Short Abstract

This panel explores how smallholder farmers navigate climate uncertainty through emerging digital tools, networks and new forms of knowledge. It examines how digital innovation reshapes power, agency, knowledge, and climate adaptation among smallholder agriculture

Description

Smallholder farmers form the backbone of global food systems and stand on the frontline of the climate crisis, confronting intensifying droughts, floods, and ecosystem disruptions that threaten food security and rural livelihoods. As the pressure to adapt grows, digital technologies are increasingly promoted as solutions for enhancing resilience and adaptation: from mobile-based weather forecasts apps and digital finance to precision agriculture and data-driven decision platforms. This panel examines how digitalization is transforming the landscape of how smallholder adapt, organise, and imagine their futures amid global uncertainty. The panel situates digital resilience not merely as the capacity to use technology but as a relational process, one shaped by inequalities in data-ownership, connectivity, and decision-making power. It also explores how digital technologies intersect with longstanding structural challenges in rural economies, such as land tenure security, gendered labour divisions, and unequal access to information. It asks whether digital innovations genuinely expand adaptive capacities or offers opportunities for locally grounded-innovation and empowerment. This panel asks: how are digital infrastructures reshaping farmers’ practices of climate adaptation? Do digital interventions enable equitable resilience, or reproduce existing inequalities and dependencies? What new forms of agency and knowledge are emerging as smallholders engage with digital tools? Who controls agricultural data, and how does this affect equity in adaptation planning? Can digital resilience enable more democratic and sustainable models of rural development? Bringing together diverse case studies and critical perspectives, the panel will advance debates on what a just and inclusive digital future for rural communities might look like.

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