Tag Archives: adaptation

Adaptation, Climate Change, Development, Gender and identity, Policy, Research

Gender, adaptation, and development: frontiers or retreat?

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I recently attended the WMO Conference on the Gender Dimensions of Weather and Climate Services in Geneva. The topic is one that brings together a lot of the work we do in HURDL, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this event. Specifically, I presented on how the development-as-usual approach to thinking about gender as essential instead of intersectional can make a tremendous difference in how we understand the presumed end users of climate services.

What does this mean? Basically, typical approaches to gender in adaptation tend to do three things:

1) They assume that gender differences are principal determinants of vulnerability to weather and climate shocks and stresses

2) They assume that men and women are unitary categories – that is, they do not generally look for the differences among men and among women, but focus on the differences between men and between women.

3) They assume that women are subservient or otherwise lacking authority and power relative to men, and this produces unique vulnerabilities for men and women.

Of course, anyone who has spent some time in an agrarian or pastoralist community in the Global South already knows that this is a gross oversimplification of gender roles and responsibilities in any setting. The categories “man” and “woman” contain a lot of variation, and that variation shapes the different roles and responsibilities individuals have in the community.

When I argue that gender is intersectional, what I am saying is that who an individual is, in terms of his or her role and responsibilities, is generally shaped in reference to a particular activity or setting. For example, a woman’s roles and responsibilities might be defined one way when talking about domestic labor, and perhaps another when talking about her agricultural activities. This means her identity is situational. Depending on her situation, it could be that her agricultural roles and responsibilities emerge at the intersection of gender and caste, while her domestic roles and responsibilities take shape at the intersection of gender and age.

Thus, talking about “women’s work” in this hypothetical community means different things in different situations. Really, we are talking about the difference between “high caste women’s work” and “low caste women’s work” in agriculture, and “senior women’s work” and “junior women’s work” in domestic contexts. These categories are not the same, for not all senior women will be high caste, and not all junior women will be low caste. Therefore, gender is only one part of the identity that defines particular roles and responsibilities within this community.

This all matters for adaptation and climate services because roles and responsibilities define who does what work, and therefore whose activities are vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change. Therefore, when thinking about how climate services might help particular populations address the impacts of climate variability and change, we must clearly define how that service will affect a particular activity’s vulnerability to a particular shock or stressor. We cannot say that a climate service will address a community’s vulnerability to climate variability and change – this is too broad to be meaningful. We need to talk about how a climate service might address the vulnerability of a community’s agricultural production to climate variability. This defines the activity in question clearly, and allows us to define the potential users of this activity appropriately – in the case of our hypothetical community, we would look to the roles and responsibilities that emerge at the intersection of gender and caste, as these identities are those that shape individual’s agricultural activities and therefore their vulnerabilities relevant to this particular stressor.

My closing point caused a bit of consternation (I can’t help it – it’s what I do). Basically, I asked the room if the point of paying attention to gender in climate services was to identify the particular needs of men and women, or to identify and address the needs of the most vulnerable. I argued that approaches to gender that treat the categories “man” and “women” as homogenous and essentially linked to particular vulnerabilities might achieve the former, but would do very little to achieve the latter. Mary Thompson and I have produced a study for USAID that illustrates this point empirically. But there were a number of people in the room that got a bit worked up by this point. They felt that I was arguing that gender no longer mattered, and that my presentation marked a retreat from years of work that they and others had put in to get gender to the table in discussions of adaptation and climate services. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are able to ask the sorts of complex questions that mark my ongoing work on gender, adaptation, and development (see, for example, my work on gendered crops, gendered livelihoods, and thereimagination of livelihoods decision-making) because a whole lot of pioneering researchers, many if not most of them women, pushed the very issue of gender onto the table. The work that I have been doing, and the ideas I outlined above, presented at the WMO, and are becoming part of the wider literature on gender and adaptation (see this overview piece) stand on the shoulders of these scholars, complementing and extending their work. I argue that HURDL’s work on gender and adaptation, and gender and climate services, is a logical extension of feminist work in development – feminist theory long ago stopped focusing merely on women, instead shifting to a wider focus on identity more generally. Gender usually matters a great deal when we talk about adaptation and development (though not always – see the Malawi case study in our USAID report). The question is how it matters, and how this particular aspect of identity produces opportunities and challenges we must address as we move forward in the Anthropocene.

Adaptation, Climate Change, Development, Mitigation, Policy

When being on the fence is a good thing: GMOs and loss of autonomy for African farmers

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In recent issues of Agriculture and Human Values the issue of genetically modified crops has come to the fore. It is heartening to see discussion on the role of GMOs in agriculture and food security in a forum that has been traditionally dominated by anti-GMO, anti non organic agriculture sentiments ( A camp to which I firmly belonged because of my allegiance to small scale farmers and, I admit to it, the general feeling in my gut that GMOs are unsafe for me). The arguments against GMOs are well known. Without completely rehashing these, one set of arguments stem from research showing the link of GMO use and associated loss of power and autonomy for small scale farmers in relation to rights to save seed and control harvests, and potentially negative impacts on local genetic diversity and the environment. Other arguments of course rely on the assumed (and perhaps somewhat deserved) must-make-profits- at-all costs nature of biotech companies at the expense of farmers and the over-claiming of potential benefits of GMOs. For advocates, GMOs increase yields, reduce the use of pesticides and improve drought and tolerance to the impacts related to climatic change (Interestingly, health has actually been the basis of several African governments to ban GMOs rather than more valid concerns about small scale farmers). In sub-Saharan Africa, debates on GMOs have been particularly virulent and divided with advocates constructing opponents as backward zealous simpletons at best and  mass starvationists at worst. Opponents have sort to portray advocates as GMO company cronies with a hidden agenda.

But the arguments by both pro and anti GMO advocates are actually not supported by sufficient research in the African context. Yes, scientists have often cited increased yields or drought tolerance as key attributes for accepting GMOs. And in this regard, they are one up on anti GMO advocates. But farmers rarely actually make agricultural decisions by isolating one particular factor. Yields or drought tolerance would only be one of the considerations in a milieu of social, economic and taste considerations. Studies which only site yields, for instance, do not tell us much about what happens or impacts in real contexts.

Which brings me back to the recent literature in Ag and Human Values. While not related to research in the African context, they nonetheless offer us an interesting array of methodologies to go about in collecting the data needed to really find out the potential impacts of GMOs on African farmers. With regard to research which claims to represent the voice of small scale farmers, Stone and Flachs show how, within GMO studies, this research obscures, rather than explains, agricultural decision making. Studies which address the loss of autonomy in decision making in relation to GMOs and small farmers have to endeavor to understand the social context within which agricultural decisions are made, and must address opinions about technologies and practices related to GMOs with regard to long term impacts. Although the overall tone for their article is anti GMO, Schnurr and Mujabi-Mujuzi encourage researchers to reevaluate the idea that it is not possible to communicate the complexities of biotechnologies to farmers. I agree with Schnurr and Mujuzi on this point and extend it to African consumers. If the public and farmers don’t understand bio- tech, it is due to the failure of scientists not of the public. Don Lotter’s ( a former organic only ag supporter) article on food security in Africa sums it up for me. He notes that there is a need to find out how to use both agrochemicals and organic methods -and I would add GMOs – together. This is particularly true given the multiple challenges to African agriculture and particularly the added challenges presented by climate change.

As a former hardcore organic agriculture supporter I and others like me are now on the fence about GMOs, agriculture, food security and small scale producer autonomy in the African context and its a good thing.

References

Lotter Don. 2014. Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am promoting the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in small-scale staple crop production. Agriculture and Human Values: DOI 10.1007/s10460-014-9547-x

Schnurr Matthew A and Sarah Mujabi-Mujuzi. 2014. “No one asks for a meal they’ve never eaten.” Or, do African farmers want genetically modified crops?” Agriculture and Human Values 31 (4):643-648

Stone, Glenn and Andrew Flachs. 2014. “The problem with the farmer’s voice AFAFA.” Agriculture and Human Values: DOI 10.1007/s10460-014-9535-1

Adaptation, Development, Governance, Humanitarian Assistance, Policy

Is Mitigation beginning to enter the Resilience conversation?

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I started writing this blog because I noticed mitigation is conspicuously hard to find when reading about resilience. Climate change resilience is often used in tandem and sometimes interchangeably with the term ‘adaptation’. Examples of climate change resilience here, here and here, highlight that the roots of resilience to climate change stem from disaster risk reduction, ecology and sociology and usually suggest a concept of “bouncing back” or “recovery” from some shock or stress. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Working Group (WG) II Contribution to its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), defined resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity of self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.” This definition raises the question: why is a strategy (i.e. mitigation) that seeks to reduce the “stress” of greenhouse gases on the earth’s atmosphere not considered a form of resilience?

Is the reason mitigation has not emerged a popular strategy for building climate change resilience because the earth has not been able to retain its basic structure and function in absorbing greenhouse gases and so can basically never “bounce back” or “return to a former state”(based on the IPCC WG II AR4 definition of resilience)?   Or perhaps because resilience has been a more popular term in the disaster risk reduction sector (which is characterized by more violent and extreme events), resilience has come to be framed more normatively in relation to the immediate and extreme impacts of climate change. Is this framing, the reason resilience is commonly applied in light of adaptation alone – as adaptation is a more immediate actionable strategy than mitigation? If so, within climate change issues which suffer from the back burner-effect already (see this blog post), mitigation then becomes the action that gets relegated to the background.

My problem with mitigation not being integral to the definition of climate change resilience, is that language matters. Since the concept of mitigation is not apparent in a number of definitions and conceptualizations of climate change resilience, it seems that so far, mitigation actions are being entirely left out of some of the efforts to build resilience to climate change. Nevertheless, the IPCC in the SPM of its Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation stated that “…adaptation and mitigation can (emphasis mine) complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change.” Can? I would like to think should! Granted, mitigation was not the focus of the report (as the authors so graciously point out) but the example advances the notion that mitigation has not necessarily been viewed by scholars and practitioners as an ultimate compliment to adaptation efforts in building resilience to climate change.

However there appears to be hope. In the most recent IPCC Assessment Report (AR5), the WG II Contribution in its SPM discusses the concept of climate-resilient pathways, which it defines as “sustainable-development trajectories that combine adaptation and mitigation to reduce climate change and its impacts.” Could a concept described as resilient that combines both adaptation and mitigation be an indication that mitigation is beginning to enter the conversation about resilience? I would like to think yes!