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Abstract
This paper starts with a flood in southern Malawi. Although apparently a ‘natural’ event, those most affected argued that it was made much worse by the rehabilitation of a nearby irrigation scheme. We use this example to interrogate the current interest in resilience from a perspective informed by political ecology and political economy, arguing that a focus on resilience should not be at the expense of understanding the conditions that shape vulnerability, including the ways in which ‘communities’ are differentiated. Complex factors are at play – and the ways in which these combine can result in a ‘perfect storm’ for some individuals and households. These factors include the effects of history combining with ethnicity, of legitimacy influencing voice, and of the interplay of political dynamics at different levels. In particular, processes of commodification have played an important role in shaping how some may benefit at the cost of catastrophic harm to others.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank James Fairhead, Dom Kniveton, Dinah Rajak, Geert de Neve and Grace Carswell for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We are also very grateful for the comments of our three anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 As Peters (Citation2013) points out, this set of questions has also been reiterated, with slight variations, by various scholars, including Borras and Franco (Citation2010), Fairhead et al. (Citation2012), Scoones (Citation2009) and White et al. (Citation2012).
2 See Cornwall and Eade (Citation2010) for discussion of ‘buzzwords’.
3 ‘Farmer first’ ideas came to prominence in the late 1980s, following a workshop at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. The resulting volume (Chambers et al. Citation1989) is seen as an early statement of the approach.
4 The catch-all term of ‘community’ continues to have widespread use and appeal within international development discourse, despite more than 50 years of critique from anthropologists and other social scientists who point out that what constitutes the boundaries of communities is varied and contested; communities do not necessarily neatly equate with place or interest group, and they are internally differentiated, by gender, class, status and so on (see for example Agrawal and Clark Citation1999; Cleaver Citation2012; Guijt and Shah Citation1998, Harrison Citation2011; Li Citation1996).
5 It is common for the name of villages and the name of the headman/woman to be the same – so Makhapa refers to both a group of villages and an individual.
6 Although we encountered considerable variation in views of how long the leases were thought to last for and what their implications were. Indeed, lack of clarity over the leases reflects broader confusions over the nature and status of land rights, both within the scheme and more generally.
7 Indeed, many suggested that this relationship was unduly close, involving inappropriate favours on both parts. There is no concrete evidence to support these allegations.
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Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Harrison
Elizabeth Harrison is reader in anthropology and international development in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. She has recently been principal investigator on the Department for International Development - Economic and Social Research Council (DFID-ESRC)-funded research project ‘Innovations to Promote Growth Among Small-scale Irrigators’. Her research focuses on the relationship between anthropology and development, with particular interest in gender and development, the notions of participation and partnership in development and the overall implications of these for power and social justice. Her regional expertise is principally in sub-Saharan Africa and the UK, although she has also carried out research in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Canford Chiroro
Canford Chiroro is a senior lecturer and consultant at CIDT, University of Wolverhampton. Canford Chiroro was the postdoctoral research fellow on the DFID-ESRC-funded research project ‘Innovations to Promote Growth among Small-scale Irrigators’ and was responsible for conducting field research that forms the basis for this paper. His research interests are in exploring institutional responses to climate change in agriculture and natural resources, understanding the impacts of agricultural intensification in sub-Saharan Africa, and researching the determinants of resilience at community and individual levels. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Tanzania. c.chiroro@wlv.ac.uk