Environmental Change and Maize Innovation Pathways in Kenya

Two of the most pressing issues facing Kenya ’s food security challenge relate to how the country will respond to climate change and how we will meet our food and livelihood requirements through maize and other crops. Our project has focused on maize as a window through which to explore different social and technological responses to environmental change.

As Kenya ’s primary staple crop and a fundamental part of many poor people’s livelihood systems, maize is culturally and politically significant and thus already the focus of major research and development efforts. For these reasons, crop development efforts involving maize and other important crops (e.g., horticulture, alternative dryland staples) will provide the starting point for our discussion, which will examine different types of innovation pathways identified through our field studies and advanced by various actors interviewed for this project – public agricultural research institutions, government programmes, donors and private companies, as well as those practiced within communities, NGOs and civil society groups, in response to growing risk and uncertainty in the environment.

At issue are the varying ways in which people in these different institutional and geographic locations understand and frame ‘resilience’ and how these framing assumptions shape their policy agendas and particular steer technical and social solutions, programme designs and resources in certain directions and not others.