The adoption of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) remains low in sub-Saharan Africa, despite its promotion as a sustainable production system for mitigating agriculture’s contribution to climate change, as well as for helping farmers adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. This necessitates continuing research on its determinants, in order to identify appropriate mechanisms to encourage adoption. This paper investigates the factors that drive CSA practices’ adoption using recent plot-level survey data from Northern Nigeria. A Multivariate Probit Model was used to analyse the adoption of six CSA practices and control for the influence of socioeconomic, plot and institutional factors. Our study finds that the likelihood of CSA practices’ adoption is influenced by land ownership, social capital, gender, off-farm work participation and plot distance from homestead. However, these factors do not unanimously influence the six CSA practices considered and vary significantly among them. It was concluded that these factors have to be considered when designing policies to promote CSA towards the achievement of sustainable livelihoods among farm households in Nigeria. We recommend that farmers be encouraged to join groups (farmer groups, cooperatives), in order to build their social capital, which could expose them to better practices, obtain informal training from those who have adopted them, and obtain help for implementation.