Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

debates and to the more systematic synthesis of all relevant and available evidence ina given field. The approaches developed by the Cochrane Collaboration (in the field ofhealth care) and its sibling, the Campbell Collaboration (in the broad field of socialpolicy) provide a robust framework for identifying the best available research on a giventopic, and synthesising the results into a format most useful to policy development andevaluation. The rigorous criteria applied to the conduct of Campbell Reviews of socialpolicy issues and interventions provide a benchmark for this review, but given anumber of limitations on the time and resources available to us we were not able tomeet all of the Campbell review criteria. Nevertheless, we have incorporated as manyof their principles as possible in this review.The focus of our review was on the nature (and definitions) of urban food security andurban agriculture, historical patterns of urban agriculture in Australian cities andelsewhere, the anticipated and actual impacts of climate change on urban agriculturalpractices and factors that might inhibit or promote more extensive urban agriculturalpractices in the future.We limited our review to academic and policy, or practitioner journals – published inEnglish, after 1990, and excluded material published in the popular media. We alsofocussed on research about cities within Australia and other developed countries.Some definitional material based on countries of the global south was also included.While studies were not screened for research design or methodology, the majoritycould be described as narrative or conceptual rather than empirical studies based onany form of experimental design. Nevertheless, a small but significant number ofempirical case studies now exist, and have been included, and these appear to begrowing in the totality of studies of urban food security. Given the paucity of empiricalstudies, no attempt was made to combine data sets and carry out any form of metaanalysisof larger data sets. Apart from the case study research described below, wewere not able to carry out any analysis of primary data on agriculture in Australia orelsewhere.A long list of material conforming to these broad criteria on the basis of their title andabstract was reviewed for relevance and a shorter list constructed, which also identifieda number of analytical themes. This material was then allocated (non-exclusively) toseven thematic groups for more detailed analysis. The approach, findings andconclusions were then summarised and finally incorporated into this review. Not all ofthe material listed in the consolidated bibliography is referred to directly in the reviewbut the bibliography is presented in its entirety for the sake of completeness and forreference.3.1.2 Case study researchCase study research is commonly used to explore in detail aspects of a particular casethat are not amenable to large scale, extensive research methods such as surveys.While not tied to any particular method of data collection and analysis, case studiesoften combine quantitative and qualitative or extensive and intensive techniques toexplore cases in great detail, providing what is often referred to as rich-thickdescriptions (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 8