The Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) is an alliance of five development partners: Oxfam GB, the Overseas Development Institute, Save the Children, World Vision International and Care International. It was established in 2009 with the aim of understanding how development interventions can contribute to adaptive capacity at the community and household level, and to inform the design and implementation of development planning by governments and non-governmental development partners to support adaptive capacity for climate change and other development pressures.
This paper is based on an analysis of three country studies conducted by national research teams in eight research sites in Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique for ACCRA. It describes the Local Adaptive Capacity (LAC) framework developed for this project, its application during the research, and the evidence found about the impact of development interventions on the adaptive capacity of people and communities.
Change is a constant in the lives of rural people in Africa. For most developing countries, climate change adds another layer of complexity to existing development challenges, such as high levels of poverty and inequality, rapid population growth, underdeveloped markets, poor infrastructure and service provision, and weak governance systems. Development interventions will need to help people and communities to adapt to the interaction of these new and old pressures. Since change is a constant, sustainable interventions can only be achieved if people can adapt them in the future to a changing context.
Adaptive capacity is understood as the ability of individuals and communities to anticipate, deal with and respond to change – both changing climate and development pressures – while maintaining (or improving) their wellbeing. Adaptive capacity refers to the potential of individuals and societies to respond to change, so it is not currently possible to measure it directly. ACCRA therefore focused on five dimensions that are considered to contribute to adaptive capacity: the asset base (including physical and non-physical assets), institutions and entitlements, knowledge and information, innovation, and flexible forward-looking decision-making and governance.
The rapid rise in warming of the Earth’s surface over the last half-century is well accepted, and there is general scientific acknowledgement that this has been caused largely by human activity. Although there is rapidly increasing understanding of how the climate is likely to change at the global scale under various emissions scenarios, what is less well understood is the exact magnitude of future temperature and rainfall changes at the local level, and how these are influencing bio-physical systems. Global climate models are most commonly used to project broad trends in temperature and rainfall distribution and intensity. However, difficulties in downscaling these models to the spatial and temporal scales relevant to local decision-making persist. For this reason, scenario-based approaches that consider a range of possible climate, agricultural production and water futures are recommended. In the three ACCRA countries, observed and projected trends confi rm that temperatures have risen and will continue to increase sharply. Trends in rainfall are not as well-aligned and are much more uncertain, but models suggest that annual rainfall in Ethiopia and Uganda will increase slightly in this century, with no substantial changes for Mozambique. All models suggest an increase in rainfall intensity over the same period.
In order to understand the impact of climate change at the local level, it is important to recognise the interactions between climate change and wider development pressures. People adapt to the impact of climate change on wider development processes, such as rising food prices, the spread of disease and illness, and competition over natural resources. The impacts of climate change will not be the same for all. Vulnerability to the impacts of climate change often comes from vulnerability in a general sense – from poverty and marginalisation. It makes little practical sense to talk about how people adapt to climate change in isolation, since adaptation is driven by a range of different pressures acting together.
Supporting local adaptive capacity cannot therefore be seen in isolation as ‘climate change programming’. It is an intrinsic part of all development interventions.
Although the range of interventions studied in the ACCRA fieldwork is varied, there are discernible common features. Typically, interventions focused on technology dissemination, often including direct asset provision.
Many respondents reported that interventions, which contributed to their household income, had made them more resilient to future shocks and stresses, but none of the interventions had explicitly set out to support adaptive capacity. Had assets been considered as part of wider adaptive capacity, different project decisions might have been made. Since people’s assets and technologies will need to change with changing circumstances, projects could have helped establish permanent links between people and sources of a range of technologies.
Assets, such as irrigation infrastructure, only deliver benefits to people if there are institutions that ensure this. ACCRA research found that institutions are at the heart of the lack of sustainability of interventions. Some institutions were subject to elite capture and corruption.
In other cases, new institutions were established but they did not survive because they were not socially rooted. Some interventions were introduced as new technical practices without considering the institutional arrangements required (e.g. introducing changes to natural resource management on common property). Few interventions had adequately considered the necessary institutional framework. These are well-rehearsed problems associated with interventions, not just those (mis)conceived as climate change.
People’s innovation was rarely considered; interventions equated ‘innovation’ with the provision of standardised new technology, which recipients were supposed to simply adopt. In some villages, innovation was clearly constrained by a dominant culture which frowned upon doing things differently. This culture was not challenged by the introduction of an ‘approved’ innovation by external authorities or experts. Opportunities were being missed to find out where, how and by whom local innovation is happening, i.e. the forces that constrain people from innovating. These barriers included institutional issues such as culture, the ability to take financial risks, lack of confidence, and limited access to information and new ideas. Adaptive capacity could have been supported by identifying and analysing these factors and identifying measures to address them together with the people concerned.
Governments’ and projects’ treatment of information was largely confined to providing standardised technical packages deemed to be ‘correct’. In fact, it is almost inevitable that information will not be appropriate to many people, and the sources of information will then tend to be considered unreliable. People’s opportunities and constraints are diverse and farmers rarely, if ever, have the objectives deemed obvious by those providing the information packages (e.g. maximising yield per hectare).
Seeing information and knowledge as components of adaptive capacity would encourage actors to put more emphasis on giving people a wider range of information, appropriate to a much wider range of circumstances and future scenarios; giving people the tools to find information for themselves; and turning information into knowledge by supporting people’s ability to use the information for decision-making.
ACCRA research found that, rather than forward-looking decision-making , policies and development interventions were often running risks of maladaptation, i.e. decision making that leads to long-term increases in vulnerability, from two sources. Firstly, climate information was being misinterpreted and uncertainties not adequately communicated, leading to the potential for ill-informed planning; and secondly, interventions and policies were designed without considering available evidence, either from economic analysis or climate information sources, including longer-term climate projections. Interventions were based on a projectised approach, with ‘participation’ consisting mainly of asking ‘communities’ what they wanted. Policies were too often based on top-down planning which did not support local fl exible decision making and agency.
- Summary conclusions
1. All development interventions need an agency lens, i.e. they need to be thought of not simply as delivering a given infrastructure or technology, but as vehicles for expanding people’s range of choices. For any intervention to offer sustainable benefits, consideration is needed at all stages, from preliminary research to final evaluation, to the question of how different people will use the intervention under a range of possible climate futures. This is impossible without due attention to features which are largely neglected in development planning and interventions, namely power and institutions.
2. The five characteristics of adaptive capacity are not stand-alones, from which one or more can be selected for attention, they shape and depend on each other. Taking adaptive capacity on board does not mean adding five sets of each intervention for the five characteristics. It means understanding these dimensions of people’s and communities’ lives, and designing and implementing interventions in ways that enhance the way in which assets, institutions, innovation, knowledge flows and decision-making contribute to increased agency, and more informed decision-making for the long term.
3. Working to support agency requires participatory ways of thinking and acting. However, much of what is called ‘participation’ has failed to deliver the intended transformation in relations between development agents and the people they wish to work with. There are practical reasons for this, relating both to deeply entrenched attitudes and also to resources, including funds, time and skills. Getting participation right will require a major investment by many kinds of actors working together. The alternative, of ‘business as usual’, will ensure that investment in development continues to have the disappointing results that have been seen over the past decades, both for sustainable development in general, and for adaptive capacity for the new and pressing challenges of climate change.
4. Change at system level is required because the necessary changes to the practice of development which ACCRA has identified are not actionable by any single organisation or individual acting alone.
The adaptation required by development actors is transformational, not incremental. Platforms will need to be strengthened and, where necessary, created at local, national and international level for negotiating these fundamental changes and paradigm shifts.
Although the challenge is enormous, the increasing use of the language of ‘impact’ provides an opportunity to place at the centre of debate the necessary conditions for sustainable impact.
Although system-wide change is needed, there are some minimum steps that individual government departments or agencies can take at the level of interventions.
- Recommendations
1. No development without adaptive capacity. Governments and development partners do not need to think of designing separate projects for building adaptive capacity, but should rather incorporate into the design of all development programmes a consideration of how people will be able to adapt in the future. Adaptive capacity should be considered in all assessments, planning processes, feasibility studies, agreements with donors, implementation, monitoring, reporting and evaluations.
2. Flexibility and scenario planning. All interventions should be designed and implemented based on future scenario planning which includes all the important likely changes – and their interactions – but also acknowledges uncertainties. Intervention design and development planning must build flexibility into programme design and management, and build support for adaptive capacity into planning objectives.
3. Using autonomous innovation as an entry point for an adaptive capacity perspective. Planning and intervention design should use people’s own ability and practice of experimentation and innovation as an entry point. This involves understanding how people are currently experimenting and innovating in response to different pressures, and understanding the constraints to innovation and the uptake of new ideas. This inevitably includes having an understanding of institutional factors, power relations, and other socio-cultural factors.
4. Turning information into knowledge. Information provision should not stop with giving people facts. All information providers should redefine their role as one of ‘knowledge providers’, whose objectives are more ‘informed decision-making’. Both they and others should support people to acquire the required skills and tools to analyse and use the information provided and, furthermore, to give them the ability to access independently further information from a variety of sources. Frequently, this will entail working with those generating and holding information to ensure that they are better connected to people.
