Integrated landscapes, systemic change: An agroecological framework for sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa’s persistent low-productivity trap reflects not only low input use but also the limited effectiveness of intensification strategies that expand fertilizer application without restoring the ecological, institutional, and market conditions required for sustained response. Increasing fertilizer use remains essential for closing nutrient deficits, but where soil organic carbon (SOC) is depleted, landscape functions are fragmented, and value chains fail to reward ecological investment, fertilizer alone cannot deliver durable productivity gains. The challenge is therefore not fertilizer versus agroecology, but how to combine mineral fertilizer with organic resource recapitalization, governed by conditional complementarity, and institutional conditions that make fertilizer responsive, efficient, and economically viable. This paper advances a causally explicit agroecological framework structured around four interacting pathways: nutrient-use efficiency, SOC recapitalization, multifunctional landscape governance, and producer–consumer reconnection, through which productivity, ecological function, and economic viability are jointly produced. These pathways operate simultaneously across scales, linking soil processes and ecosystem services to institutions and markets, with outcomes contingent on biomass availability, soil responsiveness, governance capacity, tenure security, and value-chain maturity. The framework is explicitly conditional. As with fertilizer intensification, SOC recapitalization is essential but not universally scalable; its effectiveness depends on directing high-quality biomass to farms where restoration needs, soil responsiveness, and fertilizer-use efficiency are greatest. Agroecological transition is thus understood not as the sequential adoption of practices, but as the coordinated activation of reinforcing ecological and institutional processes in which the judicious and complementary use of organic and inorganic inputs is central to system performance. The imperative, therefore shifts from scaling technologies to diagnosing the biophysical, institutional, and market conditions that determine where such coordinated processes are feasible, how localized gains can be consolidated, and under what conditions they can extend beyond their initial boundaries.

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