Since more than a decade, growing attention is paid to agroforestry systems (AFS) to address climate change, nowadays making AFS a promising option for climate-smart agriculture (CSA). To promote CSA, setting enabling institutions and accurate policy is still an issue. In particular, three dimensions are controversial in policy design: the degree of sectorial integration of climate change policies in agricultural policies, the governance mode (market, State, civil society), and the scaling of institutions. In this communication, we analyze how scholars involved in AFS research deal with policy issues in a perspective of adaptation and mitigation to climate, with an emphasis on the three dimensions above-mentioned. Through a bibliographic study based on Scopus database (Elsevier) inquiries, we selected a dataset of 66 peer reviewed references that specifically and significantly deals with cross cutting theme of AFS, public policies and climate change. We observed that a strong corpus of references (n=40) advocate for more policies promoting agroforestry for solving climate change related issues but are not clear on the policy options to consider. However, most of the authors tend to recommend more integrated policies including climate change within agricultural policies. Regarding governance modes, scholars tend to emphasize markets, State institutions and civil society separately, highlighting the role of the latter. Regarding scale, authors claim for consolidating grassroots experiences, favoring local scales responses to national or international scales responses. Using policy science recent development, we finally discuss the limits of current AFS literature regarding analysis of institutions. For further research we recommend going beyond the exclusive conception of governance modes by considering more complex hybridization processes and paying more attention to participation and legitimacy issues in analyzing existing and new policies for AFS and CSA. (Texte in