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• Receiving food aid influences the adoption of climate-adaptive agricultural practices. • Food aid reduces adoption barriers through both resource and insurance effects. • Increasing coherence between climate adaptation policies and food aid distribution is critical. This article provides evidence on the relationships between food aid and the adoption of climate adaptive agricultural practices (CAPs) in the context of smallholder households in Ethiopia and Malawi. Using bivariate and mixed recursive models, and drawing on three waves of nationally representative panel survey data, we find that receiving food aid significantly increases the probability of adopting soil and water conservation structures in both countries and increasing livestock holdings in Ethiopia. We argue that food aid influences the adoption of these resource-intensive practices directly by easing households' constraints to capital and labour, and indirectly by enabling greater risk-taking. For less risky and less resource-intensive practices, namely organic fertilizer use and legume intercropping, the impacts of food aid on adoption are negative, suggesting a substitution effect triggered by food aid. We further examine the heterogeneous impacts of food aid in terms of variations in transfer values and the levels of low rainfall risk exposure experienced by households in order to better understand how targeting and food aid implementation features influence CAP adoption choices. Our analysis makes two important contributions: (1) it provides cross-country evidence on the productive impacts of food aid in smallholder contexts, and; (2) it demonstrates the value of leveraging existing social assistance interventions in order to achieve climate adaptation objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]