Climate-smart agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa: conceptual ambiguities, structural inequalities, and conditions for equitable adoption

Since the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) formally defined climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in 2010, CSA has become the dominant framework underpinning agricultural policy responses to climate change and directing major investment across sub-Saharan Africa. However, while CSA has been rapidly taken up in institutions, its potential for equitable and sustainable rural development remains hotly debated. In this article we present a systematic critical analysis of the concept of CSA and the conditions of its application in sub-Saharan Africa, based on a systematic review of 73 studies published between 2007 and 2025. The review was conducted following the ROSES (Reporting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses) protocol. We used a combination of thematic analysis and computational lexical analysis in R. Thematic analysis was conducted inductively from a structured coding grid applied to all 73 articles, with intercoder reliability assessed by Cohen’s kappa ( κ  = 0.84); lexical analysis was used to triangulate and quantify the discursive patterns identified thematically. The conceptual findings reported below are therefore derived from the convergent reading of these two synthesis procedures. The analysis generates three major conceptual ambiguities. First, there is the definitional elasticity of the concept, which allows for the inclusion of practices based on contradictory logics. Second, there is the substantive continuity of the concept with the productivist agenda of the Green Revolution, obfuscated by a discourse of paradigmatic rupture. Third, there is the systematic marginalization of endogenous knowledge in favour of exogenous technological solutions. The analysis indicates that the reproduction and amplification of existing exclusions, particularly for women and smallholder farmers, are reinforced through unequal access to resources (land, information and finance) in the context of structural inequalities. Top-down and standardized project designs do not consider community dynamics and local rationalities, resulting in a persistent structural gap between the normative aspirations of CSA and their concrete effects on the ground. Building on these findings, the paper introduces the concept of constitutive structural mismatch, specifying epistemological, institutional and political dimensions, and suggests conditions for reformulating the CSA framework to explicitly integrate gender justice, the valorization of endogenous knowledge and participatory governance based on community institutions.