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Local governments in Sub-Saharan Africa face the daunting task of high urban growth and potentially devastating impacts of climate change across local communities and the economy. Urban and peri-urban food production can be among nature-based strategies planned for improving urban food security, reducing emissions, and climate adaptation. Co-operative governance, strategic planning, and accountable institutions are needed to support urban agriculture (UA), in the face of climate risks, unplanned urban development, the gendered nature of food provision, and the inability of urban farmers to self-organize toward optimal market and land access outcomes. Using a case study approach guided by qualitative content analysis with information derived from web analysis, we apply the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework to analyze underlying governance factors for UA in three selected Sub-Saharan African cities. Our three case cities of Kampala, Tamale and Cape Town reveal that UA is beginning to receive policy attention toward food security, and recognition for generating environmental, ecological, health, and human well-being benefits. Literature from specific cities however does not yet signal a local awareness and policy thrust regarding the associated and pertinent climate adaptation benefits of urban agriculture. We therefore recommend trans-disciplinary, locally-led, planning-based, and multi-sectoral approaches, involving a range of stakeholders toward recognizing and achieving the climate adaptation, environmental (ecologically restorative) and food security benefits of pursuing urban agriculture. This signals a larger role for the practice in sustainability discourse and SDGs 2 and 11, scaling out and up across large, medium and small towns, and cities of Sub-Saharan Africa.

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The increase in extreme weather events is a major consequence of climate change in tropical mountain rangeslike the Andes of Peru. The impact on farming households is of growing interest since adaptation and mitigation strategies are required to keep race with environmental conditions and to prevent people from increasing poverty. In this regard it becomes more and more obvious that a bottom-up approach incorporating the local socioeconomic processes and their interplay is needed. Socio-economic field laboratories are used to understand such processes on site. This integrates multi-disciplinary and participatory analyses of production and its relationship with biophysical and socio-economic determinants. Farmers react individually based on their experiences, financial situation, labor conditions, or attitude among others. In this regard socio-economic field laboratories also serve to develop and test scenarios about development paths, which involve the combination of both, local and scientific knowledge. For a comprehensive understanding of the multitude of interactions the agent-based modeling framework MPMAS (Mathematical Programming-based Multi-Agent System) is applied. In combination with continued ground-truthing, the model is used to gain insights into the functioning of the complex social system and to forecast its development in the near future. The assessment of the effect of humans’ behavior in changing environmental conditions including the comparison of different sites, transforms the model to a communication tool bridging the gap between adaptation policies and local realities.

Citizen Science (CS) has gained increased recognition over the last two decades. This turn is occurring in strong connection with the profound transformations that have affected science over the last few decades, leading towards a new social model of science characterised by greater openness to society regarding research content actors involved, research processes, and expected societal and economic impact. CS is at the centre of this complex change dynamics as a tool that strongly sustains the shift towards the “open social model” of science supporting a new approach to the science-society relationship. However CS is rarely evaluated for its long-term structural effects on science and the science-society relationship. This article addresses this topic, having as a point of departure the ongoing EC-funded Step Change project, aimed at promoting five Citizen Science Initiatives (CSIs) in different research fields (health, energy, and environment). Under the project, an Evaluation Framework has been developed, shaping the evaluation process as a citizen science project by adopting a developmental and participatory approach. The Evaluation Framework is organised into two different but intertwined levels, one focused on the evaluation of the individual CSI (analytical level) and a second aimed at identifying recurrent patterns of obstacles, facilitating factors, or a mix of them (neutral situations) across the CSIs (cross-cutting level). While the analytical level is intended as a service to better implement the CSIs, the cross-cutting level is intended as a research process to generate new knowledge on how CS could serve as a tool for a better anchorage of science into society.