PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Climate-Smart Food Systems
From Project Portfolios to Institutional Strategy: Mainstreaming Climate Resilience in Agricultural Research at CGIAR
Provisionally accepted
- 1International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Nairobi, Kenya
- 2The George Washington University, Washington, United States
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Agricultural research institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate climate impact, yet lack systematic approaches to assess and strategically reorient their portfolios. This perspective presents a four-method portfolio analysis framework—combining discourse analysis, publication review, key informant interviews, and stakeholder mapping. The framework was used to assess the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture's (IITA) 2013-2025 climate portfolio considering new strategic planning. The results of the review revealed five transferable lessons for research organisations: first, reduce the focus on adaptation alone to also include mitigation; second, close gaps between what is documented versus what is undertaken in practice to strengthen policy relevance; third, address the lack of deeper integration of gender and youth; fourth, strengthen institutional capacities to affect policy change; and fifth, advance collaborations across institutes to better address the multidimensionality of climate change impacts and opportunities. Beyond IITA, applying such a portfolio analysis framework is expected to significantly strengthen the ability of institutions to navigate the evolving climate finance landscape and support strategic reorientations in a coherent and impactful way. The approach offers other research institutions a replicable method to move from climate-relevant projects towards comprehensive institutional climate strategies.
Keywords: Climate resilience, Agricultural research, portfolio analysis, strategic planning, CGIAR, Institutional transformation, climate adaptation, Africa
Received: 20 Oct 2025; Accepted: 02 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Choptiany PhD, Tremper, Jafflin, Myers, Hernandez and Ledermann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: John Choptiany PhD
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