The Politics of Agricultural Carbon Finance: The Case of the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project

ESR

PRISE project 4 : enabling private sector adaptation in semi arid areas : country workshop : Laikipia

The presentation reports on Pathways to Resilience in Semi-Arid Economies (PRISE) Project 4. This phase investigates the private sector, especially Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) including findings on women-led SMEs, and how they can adapt to climate change. Small and medium enterprises play a key role in supporting livelihoods and economic growth in semi- arid regions such as Laikipia (Kenya). The Kenyan semi-arid lands (SALs) host over 10 million people (25% of the country’s population) who draw their livelihoods from natural resources and associated enterprises. Support of SME through combined financial and gender policy, microcredit and climate funds is critical

REDD+ institutional design and implementation within local socioeconomic settings: evidence from Kenya

Designing and implementing the Reduced Emissions from Avoided Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) depend on mutually interlinked actors, policies and socioeconomic factors across global, national and local levels. Unpacking the interaction between REDD+ design and implementation processes could holistically identify sources of institutional impediments to the programme’s effectiveness in the context of sustainable development. This thesis examines the process of designing REDD+ rules at the global level and the implementation of these rules at the national and local levels in Kenya. The study develops and applies an integrated institutions and development analytical framework (IDAF) within which iterative document analysis, quantitative vulnerability indexing, project inventories and interviews are applied to gather empirical evidence. Results reveal that multilevel institutional impediments face REDD+ design and implementation. At the global level, resource endowment determines actors’ ability to design and implement methodological, financial and safeguard design rules for REDD+. However, due to resource limitation and reliance on REDD+ funds, the input of African States into the technical and institutional REDD+ design is weak. This creates gaps in technical capacity and funding required for implementing the global rules at the national level. In Kenya, the national implementation relies on expertise and funds from multilateral intermediaries but this support plays into national institutional gaps e.g. path dependency and sectoral competition for funds to create implementation deficits. Efforts to avoid ‘institutional complexities’ in delivering carbon funds confine REDD+ activities within the State-based forestry sector but exclude key land use sectors such as lands and agriculture. This sectorial exclusion subdues cross-sectorial expertise required for REDD+ implementation but most importantly, fails to attend to underlying drivers of deforestation such as resettlement and agricultural mechanisation. Even though delivery of carbon and associated funds are emphasised at the global/national levels, local level implementation of the Kasigau project relies more on delivery of pro-poor livelihoods that keep the poor out of forests. Benefit sharing mechanism with regards to livelihoods is a key source of interplay between REDD+ design and on-ground implementation but this interplay is a source of certain institutional conflicts: first, the interplay complicates multilevel institutional arrangements for REDD+. For supporting local livelihood needs, the local community favourably perceives the private actor implementing the Kasigau project but negatively perceives State regimes that have historically monopolised local resource decisions and benefits. This raises concerns as to whether the State, as the legitimate representative of local communities’ interests in REDD+, can ably do so as expected by the UNFCCC. Second, the interplay elicits carbon-livelihood tension. Projects avoid investing/implementation within poor communities whose livelihood status could complicate delivery of carbon funds. Projects target relatively richer areas endowed with humid forest resources at 0.728; p<0.01, land title deeds at 0.552; p<0.01 and better access to water at 0.475; p<0.01. This raises concerns about emission leakage when deforestation shifts to forests hosted in poorer communities. Carbon-livelihood tension also renders equitable and pro-poor strategies in REDD+ ineffective. Strict carbon standards limit trade-offs between pro-poor livelihoods and forest protection especially when fluctuating carbon prices constrain funds needed for project operations and local livelihoods. This study presents one of the first multilevel scientific analyses of REDD+ and contributes empirical evidence to literature on REDD+ governance. It reveals that the main sources of REDD+ implementation deficits emanate from the global and national institutional processes. As such, ensuring equity and rights in REDD+ implementation is necessary but not sufficient for effective REDD+ implementation unless national level institutions are reformed and global carbon conditions and pricing harmonised with local livelihood needs

Farmers’ Agency and Experiences of Agricultural Change in Rural Kenya: Insights from Exploratory Fieldwork

Using novel agricultural technologies to boost farm productivity in the face of climatic and demographic disruption remains a priority for African policy and research. This paper uses an innovative, participatory and ethnographic methodology to explore, through farmers’ experiences, the historical pathways of social, ecological and technical (socio-eco-technical) change that have reshaped agriculture, livelihoods and rural landscapes in three sites in Kenya (Machakos, Siaya and Kisumu Counties) over recent decades. The paper identifies events and processes that triggered major changes in farming systems at household and community levels. Insights from engagements with farmers reflect an evolution in the strategic direction of agricultural development in Kenya from a more ‘bureaucratic’ mode during the colonial and immediate post-independence periods to a more ‘technocratic’ mode today. In the bureaucratic mode, the state was at the centre and aspired to align all farming practices and technologies with the priorities and programmes determined by the national government. In the contemporary period of technocratic development, agricultural programmes and interventions have been designed by scientific experts and implemented by technical agencies through the institutional form of short-term projects and programmes. In both the bureaucratic and technocratic systems, the agency of local farmers has remained weak and constrained. Both systems of management established formal development processes and power structures that largely sidelined meaningful contributions by ordinary farmers to technological change processes. We argue that the agency and capacities of farmers and rural communities, to make choices and respond to opportunities arising from or introduced into their local situations, should be recognised as an important engine of socio-eco-technical transformations towards a sustainable future for African agriculture. We therefore propose that this exploratory study helps to build a platform for further research both conceptually and methodologically, with the potential to inform the design and implementation of future agricultural development interventions

Adapting research projects to the COVID-19 pandemic: experiences from the Nairobi Risk Hub

The COVID-19 pandemic presents unique challenges to the research community beyond the devastating impacts to livelihoods and economies across the globe. Most researchers are currently struggling to develop adaptive measures to facilitate the continuity of ongoing research activities, and at the same time identify the relatable opportunities from the pandemic. The Nairobi Risk Hub, part of the broader Tomorrow's Cities research project, is one of numerous donor funded research projects experiencing this adjustment. The UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) funded project is expected to undertake interdisciplinary research and inform disaster management in rapidly developing cities: Nairobi, Kathmandu, Istanbul and Quito. The vision of the Nairobi Risk Hub is specifically to generate research evidence geared towards helping the city of Nairobi move from crisis/emergency response to integrated, proactive urban planning to enhance disaster risk preparedness and management. The research puts specific focus on floods and fires as the most prevalent hazards in Nairobi, especially within the informal settlements, as well as other cascading hazards that affect the wellbeing of the residents. The COVID-19 pandemic thus becomes a research opportunity for the hub, as well as a bottleneck to the planned research activities designed to be achieved through the application of multidisciplinary research to establish an integrated evidence base on the city’s leading risks and hazards, their drivers, institutional structures, and feasible disaster reduction measures that support pro-poor action planning. The Nairobi Risk Hub plans involve a very ambitious research and policy action plan and learning agenda. More specifically, the critical path for the hub is premised on locally grounded research involving community engagements, ground measurements, and leveraging key insights to the Nairobi city-wide policy planning. This critical path enables the hub’s work to directly and indirectly interact with the COVID-19 management processes including the impacts on research plans, but also presents new opportunities to inform strategic policy responses to the pandemic. Nairobi is one of Africa’s main economic hubs with a large attraction of international trade and activities, but faced with numerous social, economic, environmental, and urban risk-related challenges that constrain the city’s growth and resilience. Ultimately, understanding how the hub is reorganising itself and adopting to the ensuing COVID-19 related challenges and opportunities is an important element in the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework. This article outlines the experiences of the Nairobi Risk Hub in this regard. The article also draws from the ongoing COVID-19 discussions and communications taking place at the overall Hub level on mapping out the entry points for working within the context of COVID-19

Building Innovation Systems for Climate Change Technology Transfer: Perspectives from East Africa

Innovation systems are critical to technology transfer and implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Innovation systems provide an important platform for conceiving and incubating climate technologies. In East Africa, various stakeholders have different views of what constitute a good innovation system. These views are informed by country experiences and context in relation to social, technological and institutional innovation systems. The diverse experiences, lessons and contexts from the East African countries can potentially inform a rich and evidence-driven platform for a regionally integrated innovation system for the EAC which could in turn be informative to national systems. However, such opportunities could be enhanced through strengthening institutional structures that allow for cross-sectoral, cross-country and multi-level knowledge and experience interchanges.ESR

How can cities build resilience through Risk Modelling? Reflections from the COVID-19 experience

Disasters and their associated risks have continued to evolve in complexity, forms, frequencies, and severity. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the complexity of disaster risks while exposing the need to plan and prepare for potential risks adequately. Like many other disaster risks, COVID-19 has presented unfamiliar evolution characteristics that have made it difficult to contain. However, risk models and scenarios can be utilized to help understand the dynamics of risks as they interact with populations and the environment, providing useful recommendations for planning for disaster risks with considerable levels of certainty. The World Economic Forum predicts that one-third of the global population will live in urban settings by 2050, with a majority of this shift expected in developing cities. Rapid urbanization will likely implicate significant transition and transformations on urban risks. The projected increased urbanization rates also point to increased exposure to urban disaster risks and enhanced vulnerabilities to the already struggling developing cities. In order to prepare and build the desired city resilience through improved disaster risk proof development, models can be used to understand the baseline scenarios and the possible future risks and their characteristics. This blog provides some useful insights for African countries on investing in risk modeling to understand future risks and inform preparedness

Transforming access to clean technology: learning from Lighting Africa

UK AID has recently invested in a new £39.8 million programme that aims to transform access to modern energy cooking services, or MECS, in Africa and Asia. In this working paper we demonstrate how reframing our understanding of how transformations happen in access to clean energy technologies, foregrounding the social and the political, together with more sophisticated, systemic understandings of how sustained technological change and innovation occurs, can increase the chances of transformative change that is environmentally sustainable and socially just. This moves beyond the largely unsuccessful track record of past interventions that tended to focus only on technology hardware and finance. The working paper analyses the case of Lighting Africa, which successfully transformed access to solar lighting in Kenya and, as far as we are aware, conceptualises and illustrates for the first time Lighting Africa’s approach. This builds on past STEPS research that focusses on building sociotechnical innovation systems. The paper then compares the existing and planned activities of the MECS Programme in order to facilitate learning looking forward. This analysis is assisted by consideration of the important ways in which cooking as an energy service, and its related social practices, differs from lighting. It is also assisted by analysis of some critical social justice and political dimensions that were not explicitly addressed by Lighting Africa. As well as making substantive recommendations for the future operation of this £39.8 million programme of research and delivery, the working paper provides a useful illustration of how the STEPS Pathways Approach can contribute to applied analyses of policy and practice