The study of yield gaps has become more complex, prompting the use of varied approaches to measure yields and a wider range of factors to explain these gaps. In the Global North, the focus is on precision farming, whereas in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), a broader perspective is necessary due to pronounced variability in farmland conditions. While biogeophysical and management factors have been traditional focal points in yield gap analyses, socio-economic and institutional factors are increasingly recognized as significant, especially in SSA. This review synthesizes research from the past decade in SSA that integrates biogeophysical, management, farm characteristics, and institutional factors in yield gap discussions. The findings indicate a slow shift in including socio-economic factors, with management, particularly nutrient supply and crop management, remaining predominant. However, there is a growing trend towards methodological diversity, such as the adoption of remote sensing and GIS in recent years. Case studies from Kenya and Ghana, utilizing field surveys, interviews, panel data, and spatial analysis, highlight how a multifaceted approach can enhance our understanding of the various elements influencing maize yield gaps in SSA.

Participatory research approaches (PRA) are geared towards planning and conducting research process with those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study. Thus, the aim of the inquiry and the research questions develop out of the convergence of two perspectives—that of science and of practice. It also implies that in the best case, both sides benefit from the research process. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of PRA is under contestation largely because of limited impact of research studies on communities. The study evaluated efficiency and effectiveness of participatory research approaches (PRA) among smallholder farmers in Babati district, Tanzania. In this study, efficiency was viewed as a ratio of output (in terms of number of recipients who become aware of the promoted technologies and ended up using the integrated technologies), to the costs of implementing the participatory research approaches. On the other hand, effectiveness was defined as an ability of participatory research approach to meet its key objectives in this case was reaching large number of farmers and making farmers to adopt the technology in question. Data on the PRA activities was collected from the organizations implementing agricultural integrated innovations. Six approaches were evaluated: farmer research groups (FRGs), farmer field schools (FFS), mother-baby trials (MBTs), on-farm demonstrations (OFDs), mobile demonstration plots (MDPs) and coupon agro-inputs (CAIs) approaches. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was employed in which each participatory research approach was treated as a decision making unit (DMU).Two DEA models were estimated using the variable returns to scale (VRS) assumption. The first model considered the number of farmers trained per participatory approach as an output while the second model considered the proportion of adopters as the output. The results revealed that in the first scenario, farmer research groups approach had the highest efficiency (72 percent), followed by mother-baby trials whose efficiency was 71 percent. In addition, on-farm demonstration plots had an efficiency of 67 percent, mobile demonstration plots 63 percent while the efficiency of farmer field schools and coupon agro-inputs was 57 percent and 58 percent, respectively. In the second scenario, the farmer research groups approach led with an efficiency score of 68 percent, followed by on-farm demonstration plots with the efficiency of 60 percent. Coupon agro-inputs and mother-baby trials had the efficiency of 52 percent while the efficiency of farmer field schools mobile demonstration plots was 45 percent and 39 percent, respectively. The results suggest that resources devoted in implementation of the PRAs under the study were underutilized. This implies that there is still room to improve and optimize participatory approaches and enhance their efficient in use for reaching t target farmers and making them adopters of Integrated Agricultural Innovations.

This article addresses the fabrication of the eco-certified citizen, an ideal – rather than real – citizen constructed through requirements of both needed knowledge and a kind of personhood, with specific qualities. The societal demands of knowledge-response to environmental problems are studied, as well as the student’s (future citizen’s) responsibility in relation to these problems, in five subsequent national curricula for the Swedish compulsory school between 1962 and 2011. How does environmental education operate as a hub for constructing desirable citizens? From a theoretical framework of governmentality, the article explores how political rationalities for society and citizenship emerge. Our findings show how recent curricula, by using space and time metaphors, fabricate the eco-certified citizen as an individualistic, globalized person who is able and willing to use scientific knowledge to make decisions and develop opinions about the world. Citizenship has evolved as a competence rather than an ongoing practice, meaning that one has to prove oneself as a legitimate citizen. This emerging, post-political, citizenship differs from citizenship posited in 1960s’ curricula – a combination of traditional family values and democratic involvement in the local society.

Projektet Det KRAV-märkta barnet syftar till att normkritiskt problematisera lärande för hållbar utveckling. Hur bidrar denna praktik till att skapa normer för vem som är ”den goda” respektive ”den icke-önskvärda” människan? Studien, som analyserat läromedel och policydokument, visar hur skillnader mellan Vi och De Andra (re)produceras. Utifrån en idé om svensk exceptionalism konstrueras Vi som förnuftiga, altruistiska och utvecklade medan De Andra som okunniga och i behov av Vår hjälp. Det KRAV-märkta barnet är också handlingskraftigt och optimistiskt, medan uppgivenhet och ilska inte passar in i diskursen. Skyddet mot ”improduktiva” känslor blir att “göra saker” i termer av symbolhandlingar. Idén om “nödvändiga kunskaper” gör det KRAV-märkta barnet objektivt, teknologiskt lösningsinriktat och till en medveten konsument. Detta post-politiska förhållningssätt döljer strukturella orättvisor bakom individuella handlingsmöjligheter och det enskilda ”barnet” blir ansvarigt för hållbarhetsfrågorna.

The aim of this paper was to bridge the socio-technical divide in agricultural systems research by providing an approach that addresses marginalized groups, particularly rural women, and their access to and ownership of agricultural intensification processes. By revisiting social systems theory and the evolution of gender approaches in the CGIAR, the paper provides socio-spatial perspectives on gender supported by a landscape approach to innovation, agency and empowerment. A systems approach to empowerment is critical to make agricultural research-for-development gender transformative. The paper explores a more inclusive CGIAR systems research in the light of the ambitions to alleviate poverty, improve nutrition and income without compromising the long-term productivity of the natural environment. The empowering dimension of systems research is distinct from that of commodity focused value chain approaches and other traditional gender approaches within agriculture which have separated gender and development from systems thinking.

Being a part of a larger project on subject positions of the child in policy documents and teaching materials, this article focuses on the role of undecidables in the fabrication of the so-called good child in the Swedish curriculum for the compulsory school. Within a framework of governmentality, the curriculum represents technologies of government, providing an undecidable terrain open for interpretation and decisions by subjects. Through the lens of education for sustainable development, I have selected five school subjects of particular interest for analysis: biology, civics, geography, home and consumer studies, and physical education and health. By focusing on the undecidable olika, meaning ‘different’, in the five syllabi, a pattern of features designating the good child emerges: (1) science-based categorization, (2) the lifelong learner, (3) the informed consumer, and (4) celebration of diversity. These four features represent a political rationale characterised by a contradictory amalgamation of cosmopolitanism and value pluralism. In combination with an increased emphasis on measurement and assessment in Swedish education, this reinforces abjection processes in school, separating ‘the good child’ and ’the child left behind’.

Vi presenterar här ett planerat projekt som drivs av frågan vem och vad som inkluderas respektive exkluderas i den svenska skolans projekt ”Lärande för hållbar utveckling”. Vi vill undersöka hur diskursen om ”lärande för hållbar utveckling” konstruerar vissa subjekt som önskvärda och andra som icke-önskvärda och vilka konsekvenser detta får för vem som kan tänkas befinna sig inom – eller utanför – diskursens ordning. I en förlängning ska detta leda till problematisering av en institutionaliserad och tillsynes oproblematisk praktik och vilka föreställningar om ”de viktiga problemen”, ”det goda barnet”, ”de goda handlingarna” och ”de goda intentionerna” som reproduceras genom denna. Dessa konstruktioner vill vi problematisera i termer av social klass och nationell identitet (”svenskhet”) eftersom vi har hypotesen att diskursen representerar ett vardagsliv som en begränsad andel av svenska skolbarn lever i. Vi har också en hypotes om att denna skolpraktik speglar idéer om ”svenskheten” i form av diskurser om t.ex. renlighet, natursyn och rättvisa. Eftersom projektet ”lärande för hållbar utveckling” ofta operationaliseras genom utomhuspedagogik kan ovan nämnda kategorier och föreställningar i viss utsträckning anses omfatta även utomhuspedagogik.