From Climate-Smart Agriculture to Digital Climate-Smart Agriculture: A Bibliometric Review and Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) research is rapidly developing across various disciplines. Yet, this research has yielded a fragmented knowledge structure that has not provided a comprehensive understanding of its evolution towards Digital Climate-Smart Agriculture (Digital CSA). This study aims to map the intellectual structure, predict future research directions, synthesize conceptual evolution, and propose a conceptual framework for Digital CSA from an Information Systems perspective. The study uses a bibliometric review on Scopus-indexed publications, employing bibliographic coupling (BC) and co-word analysis (CoW) in VOSviewer. The BC results identify four main themes: institutional support and expansion of CSA; benefits, challenges, and impacts of CSA adoption on sustainable development; and the decision-making architecture in CSA implementation. The CoW results suggest three future research directions: smallholder farmers' adaptation and resilience to climate change; the integration of digital technology into CSA practices; and the role of agricultural actors in sustainable land management. The synthesis of both analyses shows that CSA is evolving from a practice-based approach to an integrated digital agricultural ecosystem. Based on these findings, this study proposes two conceptual artifacts, namely Conceptual Evolution Towards Digital Climate-Smart Agriculture and Layered Conceptual Architecture of Digital Climate-Smart Agriculture, which position Digital CSA as a socio-technical information system that integrates Governance, Intelligence, Technology, and Stakeholders. This study expands the bibliometric study from merely mapping themes to a conceptual synthesis that strengthens the theoretical foundation of Digital CSA while contributing to the field of Information Systems.