International Journal of Environment and Climate Change

Climate-smart agriculture has become an influential framework for aligning agricultural productivity, adaptation and greenhouse-gas mitigation, yet its practical meaning remains contested because no technology is intrinsically climate-smart across all places, scales and social groups. This critical narrative review examines how agroecological design, renewable-energy deployment and institutional arrangements can be integrated into coherent farming-system transitions rather than promoted as disconnected interventions. Literature published mainly from 2010 to 30 May 2026 was identified through accessible scholarly indexes, institutional repositories, official scientific assessments and citation chaining, and was appraised for methodological quality, contextual relevance, treatment of trade-offs and evidence of durable outcomes. The synthesis indicates that agroecological diversification can strengthen soil functions, water regulation, biodiversity and livelihood buffering, although benefits are strongly conditioned by system design, transition duration, labour and knowledge demands, and access to biomass and land. Renewable energy can lower fossil-energy dependence and expand irrigation, processing and cold-chain services, but solar irrigation may accelerate groundwater depletion and agrivoltaics may reproduce land and tenure conflicts unless deployment is governed through water accounting, crop-sensitive design and benefit-sharing. Institutional capacity is therefore constitutive of climate-smartness: secure resource rights, trusted advisory systems, climate information, farmer organisations, coordinated finance, accountable markets and cross-sector policy determine who can adopt, sustain and benefit from technical change. The strongest pathway is not a universal package but a context-specific portfolio in which ecological redesign reduces exposure and input dependence, energy infrastructure removes productive bottlenecks, and institutions manage externalities, distribution and learning. Evidence remains weakened by short trials, inconsistent indicators, adoption-selection bias and sparse long-term distributional assessment. Future work should prioritise multi-site longitudinal experiments, causal institutional evaluations, whole-system water and carbon accounting, and governance designs that explicitly test equity and rebound risks.