Inclusive and adaptive business models for climate-smart value creation

Published in February 2020 in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustianability, this open access research article considers that climate-smart business models target multiple Sustainable Development Goals by fostering agricultural productivity, supporting farm and farmer livelihood resilience, and encouraging climate mitigation. The authors argue that business models need to be inclusive and adaptive to generate climate-smart value equitably for all stakeholders involved and sustainably over time. Inclusivity involves not only providing the poor at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) with access to resources (e.g. finance, technology, access to markets) in business models but also, according to some scholars, with guaranteeing their representation in decision-making over the use of these resources. Adaptability entails the capacity to smoohtly adjust structures and processes of enterprise-BoP partnerships that underlie business models. The authors suggest that building inclusive and adaptive climate-smart business models is non-trivial work which, in the future, will require rapid cycles of collective experimentation and reflection between decision-makers in climate-smart business models and researchers studying them.

This paper was developed as part of the Organising business models for SMAllholder REsilience (OSMARE) project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Partnerships for Scaling Climate-Smart Agriculture (P4S) Project. This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which is carried out with support from the CGIAR Trust Fund.