Climate Change and Sustainable Agriculture: Water, Soil, Carbon, Crops and Livelihoods in Transition

Agricultural advisory provision in low- and middle-income countries is being reorganised by two simultaneous agendas: the digitalisation of extension delivery and the promotion of climate-smart agriculture. Both are routinely presented as opportunities to correct the long-documented exclusion of women from advisory systems, and both are increasingly framed in the vocabulary of gender-transformative change. Whether either agenda alters the structural relations that generate exclusion, rather than redistributing services within unchanged relations, remains unsettled. This critical narrative review examines the conceptual foundations, empirical evidence and institutional conditions of gender-transformative extension at the point where digital delivery and climate-smart programming intersect. Literature was identified through structured searching of open bibliographic and scholarly indexes, supplemented by citation tracking and searches of authoritative institutional repositories, and appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity, contextual specificity and the alignment between claims and evidence. Four findings emerge. Digital advisory services produce modest average effects on knowledge and adoption that are conditional on complementary interpersonal contact, and the access cascade from device ownership through connectivity, literacy, time and intrahousehold control means that mean effects conceal systematic exclusion. Climate-smart agriculture evidence is dominated by cross-sectional adoption studies in which the gender variable is usually household headship, a proxy that confounds marital status, resource endowment and decision-making authority, and that supports weaker inferences than is commonly claimed. Interventions that explicitly address norms, including household dialogue methods and role-model messaging, show promising effects on decision-making and autonomy, but the evidence base is small, geographically concentrated and rarely followed beyond project timelines. Institutional absorption remains the binding constraint, since transformative components are typically financed as project add-ons rather than embedded in public advisory mandates, budgets and staffing. Priority research needs include longitudinal designs capable of detecting norm change and backlash, gender-disaggregated evaluation of digital platforms as reachable populations rather than as messages, and analysis of data governance in advisory platforms. Confidence in current conclusions is limited by heterogeneous measurement and uneven geographical coverage.