Capacity Assessment Of Community Based Organizations For Climate Smart Agriculture Extension To Promote Climate Compatible Development: A Governance Index Approach

Abstract

Climate change impacts vary across various agro-ecological zones and thus require context specific climate smart interventions. The global institutions like World Bank and Food and Agriculture Organization are persuading countries for transition to modern agriculture practices aiming at promoting climate smart agriculture (CSA) and strengthening the adaptive capacities at grass-root levels. Paris Agreement of 2015 also emphasizes on the role of community based organizations (CBOs) for preparing local communities in collaboration with local institutions for coping with climate related disasters effectively. CBOs act as mediators, bridging the gap between local communities and institutions by consistently engaging with administration to effectively implement CSA practices. CBOs can play an effective role towards triple-win strategies of climate compatible development (CCD), provided if these organizations have adequate capacity. In recent years, many CBOs are involved in modern agriculture practices. Still, there is a big capacity gap in utilizing their role to an optimum level. Present study tries to find out whether CBOs including farmers’ groups in Pakistan have adequate capacity to adopt modern climate smart agricultural practices to achieve the country's targets set for SDG-2 and SDG-13. It employed a principle-criteria-indicator (PCI) based governance analysis model to develop an index for assessing CBOs’ capacity with a cross-sectional data of 340 KIIs and 17 FGDs at federal, provincial and districts levels in Pakistan. The analysis model combined different governance approaches with mix-method multi-criteria methods including MCDA’s SMART and statistical tests for validation purposes. Based on empirical results, it is deciphered that CBOs’ capacity is not well matched with CCD agenda in Pakistan.