Between the 1960s and 1980s, a series of abrupt, 'unprecedented' droughts occurred in the Sahel region of Sub Saharan Africa which created a regime shift in the Sahel where the socio-ecological and livelihood systems transitioned from a high resilience/low sensitivity to a low resilience /high sensitivity state. Mali, a landlocked country in sub-Saharan Africa, experienced dramatic impacts on food security and social, environmental, and institutional systems triggered by the droughts. As a result, Malian agriculture underwent significant transformations initiated by the cereal liberalization policies in the 1990s. Cereal production almost doubled in the early 2000s, yet the number of people facing chronic and persistent food insecurity and malnutrition has been steadily increasing in the past decade and may continue to rise in the context of current climate projections for a drier and hotter Sahel. This dissertation undertakes a closer investigation, beyond production, on the structural root causes and socio-ecological processes of food security and climate resilience in Mali using a mixed-method approach of process tracing, participatory game design, causal loop mapping, and system dynamics modeling. Paper 1, titled "The Malian Past: A historical analysis of the adaptive cycles in Malian socio-ecological systems", outlines the main environmental, social and institutional changes in Mali from 1960 to 2017 and situates these changes within the adaptive cycle framework. The paper challenges the existing narrative of Mali as a region that transitioned from a high resilience state to a low resilience state and suggests that Mali exhibited stages of high resilience during the collapse, reorganization and growth stages that followed the drought period in the 1960s and beyond. Paper 2 titled "The Malian Present: A participatory game design approach to examine causal pathways of Barriers and opportunities for food security and climate adaptation in Southern Mali" explores the current barriers of food security and climate adaptation faced by rural farming households in Southern Mali The paper elucidates on the development and implementation of the 'Food and Farm' game that was used as a tool to assess farming decision making under climate uncertainty. Using causal loop diagramming, this paper identifies unavailability of formal credit sources especially for non-cotton and female farmers; inadequate access to crop inputs; inadequate land access and user rights for female farmers; unavailability of adequate water; low soil fertility; climate risks and cost of early maturing varieties as the key barriers in agricultural adaptation. Paper 3 titled "The Malian Future: System Dynamics Modelling of Resilience of Malian Agriculture as a Socioecological System" discusses the results from a system dynamics model that performs a series of future climate and adaptation scenario analyses to assess the scope of future resilience of agricultural systems in Mali. The model suggests that the key drivers influencing food security in Mali are change in temperature during sowing phase which influences crop yields as well as rainfall patterns in growing season. Further increase in global temperatures and interdecadal fluctuations in rainfall patterns in crop growing phase will likely lead Mali to another famine and food insecurity phase by 2030. Adaptation strategies such as enhanced crop management, land-use change, stabilization of internal migration and urbanization rates and cereal land expansion will, at best, help in delaying the effects of declining food security as projected for 2025-2060. This dissertation recommends Malian policy-makers to move beyond incremental adaptation support and enhance preparedness for future food insecurity through systemic transformations in land rights and land use, especially among female farmers in Mali and support the cultivation of climate-resilient crops such as sorghum and millet as opposed to maize and rice.
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