The paradoxes of climate-smart coffee (PACSMAC) - new research project at MSC


04/17/2021
Kristjan Jespersen Focused on Ethiopia and Tanzania, The paradoxes of climate-smart coffee (PACSMAC) project will investigate how climate change - and the ways actors across the value chain are trying to adapt to or mitigate it - affect coffee farmers’ livelihoods and land-use decisions. While observers often describe emerging coffee production experiments and the market opportunities they generate as resilient, vibrant and environmentally beneficial, these assessments are preliminary and speculative. In fact, the opportunities and incentives for growers to adopt and benefit from any of these innovations will depend on what downstream firms and even consumers do. Conversely, firm strategies will depend on how producers respond to changes in prices, demand, climate, and support programs.


PACSMAC will illuminate the connection between smallholders’ opportunities to innovate to improve their livelihoods and firms’ and governments’ efforts to build and profit from global value chains. The project will combine in-depth qualitative research using participant observation and expert interviews of downstream coffee firms with focus group, interview, survey and satellite data in selected villages in coffee-growing regions in the two countries. Combining these valuable data sources will allow us to develop scenarios of future coffee value chain development in the two countries that connect farmers’, states’ and firms’ actions with livelihood and land-cover impacts.

 

The project is led by MSC Associate Professor Dr. Kristjan Jespersen who supports a leading international team of academics from Copenhagen Business School, Jimma University, University of Dar es Salaam, ETH Zurich, and Lafayette College. The project is funded by the Danida Fellowship Centre and will run for five years. It will support the development of four PhD students.

 

Read more about the project in this CBS news item. For further information about the project, please contact Kristjan Jespersen, kj.msc@cbs.dk.

 

The page was last edited by: Department of Management, Society and Communication // 06/17/2021