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This book asks, how can agencies assist local communities adapting to change? By what mechanisms can communities make the most of emerging information? Can effective community-based approaches be scaled up? It is essential reading for NGO practitioners, students, government and NGO policy makers who wish to gain an understanding of adaptation.

In many parts of the world, traditional institutions are the backbone of village governance and service delivery. While the effects of introducing new institutional arrangements from outside have been widely studied, autonomous changes – that is, those that originate from within communities – are not well understood. Recognising that traditional institutions continuously evolve to remain relevant, we build on critical institutionalism and the concept of institutional bricolage to explain autonomous change processes in traditional institutions. Relying on unstructured storian conversations with community members (20 female, 18 male) from two villages in Vanuatu, our fieldwork explored the emergence of village committees as a governance mechanism to sustain access to vital services. Storian data revealed that a small number of bricoleurs – local agents of change – were driving these autonomous institutional change processes, their agency enabled and constrained by structures within and beyond the community. Bricoleurs created new institutional arrangements to address new governance challenges by borrowing traditional and non-traditional elements and associated meaning, authority and legitimacy. Our analysis reveals the interplay of two established institutional bricolage processes – elite capture and leakage of meaning – each of which operated to open up and close down spaces for change. We draw on agonistic accounts of the political to deepen our understanding of this interaction. By adopting this approach, we reveal the significance of the political at the local level, through which the social plurality of village life is negotiated, resulting in profound shifts in some norms and the maintenance of others. We conclude with reflections on the prospects of unsettling the deep-rooted exclusion from decision making of groups such as women and young people through future autonomous changes in village governance.

CONTEXT: Farmer-led innovation brings farmers together with other stakeholders in a collaborative endeavour that recognises multiple forms of expertise. Critical engagement with mainstream models of agricultural science and technology (AST) development has drawn attention to the isolation of farmers as technology adopters within a compartmentalised model of AST development and dissemination. Academic, government and non-governmental actors and organisations are increasingly supporting facilitated processes in which farmers, scientists and engineers develop new knowledge, learning together about the nature of the problems being faced and the potential of different solution pathways. OBJECTIVE: Despite the centrality of learning to farmer-led innovation, its role has yet to be systematically explored. In response, this paper looks to understand the forms of learning and their contribution to farmer-led innovation during a three-year action-research project involving two groups of farmers from northern England and the Scottish Borders in the UK. METHODS: A researcher-facilitator convened a structured process of twenty meetings that together created opportunities for interaction, deliberation and re-framing of problems and solutions among groups of farmers, a university-based engineer, and wider stakeholders. Multiple qualitative methods were used to build understanding of the different farming contexts and to explore the issues the farmers wanted to work on. Meeting transcripts and fieldnotes were subject to thematic analysis, informed by the analytical framework of cognitive, normative and relational learning derived from the social learning literature. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive, normative and relational learning were found to be mutually interdependent and equally significant, building iteratively rather than linearly: the farmers and engineer assessed new information and reappraised existing situations; they did so informed by and informing a shift in understanding of their goals for new technology; and ...

CONTEXT: Farmer-led innovation brings farmers together with other stakeholders in a collaborative endeavour that recognises multiple forms of expertise. Critical engagement with mainstream models of agricultural science and technology (AST) development has drawn attention to the isolation of farmers as technology adopters within a compartmentalised model of AST development and dissemination. Academic, government and non-governmental actors and organisations are increasingly supporting facilitated processes in which farmers, scientists and engineers develop new knowledge, learning together about the nature of the problems being faced and the potential of different solution pathways. OBJECTIVE: Despite the centrality of learning to farmer-led innovation, its role has yet to be systematically explored. In response, this paper looks to understand the forms of learning and their contribution to farmer-led innovation during a three-year action-research project involving two groups of farmers from northern England and the Scottish Borders in the UK. METHODS: A researcher-facilitator convened a structured process of twenty meetings that together created opportunities for interaction, deliberation and re-framing of problems and solutions among groups of farmers, a university-based engineer, and wider stakeholders. Multiple qualitative methods were used to build understanding of the different farming contexts and to explore the issues the farmers wanted to work on. Meeting transcripts and fieldnotes were subject to thematic analysis, informed by the analytical framework of cognitive, normative and relational learning derived from the social learning literature. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive, normative and relational learning were found to be mutually interdependent and equally significant, building iteratively rather than linearly: the farmers and engineer assessed new information and reappraised existing situations; they did so informed by and informing a shift in understanding of their goals for new technology; and ...

Social inclusion and poverty alleviation are central to the United Nations (UN) new urban agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities. In Nepal, the goal of the National Urban Agenda is to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, sustainable and smart to enhance their ability to provide decent jobs and adequate housing, infrastructure and services to the ever-growing urban population". Against this backdrop, many international and national non-governmental organisations and the national federations of informal settlers in Nepal have been advocating for the rights of urban informal settlers to be included in the urban planning processes. In response, the Nepal government has formulated new policies to assess the "authenticity" of informal settlers and accelerate the informal to formal transition process. Drawing from the textual analysis of existing national policies, literature and media publications, in this paper, we document what (dis)connections and contradictions exist in the formal policies and interventions that the national government has designed for addressing urban informality issue and how they frame urban informality issues and the solutions to manage the same. Our analysis shows that although government policies are rhetorically inclusive and progressive, indicating a desire to resolve informality issues, policies issued by different ministries and departments are disconnected. We also find that the practices often contradict the policies, and attempts to secure transitions to formality are undermined by a failure to recognise the legitimate stake that informal settlers have in the process. We conclude by discussing how these contradictions and inconsistencies can potentially be redirected towards socially just urban transition and suggesting ways forward for addressing the protracted urban informality issue in Nepal.

Recent literature has recognised the value of food sovereignty and human rights frameworks in agrarian struggles. Relatively little attention has gone toward how agrarian movements develop and apply their own rights discourses to further demands for social justice. This study considers Brazil's landless movement (MST) between 1984 and 1995, revealing three distinct rights discourses that recruited and mobilised protest by linking local issues to the movement's broader political project. The findings illustrate the value of rights, frames and ideology as analytical tools, shedding light on how movement-generated rights emerge through processes of reflexivity and in response to dynamic social-political contexts.

Following critiques of the global environmental justice paradigm, a 'critical' environmental justice scholarship is emerging. This article contributes to this important field of inquiry by interrogating project evaluation through a critical recognition justice lens that draws on political ecology. We use an embedded case study of the official donor evaluation of a REDD+ pilot project in Tanzania; comparing narrated accounts of the project recipients' experiences with the official evaluation documents and asking whose ways of knowing, values, and perspectives on governance and justice are recognized and whose are excluded. We find that the report represents a narrow framing of the project experience, based on standard evaluation criteria, the technical framing of the project, and the ways of knowing, values and perspectives of the (inter)national conservation community. The project framings of many local-level project recipients are not recognized in the official evaluation, despite attempts to include villager perspectives and some consideration of justice-related outcomes in the report. Project evaluation is therefore identified as a vehicle for recognition justices and injustices, discursively reproducing the ways of knowing, values and perspectives of certain actors while excluding others. The role of project evaluation in the proliferation of dominant conservation discourse is identified, and the ability for standardized evaluations to deliver meaningful learning is challenged. We therefore call for a reframing of project evaluation and highlight the potential of incorporating critical environmental justice scholarship and pluralistic methodologies.

Whilst it is increasingly recognised that socio-political contexts shape climate change adaptation decisions and actions at all scales, current modes of development typically fail to recognise or adequately challenge these contexts where they constrain capacity to adapt. To address this failing, we consider how a rights-based approach broadens understanding of adaptive capacity while directing attention towards causes of exclusion and marginalisation. Drawing on human rights principles and lessons from rights-based practice, we develop a novel analytical tool for use with communities that considers adaptive capacity through examination of equality, transparency, accountability and empowerment. We apply this to the illustrative case of aquatic agricultural systems in Timor-Leste. This approach yields a qualitative analysis that unpacks the formal and informal institutions and actors that structure opportunities and barriers to adaptive actions. The rights framing exposes the processes of marginalisation and exclusion that lead to differentiation in adaptive capacity, but at the same time helps identify concrete actions that can be taken as part of a rights-based approach to development support for adaptive capacity. The tool and empirical illustration support an emerging body of thought that adaptive capacity requires development actors to engage not only with the technical challenges of responding to climate change, but also with the social and political context that determines the distribution of costs and benefits.