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

Farms of the future guidelines

The farms of the future (FOTF) approach is an interactive climate adaptation, knowledge sharing and learning experience that transforms climate forecasts into field-based realities by physically taking participants on a journey to areas that already experience climatic conditions that represent plausible future climate scenarios. The hypothesis behind this is that the knowledge exchange process can enhance a farmer’s/village’s capacity to adapt to changing climatic conditions by exposing them to innovative farming communities that have already successfully adapted their agricultural practices to various distinct climatic conditions the reference village might experience

The future of food security, environments and livelihoods in Western Africa: Four socio-economic scenarios

This working paper examines the development of regional socioeconomic scenarios for West Africa’s development, agriculture, food security and climate impacts. We present four globally consistent regional scenarios framed and outlined by regional experts who crafted narratives and determined key drivers of change. Stakeholders identified the type of actors driving change and the timeline of strategic planning as the most uncertain and most relevant factors of change affecting food security, livelihoods and environments in the region. The scenarios were linked to the IPCC community’s global Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and quantified using two agricultural economic models, GLOBIOM and IMPACT, in interaction with drivers outlined by the SSPs and guided by semi-quantitative information from the stakeholders. The quantification of the scenarios has provided additional insights into the possible development of Western Africa in the context of a global economy as well as how the agricultural sector may be affected by climate change. The scenarios process highlights the need to combine socio-economic and climate scenarios, to base these scenarios in regional expertise, and ways to make scenarios useful for policy design. The objective of this working paper is to provide scenarios for future regional development for West Africa on the future of food security, environment, and rural livelihoods as well as offer details of the multi-stakeholder scenarios development process. Using both qualitative and quantitative scenarios we provide insights into the possible development of West Africa as well as a scalable framework for regional decision makers and the scientific community to use scenarios to build and test policies to make them more robust in the face of future uncertainty. In these scenarios, strong economic development increases food security and agricultural development. Increased crop and livestock productivity may lead to an expansion of agricultural areas within the region but productivity improvements may reduce the pressure on land elsewhere. In the context of a global economy, West Africa remains a large consumer and producer of a selection of commodities. However, the growth in population in combination with rising incomes may lead to increases in the region’s imports. For West Africa, climate change is likely to have negative effects on both crop yields and grassland productivity, and lack of investment in agriculture may exacerbate them. The aim of the regional scenarios is provide challenging contexts for policy makers to test and develop a range of national and regional policies. To date, the scenarios have been used in a number of policy design processes which include collaborations with ECOWAS priority setting, the National Plan for the Rural Sector for Burkina Faso (PNSR), and district and national level policy processes in Ghana

Autonomous adaptation to global environmental change in peri-urban settlements: Evidence of a growing culture of innovation and revitalisation in Mathare Valley Slums, Nairobi

The growth of peri-urban areas is increasingly recognised as a dominant planning and urban design challenge for the 21st century. In burgeoning poor urban settlements growing on city margins, autonomous adaptation strategies are often the only measures to respond to increasing climatic and compounding stressors. Yet, in both research and practice there remains lack of understanding regarding the dynamics of adaptation and risk reduction at the level of the community. In this paper, we argue urban slums are ideal places to consider adaptation because they offer examples of more extreme social-ecological stress than one finds in more established communities – the kind we can anticipate more broadly in the face of climate change. A framework for identifying local adaptation processes is presented and applied to analyse the case of Mathare Valley Slums in Nairobi, Kenya – a densely populated suburb, where residents are regularly exposed to flooding from heavy rainfall. Findings reveal that slums, often viewed as illegitimate, makeshift, and temporary settlements, are places experienced by many residents as permanent communities characterised by rapid environmental change. Processes of adaptation in Mathare have become institutionalised through time, as a new generation of people imagine themselves staying and (re)organise to achieve a higher level of functioning through various strategies to reduce risk. Innovative and revitalising adaptation occurs as residents shift from employing more generic and expected coping strategies, such as evacuating homes or economic diversification, to creating “gated” communities and savings schemes to maintain and improve the settlement, despite uncertain tenure. Both formal and informal institutions, such as youth groups, play an important role in governing such heterogeneous localities, incrementally upgrading the slum and providing critical public services. Long-term residents' increasing recognition of the permanence of the slum community and its stressful conditions appears to lead to more collective action toward adaptation pathways. However, this is in marked contrast to the dominant non-local perspective of Mathare's status as both impermanent and illegal, which prevails among government officials. As such, strategies are generally not incorporated into planned interventions. While progressive policies designed to reduce risk exist, they remain nascent in their establishment and fail to benefit slumdwellers. The case illustrates the need to incorporate the wealth of knowledge, techniques, and experience extant at the community level in the development of adaptation planning

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

Scenarios and the art of worldmaking

In this exploratory paper we propose ‘worldmaking’ as a framework for pluralistic, imaginative scenario development. Our points of departure are the need in scenario practice to embrace uncertainty, discomfort and knowledge gaps, and the connected need to capture and make productive fundamental plurality among understandings of the future. To help respond to these needs, we introduce what Nelson Goodman calls worldmaking. It holds that there is no singular, objective world (or “real reality”), and instead that worlds are multiple, constructed through creative processes instead of given, and always in the process of becoming. We then explore how worldmaking can operationalise discordant pluralism in scenario practice by allowing participants to approach not only the future but also the present in a constructivist and pluralistic fashion; and by extending pluralism to ontological domains. Building on this, we investigate how scenario worldmaking could lead to more imaginative scenarios: worldmaking is framed as a fully creative process which gives participants ontological agency, and it helps make contrasts, tensions and complementarities between worlds productive. We go on to propose questions that can be used to operationalize scenario worldmaking, and conclude with the expected potential and limitations the approach, as well as suggestions for practical experimentation

Multi-factor, multi-state, multi-model scenarios: Exploring food and climate futures for Southeast Asia

Decision-makers aiming to improve food security, livelihoods and resilience are faced with an uncertain future. To develop robust policies they need tools to explore the potential effects of uncertain climatic, socioeconomic, and environmental changes. Methods have been developed to use scenarios to present alternative futures to inform policy. Nevertheless, many of these can limit the possibility space with which decision-makers engage. This paper will present a participatory scenario process that maintains a large possibility space through the use of multiple factors and factor-states and a multi-model ensemble to create and quantify four regional scenarios for Southeast Asia. To do this we will explain 1) the process of multi-factor, multi-state building was done in a stakeholder workshop in Vietnam, 2) the scenario quantification and model results from GLOBIOM and IMPACT, two economic models, and 3) how the scenarios have already been applied to diverse policy processes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam