Suchergebnisse

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.

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 scalability

Over the last several decades, policymakers and stakeholders in the European Union (EU) have put considerable effort into increasing the adoption of organic farming, with the overall objective of its sustainable development. However, the growth of the organic sector has come with many challenges that jeopardize its sustainability. The question then is how to move organic farming in Europe forward and at the same time capitalize on its potential contribution to sustainability? Organic farming in the EU is a highly complex and dynamic food system and as such this question cannot be answered in isolation using a one-dimensional mind-set and tools of the past. In this paper, we use three system archetypes—Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden and Eroding Goals—to sharpen our ability: (1) to analyze and anticipate difficulties in the development of organic farming in the EU under the current policy measures; and (2) to find effective ways to address these difficulties. A system archetype consists of a generic system structure that leads to unintended behavior over time and effective strategies for changing the structure into one that generates desirable behavior. The analysis reveals that in order to move forward, policymakers and stakeholders should reemphasize fundamental solutions rather than quick fixes that often generate unintended consequences. Specifically, Limits to Growth shows us that the leverage for moving organic farming out of the niche does not necessarily lie in increasing subsidies that push engines of growth, but rather in anticipating and managing its limits arising from, for instance, market dynamics or intrinsic environmental motivation. In turn, Shifting the Burden brings to attention how easily and unnoticeably the EU's organic farming system can become dependent on third countries thereby undermining its own sustainability. Finally, Eroding Goals highlights that is it important to continuously improve regulatory standards based on an external frame of reference, as otherwise organic farming in the EU will continue on its trajectory towards conventionalization. ; This research is part of the TRANSMANGO project. TRANSMANGO is granted by the EU under 7th Framework Programme, theme KBBE.2013.2.5-01 (Assessment of the impact of global drivers of change on Europe's food security), Grant agreement No. 613532. Birgit Kopainsky is supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the project "Simulation based tools for linking knowledge with action to improve and maintain food security in Africa" (contract number 217931/F10). Authors highly appreciate the comments and suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers and the editors. We would like to express our gratitude to Charlotte Ballard for professional proof reading of this manuscript, IFOAM EU for their assistance with data collection, and Prof. Gianluca Brunori and Sara Zambon for their valuable suggestions regarding the research. Last but not least, we wish to thank all stakeholders involved in the workshops for their time and input.

Over the last several decades, policymakers and stakeholders in the European Union (EU) have put considerable effort into increasing the adoption of organic farming, with the overall objective of its sustainable development. However, the growth of the organic sector has come with many challenges that jeopardize its sustainability. The question then is how to move organic farming in Europe forward and at the same time capitalize on its potential contribution to sustainability? Organic farming in the EU is a highly complex and dynamic food system and as such this question cannot be answered in isolation using a one-dimensional mind-set and tools of the past. In this paper, we use three system archetypes—Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden and Eroding Goals—to sharpen our ability: (1) to analyze and anticipate difficulties in the development of organic farming in the EU under the current policy measures; and (2) to find effective ways to address these difficulties. A system archetype consists of a generic system structure that leads to unintended behavior over time and effective strategies for changing the structure into one that generates desirable behavior. The analysis reveals that in order to move forward, policymakers and stakeholders should reemphasize fundamental solutions rather than quick fixes that often generate unintended consequences. Specifically, Limits to Growth shows us that the leverage for moving organic farming out of the niche does not necessarily lie in increasing subsidies that push engines of growth, but rather in anticipating and managing its limits arising from, for instance, market dynamics or intrinsic environmental motivation. In turn, Shifting the Burden brings to attention how easily and unnoticeably the EU's organic farming system can become dependent on third countries thereby undermining its own sustainability. Finally, Eroding Goals highlights that is it important to continuously improve regulatory standards based on an external frame of reference, as otherwise organic farming in the EU will continue on its trajectory towards conventionalization. ; publishedVersion

Current models of adaptation to climate change focus on common causes of vulnerability among individuals and communities in an attempt to improve their capacity to adapt. These models tend to neglect the impact on vulnerability of local relationships that include political and economic power structures. We use social network analysis to examine the connectivity and positions of vulnerable rural households and their capacity to adapt. We collected empirical data from a community of 58 smallholders in upper west Ghana on external relations with 'local actors' that are independent, operate beyond the community yet have direct relations with the community. These connections provide important resources and knowledge to build adaptive capacity that would not be generated from within the community. Our results highlight that certain external relations expose households to knowledge and other forms of capital, which in turn strengthen their ability to access and mobilise resources to respond to environmental change. However, not all external relations offer equal opportunities, which results in a stratified community and variation in the households' capacity to adapt. The network approach also identifies points where local actors can link communities and households to remote agencies crucial for planning and implementing effective adaptation.

Debates around the design and content of climate change adaptation policies are shaped, in part, by the power and influence of actors within an adaptation regime. This paper applies a power-mapping technique, Multilevel Stakeholder Influence Mapping (MSIM), to stakeholders in Ghana's agricultural adaptation policy regime. The method provides a quantitative influence score and visual map for actor groups active-in or affected-by the policy process, from the differentiated perspectives of national, regional, and local-level respondents. MSIM, as applied here, seeks to determine the underlying power structure of the adaptation regime and provides insight in to two key power-laden themes: stakeholder participation and multilevel institutional design. Results indicate that when taken collectively (the views of national, regional and local respondents combined) Ghana's adaptation regime is considered bipolar and elite-centred in its power distribution. A distinguishable 'adaptation establishment' or dominant group of power holders made up of technical government and international agencies can be identified. Meanwhile, political groups, the private sector, civil society, and universities are considered to wield substantially less power in the regime. Differentiated perspectives (i.e. national, regional or local respondents alone) reveal that several potential cross-level bridging institutions are not considered influential at all operational levels. Farmers, traditional authorities, and the District Assembly, for example, are all considered highly influential from the perspective of local-level respondents, but their counterpart agencies at the national level are not considered influential by policymakers there. Contrary to the hyper-politicized nature of climate change adaptation at international levels, Ghana's policy regime would benefit from increased participation from political agents, as well as from traditional authorities and farmers. These actor groups can help reverse the a-political nature of the adaptation regime, improve power pluralism across actor groups and levels, and facilitate cross-level cooperation between formal and informal institutions crucial to adaptation success.

Africa is projected to experience diverse and severe impacts of climate change. The need to adapt is increasingly recognized, from the community level to regional and national governments to the donor community, yet adaptation faces many constraints, particularly in low income settings. This study documents and examines the challenges facing adaptation in Africa, drawing upon semi-structured interviews (n = 337) with stakeholders including high-level stakeholders, continent-wide and across scales: in national government and UN agencies, academia, donors, non-governmental organizations, farmers and extension officers. Four key concerns about adaptation emerge: i) Climate data, scenarios and impacts models are insufficient for supporting adaptation, particularly as they relate to food systems and rural livelihoods; ii) The adaptation response to-date has been limited, fragmented, divorced from national planning processes, and with limited engagement with local expertise; iii) Adaptation policies and programs are too narrowly focused on explicit responses to climate change rather than responses to climate variability or broader development issues; and iv) Adaptation finance is insufficient, and procedures for accessing it present challenges to governments capacities. As a response to these concerns, we propose the 4-Cs framework which places adaptation for Africa at the center of climate projections, climate education, climate governance and climate finance, with corresponding responsibilities for government and non-government actors.