrated Assessment procedure aimed at developing innovative solutions to high-end climate scenarios in Iberia. Our analysis supports the view of the need to institutionalise transformation, and in particular underlines the potential role that transformative climate boundary organisations could play to address such difficult ethical choices in different contexts of action.
24 pages, In this work, an exhaustive revision is given of the literature associated with advanced information and communication technologies in agriculture within a window of 25 years using bibliometric tools enabled to detect of the main actors, structure, and dynamics in the scientific papers. The main findings are a trend of growth in the dynamics of publications associated with advanced information and communication technologies in agriculture productivity. Another assertion is that countries, like the USA, China, and Brazil, stand out in many publications due to allocating more resources to research, development, and agricultural productivity. In addition, the collaboration networks between countries are frequently in regions with closer cultural and idiomatic ties; additionally, terms’ occurrence are obtained with Louvain algorithm predominating four clusters: precision agriculture, smart agriculture, remote sensing, and climate smart agriculture. Finally, the thematic-map characterization with Callon’s density and centrality is applied in three periods. The first period of thematic analysis shows a transition in detecting the variability of a nutrient, such as nitrogen, through the help of immature georeferenced techniques, towards greater remote sensing involvement. In the transition from the second to the third stage, the maturation of technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless sensor networks, and the machine learning area, is observed
