Micropolitics in collective learning spaces for adaptive decision making (original) (raw)
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A B S T R A C T Throughout the world, climate change adaptation policies supported by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have provided significant sources of funding and technical support to developing countries. Yet often the adaptation responses proposed belie complex political realities, particularly in politically unstable contexts, where power and politics shape adaptation outcomes. In this paper, the concepts of authority and recognition are used to capture power and politics as they play out in struggles over governing changing resources. The case study in Nepal shows how adaptation policy formation and implementation becomes a platform in which actors seek to claim authority and assert more generic rights as political and cultural citizens. Focusing on authority and recognition helps illuminate how resource governance struggles often have very little to do with the resources themselves. Foundational to the argument is how projects which seek to empower actors to manage their resources, produce realignments of power and knowledge that then shape who is invested in what manner in adaptation. The analysis adds to calls for reframing 'adaptation' to encompass the socionatural processes that shape vulnerability by contributing theoretical depth to questions of power and politics.
Powering and puzzling: climate change adaptation policies in Bangladesh and India
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South Asia is a region uniquely vulnerable to climate-related impacts. Climate change adaptation in India and Bangladesh evolves using powering and puzzling approaches by policy actors. We seek to answer the question: how do powering and puzzling approaches influence the climate change adaptation policy design and implementation processes in Bangladesh and India? We adopted two strategies to collect and analyze data: semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis. We found that adaptation policymaking is largely top-down, amenable to techno-managerial solutions, and not inclusive of marginalized actors. In Bangladesh, power interplays among ministerial agencies impair the policy implementation process and undermine the success of puzzling. Local-scale agencies do not have enough authority or power to influence the overall implementation processes occurring at higher scales of governance. The powering of different actors in Bangladesh is visible through a duality of mandates and a...
In people’s minds and on the ground: Values and power in climate change adaptation
Environmental Science & Policy
As decisions on climate change adaptation involve stakeholders with different values, beliefs and attitudes (VBA), decision outcomes depend on how stakeholders interact and how power is distributed. In this paper, we explore the VBA of stakeholders involved in three water management projects focusing on dams, microreservoirs, or wetlands in a Peruvian watershed facing droughts. We apply a framework with the core ideas of the hydrosocial cycle, the decision context perspective, and the VBA hierarchy to show how stakeholders' perspectives and power influence practices on the ground. The analysis of VBA reveals three different perspectives on water management held by different stakeholder groups. First, a community-based perspective, frequent among local communities, favors micro-reservoirs managed by communities. Second, an infrastructure-based perspective, frequent among public sector stakeholders, shows a preference for dams managed by the private sector. Third, a nature-based perspective, with a preference for wetlands managed by the public sector, is found across stakeholder groups. In the three water management projects, different power distributions determine which VBA dominate and influence practices on the ground. Dams on the ground represent power from the public and private sectors, while micro-reservoirs represent local grassroot control. In the wetland project, the outcomes of the evolving hydrosocial cycle are still unclear and will depend on how multiple perspectives are considered. Examining and questioning the decision context in which adaptation occurs can help excluded stakeholders achieve more power and agency and tackle the fundamental question of 'adaptation of what and for whom'.
2013
Studies and practices on commons have demonstrated that local institutions can develop institutional arrangements to manage resources such as forests and water and can ensure benefit sharing mechanisms in a sustainable and equitable way. The characters, functions and roles of local institutions required to manage commons are well studied and translated in practice. Few researchers have reported on the role of local institutions in adaptation to climate change and variability with little known about key characters and functions reqUired. This article is based on a case study research in the mountains of Nepal following a mixed method approach including in-depth interviews of various stakeholders, focus group discussions and household survey with rural community members of different well-being groups affiliated with Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs). The research examines the impacts of climate change on livelihoods of poor and potential of local institutions to enable local communities in individual and collective actions for climate change adaptation in the mountains of Nepal. The research further explores the mandate, role, functions and capacity of the CFUG, as one of the major local institutions in Nepal, and presents key characters and functions required to facilitate climate change adaptation. The research reveals that secure rights over resources, enhanced capacity, improved governance and support mechanisms, and a critical mass of poor as key factors to optimize the role of CFUG in pro-poor adaptation in the context of climate change and variability. The article stimulates a discussion around changing role of local institutions for pro-poor adaptation in the context of ongoing power relations and social hierarchy in Nepal.
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Deliberation over how to adapt to short or long-term impacts of climate change takes place in a complex political setting, where actors' interests and priorities shape the temporal dimension of adaptation plans, policies and actions. As actors interact to pursue their individual or collective interests, these struggles turn into dynamic power interplay. In this article, we aim to show how power interplay shapes local adaptation plans of action (LAPAs) in Nepal to be short-term and reactive. We use an interactional framing approach through interaction analyses and observations to analyse how actors use material and ideational resources to pursue their interests. Material and ideational resources that an actor deploys include political authority, knowledge of adaptation science and national/local policy-making processes, financial resources and strong relations with international non-governmental organizations and donor agencies. We find that facilitators and local politicians have a very prominent role in meetings relating to LAPAs, resulting in shorttermism of LAPAs. Findings suggest that there is also a lack of female participation contributing to short-term orientated plans. We conclude that such power interplay analysis can help to investigate how decision making on the temporal aspects of climate adaptation policy takes place at the local level. Key policy insights. Short-termism of LAPAs is attributed to the power interplay between actors during the policy design process.. Improved participation of the most vulnerable, especially women, can lead to the preparation of adaptation plans and strategies focusing on both the short and long-term.. It is pertinent to consider power interplay in the design and planning of adaptation policy in order to create a level-playing field between actors for inclusive decisionmaking.. Analysis of dynamic power interplay can help in investigating climate change adaptation controversies that are marked by uncertainties and ambiguities.
After cyclone Aila: politics of climate change in Sundarbans
Contemporary South Asia, 2023
This article compares the politics of climate change in the Sundarbans region in Bangladesh and India based on ethnographic fieldwork in four villages and among migrants from these villages in Kolkata and Khulna city by focusing on the long aftermath of cyclone Aila. The comparison highlights different policy options and framings of extreme weather events . Ten years after the cyclone, the aftermath of Aila continues in both regions we studied in Bangladesh and India, but partly for different reasons. In our study areas in Bangladesh, the aftermath of Aila reinforced the neglect of coastal livelihoods, whereas, in the communities we studied in India, Aila spurred new investments in the affected areas. By comparing how the political is interwoven with the natural, we demonstrate how Aila's lingering impacts have emerged as part of local power relationships and diverse forms of agency. We highlight the multiplicity of policy responses and people's practices not only between communities and countries facing a similar predicament but also within the communities themselves. We argue that the politics of climate change is not only about climate change policy to mitigate the impact of ecological disasters but also about the reconstruction of political agents and practices.
Key words: political economy disempowerment dispossession displacement resilience elite capture s u m m a r y Bangladesh contributes little to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Based on semi-structured research interviews as a conduit to a literature review, this paper shows how the processes of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment impede the vitality of its climate change adaptation efforts. Enclosure refers to when adaptation projects transfer public assets into private hands or expand the roles of private actors into the public sphere. Exclusion refers to when adaptation projects limit access to resources or marginalize particular stake-holders in decision-making activities. Encroachment refers to when adaptation projects intrude on biodiversity areas or contribute to other forms of environmental degradation. Entrenchment refers to when adaptation projects aggravate the disempowerment of women and minorities, or worsen concentrations of wealth and income inequality within a community. In the case of Bangladesh, climate change policies implemented under the country's National Adaptation Program of Action have enabled elites to capture land through public servants, the military, and even gangs carrying bamboo sticks. Exclusionary forms of adaptation planning exist at both the national and local scales. Climate protection measures have encroached upon village property, char (public) land, forests, farms, and other public commons. Most egregiously, community coping strategies for climate change have entrenched class and ethnic hierarchies ultimately trapping the poor, powerless, and displaced into a predatory patronage system that can aggravate human insecurity and intensify violent conflict. Planners and practitioners of adaptation need to become more cognizant of the potential for projects to harm others, or admit complicity in the processes of enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, and entrenchment, if they are ever to be eliminated.
The Hazards of Mainstreaming: Climate change adaptation politics in three dimensions
World Development, 2020
Under the threat of climate change and with disproportional impacts expected for the world's poorest, the adaptation imperative confers renewed justification to development aid transfers, while the urgency of the problem lends itself to the uncritical application of existing solutions. Yet, an emerging body of work has raised critical questions about how adaptation is being conceived and implemented in the global South. We systematize and contribute to this critical scholarship by distinguishing three fundamental political dimensions of the adaptation problem, related to differential responsibility, the global uneven production of vulnerability, and unequal relations of power in adaptation decision-making itself. Further, based on research from across the global South, the paper suggests that the current program of 'mainstreaming' adaptation into existing development logics and structures perpetuates an anti-politics machine, obscuring and depoliticizing rather than addressing the political dimensions of the adaptation problem. Mainstreaming risks not only reproduceing development-as-usual, but in fact reinforcing technocratic patterns of control. The three-dimensional view of the politics of climate change adaptation is offered as an analytical perspective to sharpen and systematize future critical adaptation scholarship. In the conclusion, we highlight avenues toward enhanced attention to power and justice in climate change research and practice.
Regional Environmental Change, 2021
Climate change adaptation requires the engagement of multiple actors in different sectors and at various levels of governance. The different roles played by policy actors and their interactions shape the process of adaptation governance. Nevertheless, to date, there has been limited attention paid to how the structure of relations and their associated power dynamics between these actors affect adaptation governance process at different levels. In this study, we analyzed the structure, processes, and power dynamics entailed in the multilevel governance of adaptation to floods in coastal areas of Bangladesh. We used social network analysis approach to map and unpack the interactions between actors that influence the adaptation governance. We categorized five types of organizations based on the structural attributes of the governance network and their functions. Our analysis shows that the organizations with high influence over the governance process reside at the national level and the adaptation governance process is influenced by elite-pluralism. We found that both top-down and bottom-up processes co-exist in different phases of adaptation governance (planning, implementation, and monitoring). Lastly, we conclude that a more equitable redistribution of power (roles and responsibilities) may diminish the negative implications of federal centralization in adaptation governance.
Inequalities and environmental changes in the Mekong River Basin , 2022
In response to the urgency of sustainability and climate change, the Lower Yom watershed in Thailand is the site of a pilot project in floodwater detention. This has been claimed as a “participatory management” approach that develops drainage systems, micro-scale structural mitigation, and livelihood changes under community-based adaptation to flooding. This study adopted a participatory research approach to explore how different social groups experience vulnerability, as well as the changes brought about by the pilot project. This research develops a micro-level, social identity-based analysis of experiences in the pilot model. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews with 38 organizational representatives and 44 individuals from urban and rural communities to capture the strengths of, and barriers to, adaptation to flooding. Participatory action research workshops at the local level, focusing on interpersonal learning, were also employed to motivate subgroups to discuss their vulnerabilities in the context of flooding and how to stabilize adaptation measures. The results show that community policy drafts were able to articulate approaches to help vulnerable groups by improving flood protection, drainage capacity for water security, flood retention conditions, and livelihood alternatives. However, a key sentiment that “flooding is acceptable, but no flooding is better”confirmed a reluctance among rural farmers, workers, the elderly, and physically exposed citizens to live with floods. From this analysis, it can be interpreted that genuine participation to support flood risk governance from the local level requires substantial effort. Engaging stakeholders beyond governments to create a more effective power balance may support the revision of existing measures and initiate a means of improving practices for community-based flood adaptation.