African development and African studies

It is in part because of widespread concerns about the magnitude and posited intractability of problems facing African countries that development has become such a popular strand within African Studies. A sense of disappointment, within some academic circles and the popular press more widely, has arisen from the perceived lack of progress in the African context towards standard developmental goals such as longer life expectancy, greater opportunities for economic security and stability, or a more equitable distribution of profits made from the exploitation and sale of Africa’s natural resources. That disappointment, the extent to which it is warranted, and the appropriate response to it weave the common thread running through all three of the books reviewed here

Meteorologists Meeting Rainmakers: Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Policy Processes in Kenya

This article seeks to shed light on policy processes arising from interaction between indigenous rainmakers and meteorologists, in participatory action research aimed at increasing the capacity of a local community to adapt to climate change. Policy processes were analysed from the perspective of actors, their narratives and interests. At the beginning of the project, the interactions between the meteorologists and rainmakers was characterised by mutual scepticism. The two groups negotiated on modalities of working together and successfully made joint seasonal weather forecasts that showed good convergence. The analyses using the three lenses of actor-narrative-interest enabled the study to tease out policy dynamics that are often ignored in climate change mitigation studies. Understanding these dynamics is important to ensure that climate change strategies are designed in congruence with local policy dynamics

Making the most of resilience

Resilience is currently a hot topic with interest gaining rapidly in the development community, prompting, calls for more integration between humanitarian and longer-term development interventions. This growing interest offers a real opportunity for designing and implementing more effective forms of intervention. Many challenges however, lay ahead and operationalising resilience is not necessarily an easy task. In this briefing we explore how policy makers can make the most of resilience. This includes: defining the concept to make it more relevant to a wider range of development practitioners; building on the concept’s strengths but also recognising its weaknesses and; addressing these weaknesses by complementing resilience with other relevant concepts

Agriculture and Climate Change in Kenya: Climate Chaos, Policy Dilemmas

This paper analyses emerging policy discussions on climate change and agriculture in Kenya. Kenya has been ahead of many other countries in developing a national climate change strategy, and agriculture is one of the key critical sectors of interest. However, there are concerns about whether policy goals may be achieved amidst the actors’ many and diverging interests. This paper sets out to map how these debates are starting to take place in practice, and poses the following questions: what are the arguments, who is promoting them, and what are the implications for Kenya’s agricultural sector? A better understanding of the key actors, their interests and through what narratives actor-interests are mobilised is important because they will all have implications for the kinds of support farmers at the local level do or do not receive, and the extent to which their own interests are fore grounded or marginalised within the policy process. Ultimately, the policy response to climate change in the agricultural sector is one important factor which mediates local-level vulnerability

Knowing and deciding: participation in conservation and development initiatives in Namibia and Argentina

This thesis explores how people’s knowledge about sustainability affects participation in combined conservation and development initiatives. It focuses principally on two case studies that embody these dual objectives: the ‘conservancy programme’ in Namibia and the Alto Bermejo Project in Argentina. The concept of sustainability – of living in a way that meets both current and future needs – has led, on a global scale, to a re-casting of the relationship between conservation and development as one of necessary interdependence. Such is the credibility invested in the concept of sustainability that it is found underpinning policy and intervention in countries as distinct as Namibia and Argentina. These observations set up the two central questions of the thesis. First, what types of participation characterise decision-making processes within these two contexts? Second, how is having knowledge on sustainability one (though not the only) causal determinant of who participates, in what activities and on what basis? These questions pave the way for analysis of the types of participation found in two Namibian conservancies and specific components of the Alto Bermejo Project in Argentina. A key belief shaping policy and intervention in both contexts is that wider local involvement is a precondition of sustainable natural resource use. Consequently, strong efforts are made in both places to attempt to ensure that local people are key decision-makers. However, talk of local-level, grassroots participation in the Namibian or Argentine context, whilst by no means wholly misplaced, can obscure the high participation levels of NGO, government and specific private-sector actors. This is because both initiatives depend for the achievement of their objectives on a process of knowledge transfer from implementers to beneficiaries. Much of the knowledge deemed necessary for the realisation of these objectives lies with government, NGO and specific private sector actors. Having this knowledge, therefore, renders their participation indispensable. Indeed, the very access of these actors to the resources on which intervention depends is partly a function of the credibility invested in their knowledge. Access to resources is also a means through which the credibility of such knowledge is reinforced. This dynamic I call ‘circularity in intervention’. ‘Circularity in intervention’ entails a variety of advantages and disadvantages relative to context and perspective, which this thesis neither condemns nor condones. It does, nonetheless, seek to clarify one important point. Our account of participation in the Namibian or Argentine examples is incomplete without looking at how having or not having knowledge about sustainability affects participation

Farmers' Knowledge and Climate Change Adaptation: Insights from Policy Processes in Kenya and Namibia

One major policy challenge for the agricultural sector is to make sure that lessons from farmers' knowledge and experience are informing emerging climate change policy processes. This briefing paper reports on lessons from recent studies in two areas: first on seasonal forecasting and indigenous knowledge in Kenya, and second, agro-ecological knowledge and science in Namibia. Advocates of local knowledge playing a role in adaptation policy and practice need a clearer understanding of how policy processes really work, in order to be more effective in making it happen. Efforts to link local to national are subject to broader processes of global change. Two of these are particularly discussed: first, the prospect of accelerated and more dangerous climate impacts by the 2060s; and second, deagrarianisation (a long-term shift away from farming livelihoods in rural areas)

Tackling Poverty in a Changing Climate: Bridging Concepts and Practice for Low Carbon Climate Resilient Development

The Learning Hub is a transformative way of learning and sharing, bridging academic knowledge with invaluable insights from frontline practical experience. The Hub’s second learning cycle focused on perhaps the overarching challenge at the heart of climate change and development. How do we ensure that we tackle poverty and its root causes in ways that are adaptive and low-carbon? The two main ways that were used to explore this question were a) the framing paper and b) the learning event, held in Addis Ababa in March 2011. The purpose of this paper is to bridge the thinking and learning that came out of the framing paper and the debates sparked by it at the learning event

Changing the climate of African development. Workshop report.

On 26-27th March 2009, the Tyndall Centre convened a workshop in Cape Town South Africa. The workshop formed a part of the Tyndall Centre’s Programme on International Development, ‘Securing human welfare: how can international development be sustained in a warming world?’ The workshop brought together researchers, policy makers and representatives of civil society working on climate change and development within the agriculture, water and energy sectors. The objectives of the workshop were twofold: 1. To explore and share ideas on key areas of the interface between climate change and development policy and practice, drawing on and disseminating work coordinated by the Tyndall Centre and research partners in Africa, examining the state of current knowledge on climate change and development, with reference to agriculture, water and energy. 2. To outline, in collaboration with African stakeholders, priorities for further research on climate change and development, identifying potential collaborators and funding streams, with a view to defining a future research agenda and a potential set of working partnerships in Africa. This workshop report is intended to serve three purposes. First, it offers a brief summary of key messages emerging from the workshop. Second, it gives an overview of presentations made in the panel discussions. Third, it documents the discussions between participants that followed the presentations