Replication Data for: Sustainable Scaling Models for Regreening Africa: Focusing on Smallholders' Assets and Agency to Increase Agroecological Integration in Kenya

Urgent action is needed to combat the multiple crises of our times, including climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss. Regreening Africa, implemented from 2017 to 2023 and recently recognised as UN World Restoration Flagship, pursued such urgent action. Regreening Africa aimed to reverse large areas of land for the triple benefit of people, biodiversity, and climate across eight African countries. In view of projections and early experiences, the project sought to identify sustainable scaling models to achieve its ambitious targets. Focused on supporting the adoption of Regreening practices and sustainable behaviour change, the so-called ‘ABCD in Regreening’ project sought to evidence the positive contribution of deliberate engagement and co-design approaches. The project’s implementation and research-in-development approach was built on Regreening Africa’s territorial intervention logic. Specifically, the project rolled out participatory asset-based community-driven development (ABCD) sessions to thirty community groups that were identified through a structured and purposive selection process in the Regreening intensification sites in western Kenya. Drawing on a vast global community of practice, ABCD combines a particular set of framings, methods, and processes that highlight the importance of focusing on participants’ assets and agency, and emphasises the importance of their attitudes towards self and others. ABCD positions attitude changes as pre-condition for behaviour changes, including individual and collective action, as well as strategic external collaboration. To evidence that engagement processes contribute to adoption and scaling, the project also followed a methodical process aimed at defining, measuring, and providing evidence on what matters. After ascertaining the conceptual congruence between the promoted Regreening practices and agroecology, the farm-level agroecology criteria tool (F-ACT) was enriched with ABCD-related indicators (F-ACT+). Following a stratified randomised selection approach, the project collected baseline and endline data from 300 project and 300 non-project participants in March 2021 and September 2023, respectively. Both the descriptive statistical analyses and the more complex doubly-robust difference-in-differences (DRDID) estimator used to derive the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) clearly demonstrated accelerated agroecological integration among ABCD project participants. The ABCD sample improved significantly in eight of the 13 agroecological principles, and eight of the 13 system components. In line with our expectations, the summary ATT was significantly higher among ABCD than among non-ABCD respondents. Regreening Africa also celebrated ABCD as one of its success stories. Both allow making a case for ABCD’s intrinsic positive effect overall, and its promise as synergistic approach to support projects that target sustainable behaviour changes at individual and collective levels. Due to its outcome focus, this study allowed only limited insights into ABCD’s specific mechanisms. ABCD’s context-mechanism-outcome constellations are the subject of a separate publication about parallel theory-based contribution analysis work.