Multilevel stakeholder influence mapping in climate change adaptation regimes

The extent to which any policy, planning, or funding frameworks aimed at supporting climate change adaptation contribute to improved adaptive capacity of smallholder farmers is strongly affected by the power/influence dynamics between actors within those regimes. Power and influence studies have renewed relevance due to the current proliferation of adaptation initiatives. As these initiatives evolve, they bring up questions of equity, justice, and fairness surrounding the origins and distribution of adaptation resources. In doing so, they have shed light on persistent inequalities in status quo development regimes and asymmetrical power balances between stakeholders. To avoid exacerbating inequalities that contribute to conflict, perpetuate cycles of poverty, and prevent much needed resources from reaching vulnerable communities, it is essential that practitioners seek to make power/influence relationships transparent within any given adaptation regime. Exposing and characterizing these relationships is complex, sensitive, and involves multiple perspectives. This paper introduces the Multilevel Stakeholder Influence Mapping (MSIM) tool, which aims to assist analysts in the study of power dynamics across levels within climate adaptation regimes. The tool is adapted from the Stakeholder Influence-Mapping tool (2005) of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). MSIM is a simple visual tool to examine and display the relative power/influence that different individuals and groups have over a focal issue—in this case, climate change adaptation of smallholder farmers. The tool can be applied individually or in groups, as often as desired, to capture multiple perspectives and also to act as an intermediary object facilitating expression of sensitive information. The multilevel adapted version of the tool was trialed with a cross-section of actors in Nepal’s agricultural climate change adaptation regime. The results of this pilot, the tool use guidelines, and triangulation with supporting methods, as well as forward-looking applications in climate adaptation are provided herein

Community-based adaptation costing: An integrated framework for the participatory costing of community-based adaptations to climate change in agriculture

Understanding the cost associated with climate change adaptation interventions in agriculture is important for mobilizing institutional support and providing timely resources to improve resilience and adaptive capacities. Top-down national estimates of adaptation costs carry a risk of mismatching the availability of funds with what is actually required on the ground. Consequently, global and national policies require credible evidence from the local level, taking into account microeconomic dynamics and community-appropriate adaptation strategies. These bottom-up studies will improve adaptation planning (the how) and will also serve to inform and validate top-down assessments of the total costs of adaptation (the how much). Participatory Social Return on Investment (PSROI) seeks to provide a pragmatic, local-level planning and costing framework suitable for replication by government and civil society organizations. The ‘PSROI Framework’ is designed around a participatory workshop for prioritizing and planning community-based adaptation (CBA) strategies, followed by an analysis of the economic, social and environmental impacts of the priority measures using a novel cost-benefit analysis framework. The PSROI framework has been applied in three separate pilot initiatives in Kochiel and Othidhe, Kenya, and Dodji, Senegal. This working paper seeks to outline the theoretical and methodological foundations of the PSROI framework, provide case-study results from each pilot study, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the framework according to its robustness, effectiveness and scalabilit

Deconstructing Local Adaptation Plans for Action (LAPAs) - Analysis of Nepal and Pakistan LAPA initiatives

This paper analyses the organizational and implementation design strategies of two ongoing Local Adaptation Plan for Action (LAPA) initiatives in Nepal and Pakistan. LAPA is considered an answer for institutionalized local-level adaptation planning that aims to capture local needs and direct resources to where, when and by whom these are most needed. While both Nepal and Pakistan LAPAs have similar objectives of bottom-up planning, the operational and structural designs of the two LAPAs are very distinct, leading to different outcomes. Different internal and external factors such as age and size of LAPA, technology, local institutional arrangements, core process and environment also exert significant structural tensions on the planned organizational design of LAPAs that may inhibit delivery of their objectives

State of agricultural climate change adaptation policy in Nepal

This report is intended to complement the 2011 CCAFS publication “State of Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Efforts for Agriculture in Nepal” (Wang 2011). It provides relevant updates regarding the policies, projects, or initiatives introduced therein, and an assessment of the quickly evolving political scenario. Specifically, this document presents an objective look at 16 key policy/program/project documents within three principal thematic areas: (1) governance, (2) agriculture, and (3) climate change institutions in Nepal. Objectives and priorities for each of these documents are outlined, together with their evolution over time, intending to identify the temporal shifts in agricultural climate change policy direction in Nepal. Later sections address policy interplay between and within these thematic areas. The document aims to provide sufficient background to inform future CCAFS research in Nepal, particularly in the policy arena. The document is primarily addressed through an adaptation lens, as this research results from the Systemic Integrated Adaptation project, a CCAFS Theme 1 Adaptation to Progressive Climate Change initiative in collaboration with Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI)

Participatory adaptation planning and costing. Applications in agricultural adaptation in western Kenya

Adaptation to climate change is an important theme in the strategy and policy of institutions around the world. Billions of dollars are allocated every year, based on cost estimates of actions to cope with, or benefit from the impacts of climate change. Costing adaptation, however, is complex, involving multiple actors with differing values and a spectrum of possible adaptation strategies and pathways. Currently, expert driven, top-down approaches dominate adaptation costing in practice. These approaches are subject to misallocation, with global funds not always reaching vulnerable communities in most need. This paper introduces an analytical framework called Participatory Social Return on Investment (PSROI), which provides a structured framework for multi-stakeholder planning, selection and valuation of appropriate methods of adaptation. The broader economic, social and environmental impacts of these adaptation actions are explored and valued through a participatory process. PSROI is strength-based, building local capacity and generating stakeholder buy-in. The financial valuation generated provides an additional tool for examining and prioritizing adaptation actions based on their impact. Results from a pilot of the PSROI framework in a smallholder farming community in Western Kenya provide empirical evidence for the difference between expert driven desk-based and ground-based cost estimates that involve local communities. There was an approximate 70 % reduction in the valuation of an agroforestry intervention, selected by the local community, when compared between the desk-based valuation and that of the local community, using primary field data. This reduced expectation of the desk-based PSROI is justified by coherent explanations such as lack of knowledge about the intervention, misconception about the potential costs and benefits, and the risk-averse nature of the farmers. These and other important insights are fundamental for planning and decision-making, as well as appropriate targeting and delivery of funding for adaptation

Applying the robust adaptation planning (RAP) framework to Ghana’s agricultural climate change adaptation regime

This paper introduces a five-step framework, namely the Robust Adaptation Planning (RAP) framework, to plan and respond to the ‘grand challenge’ of climate change. RAP combines, under a unified framework, elements from robust action, participatory planning and network theory to capture the different motives, perception, and roles of actors that are important for climate change adaptation. RAP leverages existing structures and networks and involves diverse actors to plan, sequence and time strategies across multiple levels (i.e. from local to national). Actors identify adaptation interventions and important actor relations to develop wide networks, highlighting potential pathways for connecting action from central policy to local implementation (and vice versa). Comparing these proposed participatory structures with existing structures reveals actors deemed important for delivering adaptation, as well as gaps and overlaps in their relations. The end result is a robust plan covering many perspectives and local realities for both relieving immediate and adapting to longer-term consequences of climate change. We applied the RAP framework in Ghana’s agricultural climate change adaptation regime to demonstrate its usefulness as a means of planning adaptation interventions in a climate-vulnerable, multi-actor and multi-level setting. The application of the RAP framework in this paper highlights how it can: (1) visualise the adaptation space (and its different components), and reduce the complexity of implementing adaptation responses; (2) offer a shared space to actors from all administrative levels to think and create collective narratives for adaptation without demanding explicit consensus and; (3) identify key actors and actions through a collaborative planning process, and allocate responsibility for the smooth delivery of adaptation interventions