Differentiated livelihoods, local institutions, and the adaptation imperative: Assessing climate change adaptation policy in Tanzania
Section snippets
The anti-politics of the adaptation imperative
More than twenty years ago, Ferguson (1990) introduced the notion of an ‘anti-politics machine’ in explaining how exclusively technical discourses of development and simplified accounts of societies serve to erase the politics of development and create a chasm between external development agendas and local realities. We find that concept useful to understanding climate change adaptation policy in Tanzania and other least developed countries (LDCs), where concern for integrating climate change
Transitions and transformations in adaptation policy
Adaptation policy may draw on a range of framings of nature-society relations and more recent ways of understanding adaptation to climate variability and change (Head, 2010, Schipper, 2006). Adaptation scholarship increasingly recognizes the limits of incremental adaptation that would merely intensify or extend existing measures, strategies, and capacities to limit the impacts or take advantage of opportunities associated with climate change (Kates et al., 2012). However, definitions of and
Development and environmental governance challenges in rural Tanzania
Tanzania’s post-colonial environmental governance is a useful starting point for assessing transition and transformation as objectives for adaptation policy. In assessing structures of environmental governance in Tanzania, a backdrop appears against which to evaluate the focus of current adaptation policy.
Tanzania’s environmental governance structures are the culmination of processes of decentralization over several decades, but which accelerated with political and economic liberalization in
The apolitical ecologies of Tanzania’s national adaptation policy
Tanzania was one of the first countries to produce a National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA), a report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through which Least Develop Countries identify “urgent and immediate needs – those for which further delay could increase vulnerability or lead to increased costs at a later stage” (UNFCCC, n.d.). Because they serve as blueprints for national adaptation planning and internationally-financed adaptation programs for LDCs
Kilimo Kwanza: a sectoral response to the climate imperative
The UNFCCC’s guidelines for NAPA preparation emphasize the urgency of the mainstreaming of adaptation policy. They urge “… integration of objectives, policies, strategies or measures outlined within a NAPA …[so] they become part and parcel of national and regional development policies, processes and budgets at all levels and stages, and [that] they complement or advance the broader objectives of poverty reduction and sustainable development” (UNFCCC, 2002: 19). The central themes of
Differentiated livelihoods and local institutions in Kirya village, Mwanga District, Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania
This case study examines elements of transitional and transformational adaptation that are silenced by contemporary adaptation policy in Tanzania. In contrast to the picture of undifferentiated backwardness and poverty presented in policy documents, we describe the richly diverse livelihoods and adaptive practice present within a single village in Mwanga District in northern Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Region. Our case study demonstrates that the capacity of formal institutions to address adaptation
Conclusion
Our analysis demonstrates that Tanzanian policy assumes climate change to be a generalized threat to an undifferentiated rural population, thus advancing a depoliticized framing of climate change impacts and a technocratic vision of adaptation. We argue that this approach is emboldened by an adaptation imperative that is increasingly prominent in global academic, development, and policy circles. By suppressing the most basic elements of transitional adaptation, the numerous pressures on local
Acknowledgement
This material is based upon work supported by the United States National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0921952.
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