A study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems reveals that, although partnerships and institutional collaboration feature prominently in climate-oriented agricultural research, their relationship with the scaling of innovations is rarely explicitly documented. The findings highlight the need to better understand the role of social relationships to strengthen the design, monitoring, and evaluation of scaling processes.
Ensuring that agricultural innovations reach more farmers, influence public policies, and contribute to lasting transformations remains one of the main challenges facing Agricultural Research for Development. However, expanding their reach depends not only on technical solutions but also on relationships of trust, partnerships, and collaboration among the actors involved in these processes.
Against this backdrop, the study Social capital and scaling in climate-oriented Agricultural Research for Development examines how the role of social capital, understood as relationships of trust, closeness, and support among actors, is documented in the scaling of agricultural innovations. The research seeks to understand the extent to which these dimensions are recognized together in reported outcomes and what opportunities exist to better integrate them into scaling strategies.
To this end, Deissy Martínez-Barón, a researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) currently part of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, and the University of Copenhagen; Anne Gravsholt Busck, from the University of Copenhagen; and Steven Dean Prager, from the Gates Foundation, analyzed 273 results reports covering 261 projects across 12 CGIAR research programs, reported between 2018 and 2021 under the former CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).
Beyond outcomes: Understanding how social relationships support scaling
One of the study's main contributions is identifying a gap between reported scaling outcomes and how the social and institutional conditions that may contribute to achieving them are documented.
The study recognizes three complementary scaling pathways: scaling out, when innovations reach more people and places; scaling up, when they influence policies and institutions; and scaling deep, when relationships, practices, and social norms are transformed.
Although the reports provide examples of these pathways, particularly scaling out and scaling up, scaling is generally documented as an achieved outcome, without systematically explaining how partnerships, trust, and institutional collaboration contribute to these processes. The scaling deep dimension is less developed in the documents analyzed.
To identify these patterns, the researchers used a model known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which identified 17 topics grouped into four areas: agricultural systems, climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, and enabling environments. The central finding is that the reports document collaborative relationships and scaling outcomes but rarely make their potential connections explicit. According to the authors, recognizing these connections could strengthen learning across projects and improve scaling strategies.
What does the research reveal?
Scaling has limited visibility as an explicit topic. The topic most directly associated with scaling had a significant presence in only 1.8% of the 273 reports. This does not mean that projects did not undertake scaling activities, but rather that these activities had limited visibility as a process in the documentation analyzed.
Dimensions of social capital feature prominently in enabling environments. Topics associated with these environments, including collaborative research, institutional partnerships, and stakeholder participation, had a significant presence in 45.4% of the reports. These topics reflect dimensions related to social capital, although they do not constitute a direct measurement of trust among actors.
The relationship between social capital and scaling is rarely documented jointly. Only 2 of the 273 reports analyzed (0.7%) showed a significant and simultaneous presence of topics associated with both social capital and scaling. This finding shows that the two dimensions are rarely documented together, even when they feature in research outcomes.
Social dimensions vary across research areas. Topics related to climate change adaptation include capacity strengthening and climate information services, while those associated with mitigation primarily emphasize technical practices and policy instruments.
Taken together, these findings show that social capital is reflected in research experiences, but its relationship with scaling pathways is not systematically documented, making it more difficult to compare experiences and support institutional learning.
What does this mean for farmers and decision-makers?
Although the findings reveal a documentation gap, the study also presents concrete examples illustrating how relationships of trust and collaboration among actors can play a role in different scaling pathways. One example documents the dissemination of drought-tolerant bean varieties to more than 10,000 farmers across three countries through sustained partnerships among national agricultural research organizations, seed companies, and farmer associations.
Another example describes how collaboration between researchers and governments contributed to the inclusion of agroclimatic information in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of several countries under the Paris Agreement. In Colombia, the Local Technical Agroclimatic Committees (Mesas Técnicas Agroclimáticas, MTA in Spanish) illustrate how sustained interaction among farmers, extension agents, and local authorities can strengthen relationships of trust and support the use of climate information. These examples are illustrative and do not constitute evidence of a causal relationship between social capital and scaling outcomes.
For governments, development organizations, and research programs, the authors recommend explicitly integrating social capital into theories of change, planning, and the monitoring of scaling strategies. This includes identifying relevant actors and relationships and incorporating indicators of trust, collaboration, network diversity, and participation. They also caution that networks can generate inequalities or exclude certain actors, making it important to understand these dynamics to promote responsible and inclusive scaling.
The findings highlight the need to explicitly recognize and document the role of social capital in scaling pathways, from project design through to the monitoring of results. According to the authors, integrating these dimensions into theories of change and monitoring systems could improve understanding of the social and institutional conditions associated with the expansion of agricultural innovations, strengthen learning across projects, and guide more inclusive and responsible scaling strategies.
Frontiers
Social capital and scaling in climate-oriented Agricultural Research for Development
23-Sep-2026