The Nepalese agriculture extension system has experienced conceptual, structural, and institutional changes during the last seven decades. During this period, various extension approaches and models were tried, adapted and discarded. In 1999, the Government of Nepal (GoN) through the Local Self Government Act 1999 (LSGA 1999) endorsed a decentralized agriculture extension system to address the need for bottom-up planning, self-rule, territorial integrity and upliftment of local economy. It was one of the major paradigm shifts in agricultural service delivery in Nepal. However, the full implementation of LSGA (1999) remained incomplete and agriculture service delivery remained weak (Jaishi et al. 2022 a & b) as the institutional capability and competencies of implementers were not considered.

The Framework for Environmental and Social Management (FESM) establishes environmental and social performance requirements for FAO programming. The FESM includes key elements of a human rights-based approach with the goal to ensure that people and the environment are protected from any potential adverse impacts of FAO programmes and projects. It is also intended to ensure that all stakeholders have ample opportunities to actively participate in the activities of programmes and projects, and have access to effective channels to voice their concerns about them. The FESM reflects the organization’s commitment to sustainability with a new set of guiding principles, two operational pillars and nine environmental and social standards. Together they delineate the mandatory requirements related to the identification, assessment and management of multiple environmental and social risks and impacts associated with programmes and projects supported and implemented by FAO.

The Nepalese agriculture extension system has experienced conceptual, structural, and institutional changes during the last seven decades. During this period, various extension approaches and models were tried, adapted and discarded. In 1999, the Government of Nepal (GoN) through the Local Self Government Act 1999 (LSGA 1999) endorsed a decentralized agriculture extension system to address the need for bottom-up planning, self-rule, territorial integrity and upliftment of local economy. It was one of the major paradigm shifts in agricultural service delivery in Nepal. However, the full implementation of LSGA (1999) remained incomplete and agriculture service delivery remained weak (Jaishi et al. 2022 a & b) as the institutional capability and competencies of implementers were not considered.

The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of the roles of individuals and the importance of their social contexts in shaping the dynamics of technological diffusion in the agricultural sector. When justifying the different rates of innovation adoption, existing literature reviews overemphasize either the drivers of technological changes enacted by farmers’ agentic behaviour or the cognitive processes of individual farmers and their social contexts (structures). However, they continue to have a fragmented view of how local social systems and the agentic behaviour of individual actors influence the evolution of technological regimes, and they lack the ability to describe a purposeful interplay between agency and structures. We present an integrative review of the most relevant papers published in the last 20 years and discuss the impact of structures and agency emerging from local social systems on the local innovation process and, as a result, the evolution of technological regimes. The identified macro categories describe the main processes affecting individuals’ abilities to mobilize and manage local resources for innovation, allowing us to critically assess the stock of previous developments from a new perspective and identify novel research avenues.

Climate change is affecting food production through rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and greater frequency of extreme weather events, adding to the already pressing challenges to food security in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). Smallholder farmers, responsible for the food security of two billion people around the world, are severely affected due to their reliance on rainfed agriculture and increasingly disrupted ecosystems. In order to maintain food security and improve rural livelihoods in the face of a changing climate, food systems must adapt to manage and mitigate these increasing challenges.

This paper summarizes FAO’s conceptual and programmatic approach for anticipating and mitigating the impact of slow-onset hazards on the most vulnerable people depending on agriculture for their livelihoods and food security. Drawing on FAO’s experiences in implementing Anticipatory Action and the technical expertise built over decades, it recommends a phased approach to Anticipatory Action for slow-onset hazards as it reduces uncertainties associated with early warning information, improves the targeting of Anticipatory Action interventions and helps adapt the selection of Anticipatory Action options to the evolving hazard context.

Available in digital format, this year’s edition also discusses selected indicators for which FAO is a contributing agency and/or have key implications for food and agriculture across these Goals. These additional indicators provide valuable information on agricultural losses due to disasters, the distribution of land tenure rights, and the impact of international trade policies and regulations on agricultural trade, especially in developing and Least Developed Countries.This edition also includes a snapshot on conflict, COVID-19 and food insecurity, as well as a special chapter on measuring productive and sustainable agriculture, with progress toward SDG Target 2.4 analysed for the first time.

Although floating farming, a climate-smart practice, is a response to climate change challenges facing agriculture in wetland areas, the adoption of floating agriculture in Bangladesh wetland areas (also known as Haor) is slow. The purpose of our study was to identify the factors that motivate and barriers that inhibit the adoption of floating agriculture in the Haor region in Bangladesh’s Kishoreganj district. To achieve our purpose, we used Roger’s five-stage innovation-decision theory. We collected data from a sample of 120 Haor rural farmers using a quantitative questionnaire answered via a personal interview. We used a binary logistic regression to identify the factors that predict farmers’ motivational actions in adopting floating agriculture. In addition, we rank ordered the data to identify the obstacles that prohibit farmers from implementing floating agriculture. The results demonstrate that education, training related to floating agriculture, credit received, communication behavior, trialability and observability, and complexity in practicing floating agriculture motivate farmers to adopt floating agriculture. The results also show that climatic factors (e.g., high waves and excessive rainfall, aquatic plant scarcity) and non-climatic factors (e.g., inadequate demonstration plots, conflict, and political power abuse) inhibit adoption of floating agriculture. Our study provides suggestions for increasing farmers’ adoption of floating agriculture in wetland areas.

The study documented in this report, was carried out with the objective of facilitating the development of a continental Good-Practice Guidance Notes based on AR4D Institutional Partnerships and Collaborative experiences among the core organizations viz., FARA, SROs, and AFAAS in the last two decades. The study covers broad thematic issues such as capacity development, Innovation Systems and partnerships, Technology generation and adoption, research management, leadership, Policy, knowledge management, advocacy, and communication. The more specific objective of the study included development of appropriate data collection tools and techniques to draw the required information from stakeholders and synthesize such information into a coherent knowledge product.