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Magazine of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change June 2009 路 Issue 2

ISSN 1727-155X

GECHS Synthesis Human Security in an Era of Global Change

www.ihdp.org IHDP Update

2.2009

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Table of Contents IHDP Update Issue 2, June 2009

Editorial

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Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) in a Decade that Matters Karen O’Brien, Johanna Wolf, and Linda Sygna

Articles

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8 14 19

Liquid Dynamics: Rethinking Sustainability in Water and Sanitation

Lyla Mehta

Resilience as Agency

Hans-Georg Bohle, Benjamin Etzold and Markus Keck

25 29

Stocktaking the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative

Managing Extremes: Learning from Past Experiences

Mark Pelling and Lisa Schipper

35 40

The Ethics of Global Environmental Change

Des Gasper

Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis

Robin Leichenko, Karen O’Brien and William Solecki

Poverty and Global Environmental Change

Victoria Lawson and AsunciÓn Lera St. Clair

Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising Local and Global Equity and Environmental Integrity

Siri Eriksen

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Challenges for Trans-border Environmental Governance in Latin America

Alexander López and Alicia Jimenez

Scott Drimie and Timothy Quinlan

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Editorial • Human Security and Global Environmental Change in the Decade that Matters

Children being rescued during a flooding in Gonaives, Haiti Copyright by UN

Human Security and Global Environmental Change in the Decade that Matters Karen O’Brien, Johanna Wolf, and Linda Sygna

Human security is a concept that has come of age.

Without a doubt, it has gone through severe growing pains over the past two decades. As a post-modern concept, it emphasises notions of equity, justice, ethics, and rights – all of which inevitably draw attention to power hierarchies and political interests.

This attention, in turn, leads to critical reflections on conventional interpretations of security (national security, military security, etc.), which has created some heavy baggage for the concept itself. Yet the very tensions and dissonance between ‘human’ and ‘security’ that have made the concept vulnerable to criticism, may actually be a strength when human security is considered in the context of environmental change. Human security is perhaps the only concept that adequately captures what is really at stake in relation to climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in water access and availability, deforestation, land cover changes and degradation of marine ecosystems, among many other global environmental challenges. What is at stake is not the fate of the planet, but the individual and collective wellbeing of humans, both in present and future generations.

Human security can be defined in many ways, including as having the options and capacity to respond to threats to social, environmental and human rights. Nevertheless, it cannot be dissociated from the wellbeing of the environment, for they are inextricably linked. Environmental problems are reflections of human insecurities, and addressing these insecurities must be considered as part of the solution to environmental challenges.

IHDP Update 2.2009

From a human security perspective, environmental issues are political issues, development issues, social issues, ethical issues and cultural issues. Better management and regulation alone will not solve environmental problems. Environmental problems must be understood and addressed by focusing on humans, including how humans both create and respond to change.

There is a new sense of urgency for responding to environmental change, particularly because many scientists believe that climate change is leading to irreversible dangers for humans, ecosystems, and many species of flora and fauna.

There is a growing recognition that the changes that are made in the next decade or two are the changes that matter – the ones that will determine the trajectory of future temperature increases and associated changes in precipitation and sealevel rise. From this perspective, it is also urgent to address human insecurity right away. In other words, it is time to stop talking about human security, and start creating it. And this involves rethinking our model of development, which means more than crafting ambitious development goals that rely solely on development aid. It involves political, economic, social, cultural, technological and institutional changes that together create a more secure and sustainable future.

With the GECHS project coming to a close in June 2010, it is time to mobilise a new and committed group of researchers with new ideas and initiatives to drive future research on global environmental change and human security. Stepping into the future, there is a need to question how problems are defined and how research is organised. The an-

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Editorial • Human Security and Global Environmental Change in the Decade that Matters

swers may involve breaking down some long-standing barriers in global environmental change research, particularly the artificial boundaries between humans and the environment that are reflected in separate approaches, methodologies and frameworks. What has been achieved thus far?

GECHS research has conceptualised and characterised vulnerability, analysing what it means for the future of marginal populations and living conditions. GECHS research has also explored the physical dimensions of challenges to human security, for example, in the context of water scarcity and food. Underlying all of these challenges are the individual and social mechanisms that affect how a lack of security actually takes hold and manifests. Future research on human security therefore needs to address the individual and social dimensions of global environmental change more explicitly by focusing, for instance, on human agency and capacity.

Part of any discussion of human security should include the consideration of values and culture, as these shape the goals of individuals and societies in many ways.

Given recent discussions about the limits and barriers to adaptation, examining these factors is necessary now more than ever. Such research calls for the involvement of philosophers, specialists in religious studies and theology, historians, linguists and others. Nevertheless, the existing disciplinary work from the biophysical and social sciences has often made it difficult for researchers from the humanities to get involved. Yet without explicit consideration of these perspectives, human security research is at risk of being disconnected from what motivates people and their communities, and therefore, how best to improve the prospects for the future. Further, there are questions about how to carry out research in order to enhance human security.

To what extent should research be driven by participants? If there is a minimum contribution that participants should ideally make to shaping the research, what should it be? While participatory research has gained some prominence, there are no best-practice guidelines on how and in what manner to involve participants in different types of research projects. Human security research should perhaps seek to combine participatory and consultative methods with more standard approaches. In the Arctic, for example, where local involvement in research is crucial and necessary, the resulting research is well informed by realities on the ground, giving it both meaning and validity.In defining the next generation of human security research, we have to bear in mind that there is a sense of urgency in getting the right answers. One of the most debated security implications of climate change in recent years has been the threat of large-scale population displacements and migration. Policy

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makers are in need of information regarding who is moving from where to where and why, in order to effectively respond to and perhaps even facilitate environmental migration. At the same time, research shows that there is a very complex relationship between environmental change and migration, and that a myriad of factors affect the outcomes. Balancing the need for precise information with recognition of the problem’s complexity will be a challenge for both research and policy in the future. Decisions based on extreme projections, for example, may actually lead to maladaptive responses. This calls for a closer and more effective dialogue between research, policy and practice in shaping the future research agenda. This new role for “human dimensions" research on human security will be discussed at the GECHS synthesis conference, “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” which will take place from 22-24 June, 2009 at the University of Oslo in Norway. The conference will gather more than 160 researchers, policy makers and stakeholders from some 30 countries to consolidate and discuss research findings on the relationship between human security and global environmental change, and to define a new research agenda. Building on multiple perspectives and a wide range of thematic and geographical expertise, this conference aims to help shape a future human security research agenda that will meet the challenges ahead. In order to make human security research meaningful in the 21st century, it has to be driven by real world issues grounded in an understanding of how societies actually function. The reductionist perspectives prevalent in much of the natural and social sciences are unhelpful here. In the face of the dramatic global environmental changes that may be experienced in this century, not only is the human security of vulnerable populations at risk, but so is the security of large parts of the human population. Human security is perhaps one of the most important outcomes that societies could hope to achieve. The GECHS research community thus has an important role to play in shifting predominant discourses and approaches so as to improve our understanding of environmental change.

AUTHORS Karen O’Brien, GECHS Scientific Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.

Email: karen.obrien@sosgeo.uio.no Johanna Wolf, GECHS Senior Science Coordinator, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo and Senior Research Associate, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia Email: j.wolf@uea.ac.uk Linda Sygna, GECHS Executive Officer, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Email: Linda.Sygna@sosgeo.uio.no

IHDP Update 2.2009

Liquid Dynamics: Rethinking Sustainability in Water and Sanitation

Girls Carryin Water in Timor Leste

Photo by Martine Perret

Liquid Dynamics: Rethinking Sustainability in Water and Sanitation Lyla Mehta

Recurring floods and droughts, the prevalence of waterborne diseases and the mounting sanitation problems of booming (peri)urban centres illustrate the devastating impacts of what the 2006 Human Development Report has called a crisis in water and sanitation (UNDP 2006). Essential for all aspects of life, health, wellbeing and productivity, the importance of water and sanitation has been recognised in the Millennium Development Goal of environmental sustainability. Yet despite the efforts of international organisations, governments, donor agencies and civil society, progress in achieving this goal has been slow.

While the problem of water scarcity is attracting growing political attention, not in the least due to climate change related uncertainty, a billion people still lack access to safe water. Water borne diseases kill 6,000 infants daily and 2.5 billion people across the global lack access to adequate sanitation. Water and sanitation concerns are certainly not new. Indeed, they have been a focus of development interventions and international action since the 1977 Mar del Plata UN World Water Conference and the subsequent International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD). After 30 years of attention, the world seems to be abuzz with ‘wisdom’ on water and sanitation issues with countless fora dedicated to the discussion of such themes.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Yet much of the debate and the associated policies and interventions fail to address water and sanitation problems in sustainable ways that meet the needs of the poor and the marginalised. There remains a disconnect between global rhetoric and the everyday realities of such populations. The tendency to focus on water as an economic good, for example, can overshadow its cultural and symbolic significance.

The engineering and public health domination of sanitation and its top down focus on behavioural change can obscure local level priorities and needs, as well as socioculturally bound practices of hygiene and sanitation. Consequently, many projects fail despite the best of intentions.

Villagers in Merka, western India, for instance, prefer local sources of water such as tanks and wells to the ostensibly ‘improved’ piped water supplied by the Government (Mehta 2005). In numerous villages of the global South, Government - or NGO sponsored - toilets either go unused or are not rebuilt when extreme weather conditions cause them to break. Global or theoretical portrayals of scarcity often do not match up to the way the issue is experienced locally, and is there sometimes a disconnect between global desired and locally adequate solutions. Research in the water-starved area of Kutch, India, for example, has demonstrated that water crises are usually the result of struggles over access to and control of

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Liquid Dynamics: Rethinking Sustainability in Water and Sanitation

water resources, rather than natural conditions (Mehta 2005).

Scarcity is often manufactured in certain ways so as to legitimise interventions and controversial schemes, as in the case of the Sardar Sarovar Project, which served the interests of powerful actors at the expense of those lacking access to water in drought prone Kutch (Mehta 2005).

Another case in point, large dams, often considered to be the panacea to water scarcity, often carry high social and environmental costs ignored by dam builders and planners. The spread the costs and the benefits involved with these dams is far from even, with the benefits often going to large farmers and irrigators and the poor suffering disproportionately from unintended consequences such as disease outbreaks. The large scale displacement from river valleys, required for the building of dams, leads to the impoverishment of thousands of marginal farmers and indigenous peoples, whose ancestral homes are destroyed and their cultural attachments to land and river resources disregarded.

Despite these tragic effects, the primacy of large dams is maintained in places like India and China, ignoring more locally appropriate alternatives. Large dams and large scale water transfers remain popular with politicians and engineers, even though detailed empirical research suggests that their benefits may be exaggerated and unequally distributed (see World Commission on Dams 2000). Social, cultural, political and distributional issues underlie ‘water and sanitation crises’. Such examples highlight the fallacy of viewing water and sanitation problems in technical terms, an ap-

proach that does little for local users’ rights and ignores the human dimensions.

Understanding Liquid Dynamics

Current approaches often fail to address the challenges associated with contemporary water and sanitation system dynamics, which can be labelled liquid dynamics.

Liquid dynamics refer to the patterns of complexity and interaction between the social, technological and ecological/ hydrological dimensions of water and sanitation systems.

Access to water and sanitation is determined by complex, dynamic interactions between different social, technological and environmental processes across different scales and timeframes. These interactions often have uncertain consequences shaped by unequal power and social relations. Significant existing problems in sustainable access, compounded by uncertainties arising from rapid urbanisation and climate change, interact to yield complex, dynamic water and sanitation systems. Adding to this, different groups, be they hydrologists and engineers, policymakers and NGOs, the wealthy and the poor, or women and men, often understand and frame these dynamics in different ways.

Typically, interventions do not address the needs and concerns of the marginalised and resource poor. Good governance processes are thus essential in terms of the institutional and political relationships that shape the interactions between water and sanitation, as well as between technologies and people. While important moves to involve communities in participatory ways have been made and efforts such as integrated water resource management (IWRM) seek to address water management at different scales, key challenges remain in addressing adaptation to dynamics, uncertainties and the priorities of different groups. Moreover, it is questionable whether these interventions can go beyond being technocratic and controlling to be truly inclusive and redistributive in nature.

Design processes, or the types of social appraisal through which water and sanitation knowledge is gathered to inform decision making and institutional arrangements, are also crucial. These processes have traditionally concentrated on narrow, technically-focussed approaches such as cost benefit analyses, ignoring a range of options and alternative perspectives that enhance equity and sustainability.

Appraisal processes must thus be opened up to better support sustainability and social justice pathways.

Children Fetch Water during a Flooding in Suda, Copyright UN / Tim McKulka

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Liquid Dynamics: Rethinking Sustainability in Water and Sanitation

Traffic jam in a street in New Delhi. Copyright by Ho Ching Lee.

Developing Pathways To Sustainability In Water And Sanitation

A sustainable water and sanitation system is one that can maintain a level of service provision over the long term by adapting to and coping with dynamic interlocking processes such as floods, droughts, increases in users and intensified urbanisation. There are diverse views, however, on what counts as sustainable or not. It is important to look at the services valued by marginalised rather than powerful groups and ask whether water and sanitation sustainability has normative goals such as poverty reduction or social justice. To achieve socially just sustainability in water and sanitation, the following must be considered: • How can resilience, robustness, durability, and stability be built into the dynamics of complex water and sanitation systems in the context of the new shocks stressors arising from patterns such as climate change, rapid urbanisation and middle class hygiene movements? Consideration of processes at various temporal and spatial scales and the ways in which they interact in different places and are felt by different groups, are key.

• How do different groups frame water and sanitation systems and dynamics? How can these frames lead to valued sustainability goals?

• How are water and sanitation systems governed and appraised and how are they shaped by power relations? How might various approaches better enable the poor’s perspectives and agency in the provision of water and sanitation services?

IHDP Update 2.2009

• What is the influence of history and culture in shaping water and sanitation knowledge and practice?

How does this influence differ in diverse local settings versus in the contexts of global debates and agencies?

Building pathways to equitable sustainability in water and sanitation will involve a plurality of approaches. Mapping what works when, where and how will require detailed case studies either focusing on water and sanitation issues or examining their interaction with other themes such as health, food or agriculture. It is time to move beyond conventional indices of sustainability and the associated definitions of water and sanitation issues, for these tell us little about equity, pro-poor agency, power and resilience. An agenda that links poverty reduction and social justice with sustainability in today’s accelerating liquid dynamics in the water and sanitation domain is urgently needed.

AUTHOR Lyla Mehta, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex and water and sanitation convenor at the STEPS centre E-mail address: L.Mehta@ids.ac.uk REFERENCES Mehta, L, Marshall F., S Movik, A. Stirling, E. Shah, A. Smith and J. Thompson. 2007. ‘Liquid Dynamics: Challenges for sustainability in water and sanitation’ STEPS Working Paper 6, STEPS Centre: Brighton.

Mehta, L. 2005. The Politics and Poetics of water; Naturalising Scarcity in Western India. Orient Longman: New Delhi UNDP. 2006. Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis. NY: Human Development Report Office, UNDP. World Commission on Dams (2000) Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-making, London: Earthscan Publications

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Resilience As Agency

Photo 2: Carrier for home-made food in Dhaka Copyright Hans-Georg Bohle

Resilience as Agency Hans-Georg Bohle, Benjamin Etzold and Markus Keck

This article re-frames resilience as a peoplecentred approach and highlights the importance of agency-based perspectives, taking the food system of Dhaka, Bangladesh as a case Keywords: Resilience; human agency; capabilities; human security; megacity; food systems

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Reframing Resilience: From Systems-Oriented to People-Centred Perspectives

Agency is a vital issue in the conceptualisation of social resilience and a theme that resilience discourse has, so far, failed to satisfactorily address. Whether viewing resilience as the ability to support the buffering capacities of vulnerable livelihood systems, to strengthen the adaptive capacities of people and their institutions, or to generate innovation and learning that allow for resilient transformations, the focus must be on social actors and their agency.

The resilience discourse has been dominated by approaches that are rooted in ecological systems thinking. If resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and disturbance and still maintain function” (Berkes and Folke 1998: 12), then the measure of resilience is the robustness of the system and the speed of its return to a former, stable state. Such measures of resilience certainly require systemsoriented analytical approaches. Secondly, if resilience is defined as “the capacity of a social-ecological system to adapt to change through self-organisation and learning” (Berkes, Colding and Folke 2003: 14), then the measure of resilience shifts to adaptive capacities, the ability for reorganisation and renewal, and the potential for self-organisation and learning.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Resilience As Agency

Such measures of resilience clearly require an agency perspective that allows for the examination of these abilities and potentials in the context of social systems analysis. A particular focus should be placed on adaptive types of governance that look at both the formal and informal rules governing social systems as well as the social agents and the agency allowing them to organise into actor-networks and actively influence the rules of the game (Etzold et al. 2009).

Thirdly, when viewing resilience broadly as “the potential to create opportunities for doing new things, for innovation and development� (Adger 2006: 253), then social actors, their potentialities, their creativity and their capabilities are at the centre of analysis.

Such a perspective clearly views resilience as human agency. In this contribution, we will discuss agency-based perspectives of resilience through the analysis of the urban food system in Dhaka, Bangladesh, concentrating on issues of adaptive food systems governance and, in particular, resilient livelihood transformations of the most vulnerable.

In the tradition of (ecological) systems analysis, as represented by the first definition of resilience mentioned above, we will first look at the entire food system of the megacity, considering both its robustness and stability against shocks and disturbances, and then turn to various social actors and their social sources of resilience.

In the tradition of social systems analysis or the second definition of resilience mentioned above, we will turn to issues of food security, viewing them from a food governance perspective.

Photo 1: Wholesale merchant for rice in Babu Bazar, Dhaka Copyright by Hans-

Here we will discuss how the megaurban society is organised around food and how systems of adaptive governance, learning and self-organisation influence states of food security. Finally, our resilience perspective will focus on issues of community resilience and human security, concentrating on people’s opportunities, potentialities and freedoms, or the third definition of resilience mentioned above.

Agency to avoid hunger and secure livelihoods in a resilient manner will be at the centre of this final analysis. The article will conclude by proposing an agency-based resilience framework that allows for a framing and reframing of resilience from a people-centred perspective.

Analysing Resilience from a Food Systems Perspective

Food systems can be defined as the spatial, functional, social, and environmental integration of four types of subsystems: production, exchange, distribution and consumption of food. In the food systems literature, the distribution of food that mediates between the production, exchange and consumption of food is the least well-defined (Cannon 2002: 354).

Despite its overwhelming importance, the distribution system, particularly in urban contexts where practically every consumer depends on it, is not well understood.

This investigation of the megaurban food system of Dhaka focuses on the function, structure and dynamics of the distribution of food.

Photo 3: Street-food vendor in Dhaka Copyright by Hans-Georg Bohle

Georg Bohle

IHDP Update 2.2009

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Resilience As Agency

Beginning with a brief discussion of resilience from the perspective of the entire food system, our analysis will approach the megaurban food systems from two different perspectives. The first perspective concentrates on the entry points of food into the city as well as the major distributional nodes from which food flows into the various channels of the intra-urban food system. The second perspective, on the other hand, centres on small-scale intra-urban distribution patterns, taking the informal trading of street food as a case in point.

2.1 Avoiding the Collapse: Resilience from a Food System Perspective

Urban food supply and distribution are usually seen as functioning constantly and routinely in all urban societies, and thus are often taken for granted by urban populations.

Under conditions of shock, disturbance and major food crisis, however, urban food supply and distribution can suddenly become “a public issue which can blaze on the political agenda with suddenness, urgency and often ferocity” (Guyer 1987: 1).

This is particularly true for growing megacities in poor countries such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, where food supply and distribution are precarious even in normal times and where large parts of the population have to live with the constant threat of food insecurity and hunger.

Considering Dhaka’s food system as a functional unit and measuring its robustness against shocks and disturbances in accordance with the first resilience definition, it becomes evident that the food system of this megacity has been remarkably resilient at least over the past 35 years.

Since the drought of the early 1970s that coincided with the creation of Bangladesh as a nation state and the corresponding political turmoil, Dhaka’s food system as a whole has not revealed any major crisis or collapse.

Although the food supply was repeatedly strained by natural disasters such as catastrophic tropical cyclones and floods, there has always been enough food in the city to secure at least a minimum supply for the urban population.

Even when political transformations, power shifts, and economic crises such as that of the 2008 global food price hikes affected the megacity, the food distribution system remained remarkably stable. What are the mechanisms that made the entire food system more or less robust and what were the implications for food security? To answer these questions, our analysis will now take a social systems viewpoint and, in line with the second resilience definition, view resilience from a food governance perspective.

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2.2 Achieving food security: resilience from a food governance perspective

The newly established IHDP core project, “Earth System Governance”, views governance of the Earth system as a collection of formal and informal rules, rule-making systems and actor-networks that are set up to steer a system (ESG Science Plan 2008). In a food system context, these rules, rule-making mechanisms and networks are currently undergoing rapid changes under the impact of globalisation and global environmental change.

Food systems are becoming even more complex, and the ways in which they are managed more intricate. It is not only the capacity to govern how food is produced, consumed or distributed that is changing, but also who is able to influence the “rules of the game” (Food Ethics Council 2009). The capacities to govern food systems and to influence the rulemaking of food governance are clearly important dimensions of the agency of the social actors involved.

Such capacities are expressions of the power relations within the food system. New processes of managing food are constantly reshaping the power relations within food systems.

Agency is a vital issue in the conceptualisation of social resilience and a theme that resilience discourse has, so far, failed to satisfactorily address

When conceptualising the system of food governance in Dhaka from a resilience perspective and within the normative context of food security, defined as the availability, accessibility and affordability of food, a number of agencyrelated questions arise (ESG-Science Plan 2008).

What is the architecture of the megaurban food system of Dhaka? Who are the agents and what is the agency that drives food governance? How accountable are the governing institutions and how adaptive is the system of food governance? What are the implications of food governance for access to and allocation of food within the megaurban food system? Looking through a resilience lens, we will briefly touch upon the central question of the adaptiveness of food system governance before discussing issues of food access and allocation in terms of the human security of the foodinsecure.

The key characteristic of Dhaka’s system of food governance is the informality of the rules, rule-making systems and actor-networks that govern megaurban food supply,

IHDP Update 2.2009

Resilience As Agency

distribution and consumption. We argue that the predominantly informal character of food governance in Dhaka is key to understanding the adaptive capacity of this city’s food system, which largely depends on structures and processes of self-organisation, informal actor-networks, high degrees of flexibility and mobility, and self-regulated institutions of food governance. We also argue that understanding informality requires a focus on food-related institutions and social practices rather than on economic entities or an entire “informal sector”. Therefore, we take the informality of Dhaka’s food governance as an aspect of agency that is negotiated and contested in urban arenas (Etzold et al. 2009).

The system of food governance in Dhaka’s wholesale markets for rice is an illustrative example of how informal rules and rule-making as well as actor-networks and their agency determine the adaptive capacities of the megaurban food system (Keck et al. 2009). The wholesale traders collaborate in largely self-organised market associations, respond to global price fluctuations, national supply bottlenecks, sudden interruptions in transport facilities and local food shortages in an extremely fast and flexible way, thus securing the megacity’s supply of rice (photo 1).

At the same time, they also realise their profits, which may even be above average in times of food crises, by keeping contact with numerous food suppliers, importers of food, rice millers, trade associations, transport entrepreneurs, food brokers and credit institutions. On average, every rice wholesale merchant deals with seven to eight suppliers regularly, but business partners increase in number and change rapidly in times of supply crises. Wholesale traders usually maintain long-term informal relationships with select food suppliers, whereas contacts with retailers farther down the food supply chain are even more flexible, but also less stable.

What are the implications of this highly dynamic informal system of wholesale food governance in terms of food accessibility and affordability for the most vulnerable populations? To answer this question, we focus our resilience lens on the level of food-insecure communities, households and individuals, addressing their potential to create opportunities and innovation in dealing with food crises as per the third resilience definition.

2.3 Feeding The Vulnerable: Resilience From A Food-Insecurity Perspective

In Dhaka, most of the workforce is either dependent on food being delivered directly to the workplace from homes or onstreet food, prepared and consumed in streets and public places. In Dhaka, just as in other Asian megaci-

IHDP Update 2.2009

ties, an elaborate informal system of delivering home-made food to the workplace exists. Shortly before lunchtime, thousands of cycle carriers, rickshaw pullers and pushcarts deliver food to workplaces in metal carriers (photo 2). Thus, the working husband can enjoy fresh food prepared by his wife at home. For those who cannot afford such services for the delivery of highly esteemed homemade food, street food vendors step in and sell cheap rice meals (photo 3), pastries, fatty snacks, white bread, biscuits, bananas, sweet tea and betel leaves to their customers (Etzold 2008). Although this method of food consumption is essential for most of Dhaka’s highly vulnerable working populations, its accessibility and affordability are highly precarious.

The key characteristic of Dhaka’s system of food governance is the informality of the

rules, rule-making systems and actor-net-

works that govern megaurban food supply, distribution and consumption.

When the wholesale merchants on the upper end of the megaurban food supply chain buffer supply crises, they usually increase food prices dramatically, putting significant pressure on the affordability of food for the most vulnerable consumers. Street food prices then increase sharply as well.

In addition, numerous regulations and restrictions imposed by formal agents disrupt the smooth functioning of the street food sector in terms of food availability and accessibility for the most vulnerable. During the political regime of the socalled “Caretaker Government” (2007-2008), informal food preparation and consumption in public spaces was banned as illegal and unhygienic. “Rapid Action Battalions” and the police were employed by the authorities to confiscate street food vendors’ equipment and evict them from the streets, which not only put enormous pressure on the vendors’ livelihoods, but also on the food consumption options for the most vulnerable customers.

Only the remarkable flexibility and buffering capacities of the street food vendors prevented a major break-down of the food supply for the most vulnerable in the streets of Dhaka. Numerous vendors had to buy their confiscated equipment time and again, endure direct and structural forms of violence, bribe policemen, public gate-keepers and local musclemen, change the range of food items for sale, or shift from semi-mobile vending units to fully mobile vending strategies (Etzold 2009).

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Resilience As Agency

focus analytical

social resilience of the most vulnerable vulnerable

contested

conflicting

differential

socio -spatial socio -political scopes of Vendors creativity, adaptative caFocus perspectives Social socialresilience actors of the most vulnerable arenas agendas agency pacity and innovative strategies Vulnerable Contested Conflicting Differential Analytical Social Actors socio-spatial socio-political scopes of perspectives and particularly their endurance degrees of fairness of accountability scope of normative arenas agendas agency regulation of governance choices dimensions freedom of hardship, additional work, debtDegrees of Fairness of Accountability Scope of Normative freedom regulation of governance choices dimensions taking and self-exploitation all conmeasures of Vulnerability vulnerability conflict protection from strength ofof Conflict resoluProtection Strength Measures of tributed to a minimum degree of resilience reduction resolution from violence entitlements reduction tion violence entitlements resilience resilience in the food consumption Expanding Promoting Empowering Creating enMechanisms mechanisms peoples' empowering creating expanding promoting of the most vulnerable. scopes for adaptive cainstitu- abling environof resilience of resilience - tionspeoples ‘ enabling scopes for adaptive ments learning pacities building

The resilience of the overall building institutions environments learning capacities food system as well as the political An agency-based resilience framework draft : H.-G. Bohle, M. Keck, B. Etzold stability of the country as a whole was Source: H.-G. Bohle, M. Keck. B. Etzoid thus achieved, among others, at the cost of the availability, accessibility and affordability of food What are the implications of this conceptualisation of for the most vulnerable who had to struggle even harder for resilience for human security? After the initial definition of their livelihoods and who spent more of their meagre in- human security in terms of “freedom from want” and “freecomes and of their social resources on food than ever before. dom from fear” by UNDP (HDR 1994), the Global EnvironTo conclude, the answer to the question “how resilient is the mental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project of food system of Dhaka” (Bohle 2009) depends, first and fore- IHDP had broadened the concept by pointing to three basic most, on the definition and conceptualisation of resilience. dimensions of human security: that people have options to

As the case study of Dhaka’s food system reveals, the adapt to threats to their human rights; that they have the answer differs between systems-oriented and people-centred capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and that they approaches to resilience. The answer also differs between re- actively participate in pursuing these options (GECHS Scisilience perspectives that take robustness and systems stabil- ence Plan 1999). ity as measures of resilience, as well as between approaches that measure resilience in terms of the self-organisation of All of these dimensions of human security, options, casocial systems and those that view the abilities and opportu- pacities and freedoms, point to the overarching importance nities of social actors as key determinants of resilience. Our of agency for achieving human security. The UN Commisanalysis of Dhaka’s food system argues for an agency-based sion on Human Security, in its report entitled “Human Seresilience approach and is rooted in the latter two approach- curity Now” (CHS 2003), integrated Amartya Sen’s capabiles. ity approach (Sen 1999) into the concept of human security, addressing it in terms of the “freedom to act and to attain 2.4. Reframing Resilience As Agency: An Actor-Oriented Resil- valued opportunities”. From these perspectives, human seience Framework And Implications For Human Security curity, as well as social resilience, are fundamentally issues of

An actor-oriented, agency-based resilience frame- human agency, or, as the subtitle of “Human Security Now” work (Fig. 1) reframes resilience from a systems-oriented to (2003) indicates, of “protecting and empowering people”. a people-centred perspective. It starts by considering social actors and their agency, arenas and respective agendas in the AUTHORS Hans-Georg Bohle, Benjamin Etzold and Markus Keck, University of transformation of livelihoods in a resilient way. The frame- Bonn, Geography Department, Meckenheimer Allee 166, D-53115 Bonn / work proposes a normative context of entitlements, capabili- Germany Email: bohle@giub.uni-bonn.de ties, freedoms and choices or, even more broadly, of justice, fairness and equity. An agency-based framework measures REFERENCES Adger, N.W. (2006): Vulnerability. In: Global Environmental Change 16 resilience in terms of how peoples’ livelihood vulnerability (3): 268-281 Berkes, F., Folke, C. (eds.) (1998): Linking Social and Ecological Syscan be reduced or, to put it more broadly, in terms of their tems. Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building human security. Mechanisms for resilience-building, from Resilience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press this perspective, are first and foremost about empowerBerkes, F., Colding, J., Folke, C. (eds.) (2003): Navigating Social-Ecological Systems. Building Resilience for Complexity and Change. ing the most vulnerable to pursue livelihood options that Cambridge: Cambridge University Press strengthen what they themselves consider to be their social Bohle, H.-G. (2009): How resilient is the food system of Dhaka/Banglasources of resilience. desh? Paper presented at the 7th IHDP Open Meeting, Bonn, April 27, 2009

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Resilience As Agency

Cannon, T. (2002): Food security, food systems and livelihoods: Competing explanations of hunger. In: Die Erde 133 (4): 345-362 CHS (Commission on Human Security) (2003): Human Security Now: http://humansecurity-chs.org/finalreport/English/FinalReport.pdf Earth System Governance. People, Places and the Planet. Science and Implementation Plan. IHDP, Bonn 2008 Etzold, B. (2008): Street Food in the Megacity Dhaka: How can we conceptualize its role within the megaurban food system? In: Bohle, H.-G., Warner, K. (eds.): Megacities: Resilience and Social Vulnerability. Source 10/2008, UNU-EHS, Bonn: 30-43 Etzold, B. (2009): Street food vending and structural violence in Dhaka. Paper presented at the 7th Open Meeting of IHDP, Bonn, April 27, 2009 Etzold, B. Keck, M., Bohle, H:-G., Zingel, P. (2009): Informality as Agency – Negotiating Food Security in Dhaka. In: Die Erde 140 (1): 1-22Food Ethics Council (2009): info@foodethicscouncil.org., Brighton U.K. Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) (1999): Science Plan, IHDP Bonn Guyer, J. (ed.) (1987): Feeding African Cities. Studies in Regional Social History. International African Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press Human Development Report (1994): New Dimensions of Human Security. Published for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). New York: Oxford University Press Keck, M. (2009): Informal food market governance in the megacity of Dhaka. Paper presented at the 7th Open Meeting of IHDP, Bonn, April 27, 2009 Keck, M., Etzold, B., Bohle, H.-G., Zingel P. (2009): Rice for the megacity. The Food System of Dhaka in between global risks and local vulnerabilities. In: UNICEF International Year of Planet Earth (forthcoming) Sen, A. (1999): Commodities and Capabilities. New York: Oxford University Press

Girl in Dhaka Copyright UN Photo/Liba Taylor

IHDP Update 2.2009

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The Human Security Approach as Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change

The Human Security Approach as a Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change Des Gasper

We need languages for transition; a human security framework adds value to languages of human rights, human development, and global public goods, through its emphases on interconnectedness and solidarity.

Key words: human security, climate change, value change

We need languages for transition; a human security framework adds value to languages of human rights, human development, and global public goods, through its emphases on interconnectedness and solidarity.

The Need For A Language About Being Human

Coffee Bay, South Africa Copyright lebeccio

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A great deal is now known about current global climate change:- the serious risks of moving irreversibly outside the climate-bands to which human societies across the world have become adapted over long periods; the now commencing and unavoidable phase of ‘early harvest’ costs that will hit poorest groups and poorest countries the most; the possibilities of a subsequent phase of major deteriorations and even catastrophe (UNDP, 2007). Much has been written also about the ethics of global environmental change. The 2007-8 Human Development Report provides a forthright introduction. To use Biblical language, from those who have little shall be taken what little they have; and the sins of the fathers will be visited on other men’s sons. From those that have, do not (judging from past behaviour rather than past language) expect much; not even sympathy or attention can be presumed.

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The Human Security Approach as Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change

Rich countries that invest massively in their own security claim there is too much uncertainty to invest in global climate security. More than is foreseen may eventually come back from those from whom much has been taken —in terms of violent conflict, migration, disease, trafficking of persons and drugs, piracy, and other forms of ‘adaptation’.

For scientific knowledge and ethical argumentation to have much influence requires more than merely publication. It requires a context of frameworks of thought that stimulate and channel attention and interest. As we have seen over the years, materials that are too uncomfortable soon get overlaid by other concerns.

The language of ‘public goods’/‘public bads’ and ‘market failures’ drawing on economics (Kaul et al., 1999) is relatively comfortable and familiar, and very relevant for understanding, but may be too impersonal to motivate basic rethinking and political reorientation. It contains little discussion of the human meaning of these ‘failures’, including the likely resulting anger, conflict and desperation that will bring further costs.

The language of economics is also in danger of misdirecting us.

The 2007 Stern Commission essayed an economic cost-benefit analysis (ECBA) of climate change for the UK government.

All foreseen (monetizable) effects were projected. The costs of global warming were seen as the consumption losses that it causes (for example because someone dies prematurely) and these were compared with the benefits of global warming and of the economic activity that causes it.

The commission concluded that measures to mitigate impending change would be enormously advantageous and the costs prevented would be vastly greater than the costs of the mitigation measures. The value principles built into ECBA mean that only monetized effects matter; a rich person’s benefits are more important, since weighted by his greater purchasing power. Distribution is unimportant as gains for the rich can outweigh costs for the poor and even outweigh the deaths of the poor. The same evaluation approach used to justify climate change mitigation is used by the UK government to justify climate-damaging airport expansion. Thus, minutes saved for highly-paid executives can outweigh, in this monetary calculus, the loss of livelihood for very poor people elsewhere as result of increasing desertification, climate instability, and sea level rise (Monbiot 2008). The key decisions in policy analysis are made before economists apply their techniques. They are the decisions that frame the issues and are built-in to the techniques about what to include and with what weights (e.g., in ECBA: monetized values), implicitly what to leave out (non-monetized values; penniless people), and the tacit assumptions about the

IHDP Update 2.2009

range of validity of a technique. For example, ECBA assumes that any type of future cost (including lost lives) can legitimately be mathematically discounted in the same way as potential monetary benefits or costs (Shue, 2006). So the poor, whose lives are already largely discounted through use of a monetary calculus in which their activities have little weight, can be ‘written off’ scientifically when the loss of their ‘consumption streams’ is outweighed by the growth of consumption streams of the already rich.

Commensuration in ECBA is helpful and legitimate when dealing with legitimately commensurated goods, where non-commensurable criteria pull sharply in different directions. Yet the appropriate advice should not be to fabricate comparisons but to seek a better option that does not involve the ‘trade-off’ (Etzioni, 1991). A series of choices about how we see ourselves determine the motivation required for ethically appropriate framing, creativity, and serious attention to any of the detailed debates on ethics of climate change.

To what extent do we see shared interests between people, thanks to a perception of causal interdependence, so that appeals to self-interest are also appeals to mutual interest? How much do we value other people’s interests, so that appeals to sympathy can be influential due to interconnections in emotion? To what extent do we see ourselves and others as members of a common humanity, or as members of a national or other limited social community (with, for example, an ethnic, religious, ideological, or economic basis of identity), or purely as individuals? This set of choices determines our interest in and response to any proposed reasoning about ethics.

Roles Of A Human Security Perspective

A human security perspective can influence how we see ourselves, others and our interconnectedness, how we think about ethics and security, and may contribute to globalization of ethical thinking and to doing globalization ethically.

The human security framework has been emergent for at least a generation, under various names, for example in 1970s conflict, peace and basic human needs research, by figures such as Kenneth Boulding, John Burton, and Johan Galtung, and in the 1980s work of the Brandt Commission, the Palme Commission, and the South American Peace Commission. It became prominent under the ‘human security’ name in the 1990s, especially through the Human Development Report 1994 (UNDP 1994).

Terms like ‘human security’ try to catch the attention of an audience and the user’s own attention; they aim to stimulate

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The Human Security Approach as Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change

and motivate. Having caught attention, they then organize it: they link to a perspective, a direction. They then aspire to influence and organize activity and frame the work. The international usage of such terms, and the frameworks that they mark, however, often seem to come and then quickly go. A few terms become established, but in the process they frequently change or lose meaning. How important, persuasive and durable is a ‘human security’ framework likely to be?

Consider a possible analogy. South Africa has long described itself as ‘a world in one country’. In this land, people from various origins including African, European and Asian have come together. Long, bitter, brutal attempts were made to separate ‘Europeans’ residentially, socially and politically from other groups, even while economic development and mass culture increasingly pulled them together. The project for a politically unified South African people won against the apartheid system that had denied a shared political and ethical community. The ‘one people’ project did not win by military conquest, but in part as a conquest of ideas and feelings: an increased acceptance of the sharing of environments and predicaments and of shared humanity.

The world as a whole is organized in some ways as a system of global apartheid—illustrated by the barriers and patrols that separate the USA from Mexico, or Spain from North Africa. Major forces pull the world together, but these can be responded to by trying to enforce separations, as did the apartheid regime in South Africa. The alternative is to rethink global systems to express an ideal of ‘one world’. ‘Human security’ frameworks contribute to rethinking the meanings of security, ‘we’, ‘self’, ‘interests’, ‘self-interest’ and ‘common interest’. Evolution away from global apartheid will be difficult. Globalization often undermines psychological security, which correlates weakly with more objective measures of security. The more the fearful barricade themselves, the more fearful they can feel.

The more they own, the more they fear losing it, even if the risks they face are far fewer than those faced by those less fortunate. However, globalization also establishes bases for real human security by building interconnections that can foster shared interests, richer identities and mutual respect. Psychologically, and in almost every other way, people are parts of bigger, indeed global, systems. Human security means broadly the security of human beings against important threats to their basic needs. It refers to the security of all people, not just the security forces or the state or the rich. A common narrow formulation refers only to the physical, bodily security of persons; or, narrower still, to bodily security against intentional physical threats. Picciotto’s definition is far less narrow: security in terms of quantity of years lived (adjusted for life quality as common in health planning, and with the normative benchmark

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of a normal human lifespan of say seventy years), against all threats to life, whether physical or not and intentional or not (Picciotto et al. 2007). Intermediate between this and the first formulation lies the widely used phrase ‘freedom from fear and freedom from want’. Even the narrower formulations of human security are radical in relation to traditional security studies thinking. The term ‘human’ is inherently global in coverage, and contains—for humans—a moral appeal. Combined with ‘human’, the term ‘security’ too makes a normative appeal, for priority. ‘Human security’ conveys a message about basic quality of life and a claim for a priority in policy.

‘Human security’ frameworks contribute to

rethinking the meanings of security, ‘we’, ‘self’,

‘interests’, ‘self-interest’ and ‘common interest’.

The ‘human security’ language adds important themes to the older language of ‘basic human needs’. First is the significance of stability in fulfilling basic needs and avoiding certain types of loss. Second is the threat of triggering fundamental damage when we lapse below certain thresholds that act as the limits to safety in pervasively interconnected systems that contain maximum tolerance levels, beyond which harm can ensue.

Third is the importance of attention to feelings and subjectivity as well as to objective life circumstances. Losses include not only the loss of objects but the loss of major meanings and even identity. A human security perspective thus involves a system of ideas: a focus on individual human persons and on stability in fulfilling their basic needs, attention to causal interconnections regardless of conventional disciplinary boundaries, and emphasis on ‘tipping points’ and felt insecurities. It includes strong attention to the contents of individual person’s lives and to human depth in understanding security. It draws on a synthesis of features from the normative languages of human needs, human rights and human development, and a framework for situation-specific wide ranging explanatory syntheses.

Human security thinking directs us to look at ordinary people’s daily lives, and at the vulnerabilities, contingencies, and consequent possible disadvantages that can arise. The concentration on the contents and fluctuations of daily life, and on specific threats and misfortunes—including ill-health, disability, displacement, death—gives a more intense, realistic awareness of the meanings of ‘human’. As in the work of Burton and his basic needs school in conflict studies we see how people seek security of various sorts, physical, economic, and psychological (Burton, 1990). Human security thinking is thus more strongly concerned with felt experience than some of the legal-led work on human rights and economics-led work on human develop-

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The Human Security Approach as Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change

ment. It focuses on the priority capacities and vulnerabilities that form the grounds for basic rights.

As in the related ‘human’ phrases—human needs, human rights, human development—normative importance is given to all living (and future) persons - everyone matters. Human security thinking adds an emphasis on the human species as a whole, and its shared security, insecurity and fragility to more individualistic human rights thinking. The emphases on shared fragility, basic requirements and felt experience give a foundation for solidarity, ‘joined-up feeling’ (Gasper and Truong 2005). By encouraging thinking deeply about all individuals, human rights language can be grounded in a way that helps to counter dangers that can otherwise arise in the use of rights language. Human security thinking extends the holistic perspective of explanation from individual daily lives through to social, national, and global systems. It examines how international, national and local level insecurities and conflicts affect and hurt individuals, and how individual level insecurities and conflicts contribute to local, national and international level pathologies. We can call this ‘joined-up thinking’. It reinforces ‘joined-up feeling’, through a greater awareness of interconnection. Awareness of effects—actual, probable or possible— on others from one’s actions may support feelings of sympathy, even responsibility; while awareness of boomerang effects— actual, probable or possible—on oneself can generate feelings of caution and precaution. A perspective of joined-up thinking, in which environmental insecurity, health insecurity, economic insecurity, military insecurity, psychological insecurity

In this photo of 1973, Frontiers within frontiers: children behind fence that separated them from the white community near Johannesburg. The 'one people' project in South Africa won in part as a conquest of ideas and feelings.Copyright UN/Pendl.

IHDP Update 2.2009

and more all sometimes strongly affect each other, reduces the significance of definitional disputes. Broad attention to types of threat and damage fits with a broad causal analysis, but even those users of a narrow physical violence definition of human security, who adopt a transdisciplinary causal perspective, are led to engage with other types of insecurity and harm, and with how people value and react to them.

Which of these connections are considered most important remains a matter for investigation and evaluation, caseby-case. Jolly and Basu Ray (2007) show this based on the national Human Development Reports which have taken human security as a theme. A human security perspective is a frame for work, elaborated differently each time, not an instruction to study the effect of everything on everything or a fixed blueprint of research design.

Issues In Global Ethics

Human security thinking might favour the changes of perspective that are needed in how people perceive shared interests and shared humanity. It extends the logic of global public goods, in particular the logic of global public health.

Everyone, the rich included, lacks health security if they have sanitized their own private space but their neighbours’ yards and public spaces remain unsanitized. Health threats respect no paper boundaries. Assuring one’s own health requires assuring decent living conditions for one’s neighbours, and not undermining them by the indirect effects of one’s other actions.

Health impact assessments of alternative international trading arrangements and other international ‘non-health’ policies are now recognised as central for global public health (special issue of Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, March 2007, 85(3)). This principle applies more broadly. Certain major bads that emanate from one’s neighbours can to a large extent not be contained: pollution, weapons, people, drugs, diseases, criminal networks, etc. There cannot be security in one country alone.

The human security perspective generalizes the public health perspective, in which disease anywhere and the conditions that breed it, form a threat everywhere. In the case of climate change, powerful groups in some rich countries until lately calculated that global warming would bring them no net harm, or even net benefits: agricultural growing seasons, for example, would extend. Problems resulting for other countries were theirs alone. It is evident though that global warming will bring not modest marginal variations in climate but possibly massive system-breaking impacts within countries and, when more fragile countries disintegrate, across countries. The past generation of inaction on climate change has left less room for

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The Human Security Approach as Frame for Considering Ethics of Global Environmental Change

debate. The delay in action and the accelerating deterioration mean that, even considering only the personal benefit of most people presently alive in rich countries, it is imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of which ethical theory one subscribes to (Climate Ethics group at Pennsylvania State University, www.climateethics.org). Arguments about the claims of future generations are no longer essential. They simply add to the necessity for adjusting structures in the countries with the largest emissions. Public goods provision cannot be merely a matter of calculation of self-interest, otherwise free-riding by selfinterested participants can destroy a system. Only shared norms, institutions and regulatory activities can bring security.

The energy for moving towards and sustaining norms of solidarity comes especially from real cases that evoke awareness of shared humanity, human fragility and feelings of unfairness.

Sympathy is fostered by attention to the personal, the individual, the imaginable and tangible. The human security perspective shares this intense attention to individuals, in a particularly vivid and realistic way due to its focus on priority requirements of physical security, food security, physical and mental health, and community membership. Emphasis on these human specifics provides a conceptualisation of what is common in our humanity. A human security perspective thus adds or strengthens attention to humanity as a whole, the human species, a community of fate that shares a fragile life support system. To an awareness of and respect for individuals it adds an understanding of human individuals, the category of human species, and a sensitivity to the specifics of human need, vulnerability and shared insecurity, wherein each affects all. Some commentators fear that a ‘human security’ language leads to subordinating human development concerns to conventional thinking on military security. But human security analysis is a reaction to such a danger, not its cause.

It encourages us to ask: whose security, and what increases security? Human security analyses have argued in detail that major reductions of military expenditures can often increase security, by redirection of efforts to fields that build democratic peace.

Conclusion How can transition occur from the wasteful, thoughtless, unsustainable style of resource use now present in rich countries?

The Great Transition project that originated at the Stockholm Environment Institute (Raskin et al. 2002; Raskin 2006) identifies three required value shifts: first, from a preoccupation with the acquisition and consumption of commodities to a broader and deeper picture of what gives quality of life; second, from an overwhelming individualism to a human solidarity, based indeed on respect for individuals; and third, from an attitude of mastery and domination of nature to an attitude of steward-

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ship for ‘Mother Earth’. Any transition needs a language that makes vivid and meaningful what is at stake, that unites and motivates groups committed to change, and that persuades enough of those groups who could otherwise block change.

Given the language and global ethic of human rights, and that of human development as the expansion of human freedoms, what does a human security perspective add? The value shifts identified as necessary by the Great Transition work (Kates et al., 2006)highlight that human rights language, and the capability approach’s ‘development as freedom’, while important, are not sufficient. Alone, they are potentially too individualistic and compatible with visions of self-fulfilment through unlimited consumption and exploitation of nature.

The emphases required—on human solidarity, stability and prioritization, prudence and enlightened self-interest, sources of richer quality of life, felt security and fulfillment, and ecological interconnection that demands careful stewardship— are more fully present in human security thinking. A human security perspective helps to ground the human rights and human development approaches in the nature of being and wellbeing. Human security conveys interdependence more than does human rights language, and adds a synthesizing approach in explanation and diagnosis. Human security acknwoledges dangers, vulnerability, and fragility, and it connects to human subjectivity, which increases its explanatory force and motivating potential.

AUTHOR Des Gasper, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague: Email: gasper@iss.nl REFERENCES Burton, J.W. (1990) Conflict: Basic Human Needs, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Etzioni, Amitai, 1991. The Moral Dimension in Policy Analysis. Pp. 375386 in R. Coughlin (ed.), Morality, Rationality and Efficiency, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Gasper, D., and T-D. Truong (2005): Deepening Development Ethics – From economism to human development to human security. European J. of Development Research, 17(3), 372-384.

Jolly, R., and D. BasuRay, 2007, ‘Human Security – national perspectives and global agendas’, J. of International Development, 19(4), 457-472.

Kates, Robert, et al 2006. Great Transition Values – Present Attitudes, Future Changes. Great Transition Initiative. http://www.gtinitiative. org/documents/PDFFINALS/9Values.pdf Kaul, I., I. Grunberg, M. Stern (eds.) 1999, Global Public Goods. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Monbiot, George, 2008. ‘Juggle a few of these numbers, and it makes economic sense to kill people’, The Guardian, February 19 2008.

Picciotto, R., F. Olonisakin, M. Clarke, 2007. Global Development and Human Security, Transaction Publishers / Springer.

Raskin, P., 2006, ‘World Lines: Pathways, Pivots and the Global Future’, Great Transition Initiative, http://www.gtinitiative.org/ Raskin, P. et al, 2002. Great Transition.

Shue, H., 2006. Ethical Dimensions of Public Policy. Pp.709-728, in M. Moran, M. Rein, R. Goodin (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy.

UNDP, 1994. Human Development Report 1994. NY: HDRO, UNDP. DP, 2007. 2007/2008 Human Development Report: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world. New York: Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Program.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

Taking Stock of the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative Scott Drimie and Timothy Quinlan

The Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative represents an international effort to develop a research and intervention framework that is comprehensive, and sensitive to differing contexts, particularly where different combinations of stressors interact.

A Rural Setting in Malawi, where SAVI research was undertaken in 2006. Copyright Scott Drimie and Tim Quinlan

What is the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative?

The Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI) represents an international effort to develop a research and intervention framework that is comprehensive in scope, yet sensitive to differing contexts, particularly where different combinations of stressors interact. The initiative emerged from a group of researchers working on environment, development, and health issues in urban and rural communities around the globe who have long been aware of the intersections and interactions among multiple stressors, and how they shape vulnerability and influence human security.

This group articulated the concern that an integrated framework for assessing and responding to multiple stressors that have differential impacts on individuals, groups, or regions, has been lacking. This is particularly important in southern Africa, where issues such as food insecurity are closely linked to drought, HIV and AIDS, conflict, and trade policies through multiple direct and indirect interactions.

Unravelling these inter-relationships requires a conceptual and analytical approach that integrates multiple processes of change and their differential outcomes on regions, households, sectors, and individuals.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Keywords: multiple stressors, southern Africa, vulnerability

The initiative started from the premise that ‘multiple stressors’ are affecting the security of individuals and populations in southern Africa in different ways. There is a need for scientists and practitioners to find ways to clearly distinguish the interactions and intersections of these stressors so as to extract the key factors that generate vulnerability and to identify practical and effective interventions.

Accordingly, SAVI recognises the limitations of single-cause explanations, as well as the limited ability of any one discipline to adequately assess vulnerability to multiple processes of change.

This article begins with a brief overview of SAVI, highlighting some of the key achievements such as the “SAVI Framework” and the emerging research agenda. Building from these, the paper considers the conceptual basis for SAVI playing the role of a “boundary organisation” more actively and strategically in the southern African region. Examples of its use by researchers engaged with decision makers are given along with its use within international organisations.

The paper ends by reflecting on the planned session at the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) conference, which aims to draw on the collective experience of scientists working within the SAVI network to interrogate its usefulness.

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Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

A “Brief History” of SAVI This brief history does not attempt to present a comprehensive overview of SAVI since its inception in 2003, although it may form a basis for a more detailed, critical review. This history attempts, instead, to document what has been achieved in order to provide a critique of its impact.

A workshop convened in Maputo in 2003 by the GECHS project brought together researchers from different disciplines to explore concerns around “multiple stressors” that were affecting southern Africa. That led to consultations with relevant government bodies such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Vulnerability Assessment Committee, Food Aid officials and non-governmental organisations such as Action Aid and CARE International, and other research groups such as the Global Environmental Change and Food Security (GECAFS) and the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid tropical regions (ICRISAT) at two workshops in Cape Town in 2004 to develop the aims of the role of SAVI. Although well received by these disparate groups, there has been a subsequent concern that the active role of SAVI as a “stakeholder” in regional vulnerability debates has been lacking since these consultations.

The initiative, however, has made some notable achievements since 2004. For example, a paper outlining an emerging conceptual framework around “multiple stressors” was presented to the ‘HIV/AIDS and Food and Nutrition Security’ conference, organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Durban, April 2005. The “SAVI framework”, presented and discussed at the consultation meetings and at the Durban Conference, was intended to characterise the form and content of the proposed SAVI programme. The Durban paper led to a journal article and the design of a research proposal, which was submitted and ultimately funded by IFPRI’s Regional Network on AIDS, Food Security and Livelihoods (RENEWAL). This project, entitled “Dealing with vulnerability: parents efforts to secure the future of their children”, was recently completed in sites in South Africa and Malawi. Led by the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the team was comprised of researchers from the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town, IFPRI, RENEWAL, Bunda College in Malawi and SAVI.

Further refinement of the SAVI framework has taken place through its practical application by RENEWAL, Oxfam Australia and World Vision Australia.

Facilitated sessions using the framework have enabled

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these organisations to reflect on their strategic directions and to work towards a more integrated approach in their programming.

An informal meeting of SAVI at the 6th Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community in October 2005 in Bonn, Germany, reiterated the concern that SAVI needed to re-examine its objectives and choose a strategic direction that would consolidate its position in the region. An attempt to develop a strategic direction to build this impetus was commissioned by the University of Witwatersrand, but unfortunately, the initiative has not had the desired impact that was initially hoped for by a range of stakeholders, particularly in terms of becoming something concrete in the institutional terrain of southern Africa.

The SAVI Framework

As indicated above, SAVI brought together scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds and practitioners involved in monitoring, assessing and addressing vulnerability in southern Africa. A key objective of the initiative was to identify and address key questions regarding vulnerability, such as how multiple stressors interact to create differential vulnerability, how responses to one stressor may enhance vulnerability to other stressors and what type of interventions influence whether a process of change manifests as a stressor or an opportunity.

The preliminary framework developed for the Cape Town consultations was an outcome of previous work by SAVI and continued to be further developed in consultation and collaboration with diverse communities in southern Africa, including researchers, practitioners, stakeholders and policy communities. The RENEWAL-funded research led

by HEARD was one example of its refinement. Its use by Oxfam Australia and others is another, as it has been adapted for planning purposes. Karen O’Brien has been the key architect of the framework and the following section draws on her paper, presented at the Cape Town meeting, entitled “Assessing Vulnerability to Multiple Stressors in Southern Africa: A Preliminary SAVI Framework”.

A simple compilation of threats and assessment of their impacts does not adequately capture the nature and dynamics of vulnerability. In particular, it does not provide a sound basis for the design and implementation of projects or interventions that reduce vulnerability and enhance human security. To understand how climate change, trade liberalisation, HIV/AIDS, conflicts, and other stressors in-

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Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

tersect and interact to influence the capacity of individuals, households, regions, or social groups to cope with shocks and respond to environmental, social, economic, cultural, and political changes, there is a need to consider vulnerability from a comprehensive perspective.

A comprehensive approach should ideally identify who is vulnerable, to what and why, and what can be done to reduce this vulnerability. Five criteria that are relevant to a framework on comprehensive vulnerability have been identified by SAVI. First, the framework needs to be driven by a theoretical model of change. In particular, the framework should represent a perspective of disequilibrium and change as a norm, rather than as an anomaly. Such a model must also be time sensitive and historically sensitive to differences between shocks, longer term cycles and temporary ‘new states of equilibrium.’ Second, the framework should focus on how different stressors intersect and interact to influence both outcomes and responses to change. Third, the framework should incorporate how current responses to multiple processes of change can exacerbate or mitigate vulnerability to future changes. In other words, it should address dynamic aspects of vulnerability. Fourth, the framework should enable interaction between scientists and “practitioners” (individuals or organisations responsible for practical interventions) to produce scientific and strategic knowledge.

Fifth and related to the point above, the framework needs to resolve the methodological challenge of producing comparable results from detailed empirical research in different locations.

The SAVI framework emphasises the role of external interventions, whether they are organised by the international community, regional or national governments, NGOs, or the private sector. Two types of interventions are recognised: 1. Those that alter the context and facilitate the ability of the community, household, or social group (i.e. unit of analysis) to respond to changing conditions (for example, home-based care programmes and skills training, amongst others); and 2. Those that attempt to influence outcomes, without actually recognising or changing the context (for example, food aid).

The ways in which policies and projects influence the context for response to multiple stressors is a key focus within SAVI.

In sum, the framework shows how cumulative and interacting stressors can undermine the ability to respond to current and future change, thereby perpetuating vulnerability, and considers how interventions may affect vulnerability, either positively or negatively.

The SAVI framework emphasises the role of external interventions, whether they are organised by the international community, regional or national governments, NGOs, or the private sector.

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Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

Its applied aim is to identify, within these dynamics, opportunities for interventions that reduce vulnerability and enhance human security.

An Emerging Research Agenda

The SAVI Framework seeks to identify how responses are linked and to identify potential “pivot points,” where stressors can be transformed into opportunities. The “pivot points” may be local, such as the provision of credit or health care, or “macro,” such as creation of linkages between economic and social policies through the modification of World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements or changing international patenting laws. The framework recognises that the capacity, or lack thereof, of individual agents may influence whether changes represent stressors or opportunities. For example, local knowledge of seeds or soils, education, or entrepreneurial ability may influence whether a farmer is able to grasp opportunities or experience stresses. When capacity is undermined by disease such as tuberculosis or AIDS, vulnerability increases and the ability to pursue opportunities that might enhance security is often limited.

Close collaboration between researchers and practitioners is essential to ensure that investigations and analyses are refined to a point of generating both knowledge and critical information for planning interventions. Collaboration can also allay misunderstandings, for example, between theoretically informed analyses of change and demands for practical information as well as regarding different answers to the question of, “Does it matter?” in relation to particular changes.

This framework, in turn, was used to conceptualise a generic research plan that links diverse communities and initiatives that address the issue of vulnerability. Such a plan can potentially involve three tasks.

b. Understanding Vulnerability

To understand vulnerability, it is important to understand the underlying processes and how they are linked to each other, for example, through the political economy of a place or region, and how they produce differential outcomes and responses. A redefinition of concepts and indicators of vulnerability may be necessary. c. Enhancing Human Security

To reduce vulnerability, it may be again necessary to frame questions and interventions in different ways. This may involve, for example, focusing not on poverty but on factors that contribute to impoverishment (i.e. adopt a multidimensional conception of ‘poverty’) and focusing not only on vulnerability (a negative outcome) but on human security (a positive outcome).

There is unlikely to be a “one size fits all” solution, but by considering vulnerability from a comprehensive perspective and building regional perspectives from the ground up, key interventions that enhance human security may become both visible and feasible. The methodological considerations described above informed the SAVI research study funded

by RENEWAL. The study was a micro-level investigation into how threats to livelihoods and welfare are perceived, experienced and confronted. The focus was on how parents plan and act to secure the future of their children. Necessarily a longitudinal and multi-site study, the study included a review of the participants’ parental strategies in relation to experiential data as well as broader scale information on processes of change identified during the course of the study.

Notably, the study initiated changes to parental strategies

a. Assessing Vulnerability

he first task is to assess vulnerability, focusing on who is vulnerable, to what stressor, and why. The objective of identifying vulnerability “to what” is not meant to regress to single stressor approaches, but to assess the dynamic pathways where vulnerability is generated, such as through the loss of livelihood options linked to multiple stressors. In practice, this entails first identifying what the problems are in particular contexts and then assessing conditions for responses, what is problematic about the responses and who benefits from them.

Maputo Central Market Photo S. Drimie and T. Quinlan

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

Briefly stated, four key points influenced the design of the study: • HIV and AIDS is one, but not the only, significant threat to human welfare in the region; • HIV and AIDS is an outcome of the interaction of a range of other processes of change; • Orthodox tools for assessment of human and environmental vulnerability are inadequate for defining the concept rigorously, let alone for distinguishing one cause from another; • Tools for understanding what vulnerability is in different contexts and for making it a useful concept in the application of research need to be able to predict the consequences of changes to different contexts.

Recognising the need to refine and contextualise the concept of vulnerability, SAVI drew upon research that revealed the multiple stresses on the region’s population, that threatened with descent into a vicious spiral of impoverishment. While acknowledging the AIDS epidemic as a singularly important factor, the emphasis is on clearly identifying the interplay of other political, social and economic factors that govern the health and welfare of the region’s population.

This project has received considerable interest from the Department of Social Development in South Africa, which may contribute funding for phase two. As the department refines its role in providing safety nets through social transfers to vulnerable children, its need for a more detailed

understanding of how parents and guardians make decisions about securing the future of these children has increased.

SAVI as a “Boundary Organisation”

The development of the SAVI Framework, its application by international agencies and its commensurate influence on a research agenda that underlay the HEARD/ RENEWAL research project provide some insight into how SAVI appeals to both the science and practitioner communities. This highlights the potential of SAVI in playing a more direct role in “brokering” or “facilitating” a greater exchange between scientists and practitioners when working with vulnerability.

Social science research has convincingly argued that what demarcates science from non-science is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behaviour known as “boundary work” (Guston, 2001). The concept of “boundary work” has been applied in studying the strategic demarcation between political and scientific tasks, arguing that the blurring of boundaries between science and politics, rather than the intentional separation often advocated and practiced, can lead to more productive policy and decision making.

Recognising both that there is no unbridgeable chasm between science and non-science and that the flexibility of boundary work may threaten some important values and interests, scholars have discussed some possible factors that significantly contribute to linking the two domains and thus stabilising some boundary work, including the identification of boundary objects and boundary organisations.

Boundary objects sit between two different social worlds such as science and non-science and can be used by individuals within each world for specific purposes without losing their own identity.

Guston gives the example of a patent on research results that can be used both by scientists to establish priority and by politicians to measure the productivity of research (2001). Boundary organisations involve the participation of actors from both sides of the boundary, as well as professionals, who serve a mediating

The second group of SAVI researchers in Malawi: S. Radebe, D. Chanika, P. Msoma and M. Casale Photo S. Drimie and T. Quinlan

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Taking Stock of the Southern African Vulnerabilty Initiative

role. They exist at the frontier of the two relatively different social worlds of politics and sciences, but have distinct lines of accountability to each. In other words, boundary organisations perform tasks that are useful to both sides and involve people from both communities in their work, but play a distinctive role that would be difficult or impossible for organisations in either community to play. A successful boundary organisation will thus succeed in pleasing two sets of principals and remain stable to external forces astride the internal instability at the actual boundary. The success of the organisation in performing these tasks can then be taken as the stability of the boundary, while in practice the boundary continues to be negotiated at the lowest level and the greatest nuance within the confines of the organisation. This dual agency has been labelled “co-production’, the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order. Boundary organisations are involved in co-production in two ways: they facilitate collaboration between scientists and non-scientists, and they create the combined scientific and social order through generating boundary objects, which is something either party can use for its own purposes.

To play this role, a boundary organisation must have credibility through strategies of engagement and inclusion of interested parties rather than insulation from them. By appealing to and balancing between multiple principals, a boundary organisation may become an arbiter of the quality of policy-relevant research. In addition, a boundary organisation facilitates the more effective flow of information, such as an agricultural extension service, by augmenting the creation and transfer of usable knowledge and coordinating science and decision making across boundaries.

It is clear that SAVI has already established itself, albeit somewhat “lightly”, as a boundary organisation. The original thinking behind the initiative was about developing an “intervention framework” that enabled responses to multiple stressors from diverse stakeholders. The development of analytical frameworks such as the one discussed was intended to support both practitioners and scientists. As such, the “SAVI Framework” has become a boundary object, providing use to both the practitioner community (Oxfam Australia and World Vision Australia) and scientists (RENEWAL, the SAVI “community of researchers”). The role of SAVI as a boundary organisation can, however, be taken much further, particularly in terms of facilitating collaboration between scientists and non-scientists and through generating boundary objects, which is something either party can use for its own purposes. To do so, SAVI needs a stronger presence in the region, demonstrating its utility to both science and non-science in a few practical ways. It should

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become a “broker” between the two communities, working as a “facilitator” or a “trusted third party”. In order to do so, SAVI requires a strategy to develop its own capacity to work as a boundary organisation such that it becomes a valued and necessary player in the region.

SAVI Session at the GECHS Conference

The SAVI session at the GECHS Syntheis Conference in Oslo in June 2009 aims to draw on the collective experience of scientists working within the SAVI network to analyse the usefulness of the SAVI framework. This is to be achieved through a review of the framework’s application in a number of projects, and by comparing it to other contemporary vulnerability frameworks. The papers presented during the session will be focussed around two related questions.

The first question is that of the theoretical soundness of the framework – does it stand up the scrutiny in light of our scientific knowledge? The second question whether it is useful.

Does it help us design good research, interpret findings and develop effective interventions? Ultimately, the session aims to stimulate debate towards refining the SAVI Framework and increasing its applicability in light of current knowledge and experience as well as science and development needs.

AUTHORS Dr Scott Drimie, Regional Coordinator, Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security (RENEWAL); Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), c/o University of Witwatersrand, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, PO WITS, 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa Professor Tim Quinlan, Research Director, Health Economics and HIV/ AIDS Research Division (HEARD), University of KwaZulu-Natal, HEARD, Westville Campus, Private Bag X54001, Durban 4000, South Africa REFERENCES Guston, D., H (2001) ’Boundary Organisations in Environmental Policy and Science: An Introduction”, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 26, No. 4, Special Issue: Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science. (Autumn 2001), pp. 399-408.

O’Brien, K., et al., Vulnerability interventions in the context of multiple stressors: lessons from the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI). Environ. Sci. Policy (2008), doi:10.1016/j. envsci.2008.10.008

IHDP Update 2.2009

Climate Change and The Global Financial Crisis

Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis Robin Leichenko, Karen O’Brien and William Solecki

Key words: climate change, globalization, financial crisis, double- exposure

Climate change and globalisation are weaving together the fates of households, communities, and people across all regions of the globe. Both processes are creating growing risks and uncertainties about the future. Both are also enhancing connections across space and time, such that actions taken in one locale have increasingly visible effects on other locales, often in ways that are hard to predict. This article explores connections between these two global processes through an investigation of linkages between climate change, world financial markets and the current financial crisis that emerged with the collapse of the global housing market in 2008.

Building from the framework of double exposure (see Leichenko and O’Brien 2008), we show how the fallout from the financial crisis has intersected with climate related risks in many areas. In particular, we explore how the globalisation of financial markets and climate change are intersecting to create new types of inequalities and vulnerabilities, undermining local capacity to adapt to climate change. Yet while interactions between climate change and globalisation are creating new threats to human security, they may also be creating new opportunities for action (Leichenko and O’Brien 2008). In the case of the financial crisis, we show how responses to this crisis can open up new opportunities for positive actions that reduce risks associated with both the process of climate change and the globalisation of financial markets.

We first describe the basic elements of the double

IHDP Update 2.2009

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exposure framework and consider how the framework may be applied to assess interactions between the global financial crisis and climate change. We then highlight the implications for climate change vulnerability and adaptation, concluding with a discussion on how the recognition of the linkages and feedbacks between the two processes can contribute to a more resilient and sustainable future.

The Double Exposure Framework As described in Leichenko and O'Brien (2008), the double exposure framework provides a general approach for the analysis of many types of environmental change and globalisation interactions. The framework’s premise is that multiple global change processes are occurring both simultaneously and sequentially, creating either negative or positive outcomes for individuals, households, communities and social groups. Within the framework, global environmental change and globalisation manifest as either gradual or sudden changes such as stressors or shocks, that have differential effects across a particular exposure frame. Depending of the focus of the research, an exposure frame might be, for instance, a spatial, political or ecological region, an economic sector or a network of institutions. Exposure results in measurable outcomes, which may, in turn, affect the processes as well as the context in which future changes are experienced.

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Climate Change and The Global Financial Crisis

In each case, exposure to global change processes is influenced by the characteristics of the change (direction, rate, magnitude, intensity, and spatial extent) and by factors in the contextual environment (institutional, economic, social, political, biophysical, cultural and technological conditions). Responses, which may include actions taken either in anticipation of exposure or following it, are conditioned by factors in the contextual environment as well as by the individual attributes of each affected actor (wealth, political access, social capital).

Outcomes depend on both the degree of exposure to each global process and on the response taken by the affected individuals or other actors (see Leichenko and O'Brien 2008 for a full description of the framework and terminology).

Figure 1 provides a simple illustration of the main components of the double exposure framework.

Processes of global environmental change and globalisation are represented as partially overlapping triangles, which manifest in a specific contextual environment, portrayed as an oval. The extent or magnitude of exposure to the processes is depicted as the intersection between the triangles and the oval.

Responses to the processes are represented by an arrow leading from the contextual environment to a square representing outcomes. Outcomes, in turn, are depicted as separate from the contextual environment to emphasise that any outcome reflects measurable conditions at a specific point in time.

Figure 1. The Double Exposure Framework (adapted from Leichenko and O’Brien 2008)

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The framework also incorporates dynamic linkages between the components, for processes may alter the contextual environment, responses may affect the processes, outcomes may affect responses, and so forth. Dynamics are also incorporated in the framework through the recognition that processes and outcomes are often reflexive. Within the figure, these types of circular linkages, which we term “feedbacks”, are depicted by the arrow leading from responses and outcomes back to the process triangles. Although the figure focuses on a single exposure frame, it is important to note that outcomes and responses occuring within one exposure frame may have widespread influences on other exposure frames both across space and over time. By emphasising the dynamic interactions between processes, responses, and outcomes, the framework aims to elicit new insights and research questions beyond those associated with separate framings of each global change process.

The Global Financial Crisis and Climatic Risk The interaction between the current, ongoing global financial crisis and different types of climatic risk provides a useful example, illustrating some of the key facets of the double exposure framework. The financial crisis, similar to most large scale disaster events, reveals underlying conditions that were hidden prior to the event, along with conditions that were quite apparent, albeit only in hindsight to some. The crisis began as a result of high rates of loan default among subprime mortgages within selected United States housing markets, but quickly spread to other locations and sectors.

As with most disasters, the financial crisis can be attributed to multiple factors. There was undoubtedly human error and bad judgment involved, and perhaps even criminal behaviour. Nevertheless, the globalisation of financial markets, the deregulation of the financial industry and the global marketing of mortgage-backed securities were key factors that promoted these risk taking behaviours. This transfer of financial risk across both space and time created a pathway for the crisis to extend beyond the confines of any local, regional or national origins.

Is it possible to identify numerous connections between the climate crisis and the global spread of financial risk. For example, the globalisation of finance contributed to increased availability of low interest rate loans, or “cheap” money, which in turn promoted urban development and automobile oriented urban sprawl in environmentally sensitive areas throughout the world (Leichenko and Solecki 2005; Leichenko and O’Brien 2008). These types of development pat-

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Climate Change and The Global Financial Crisis

terns not only contribute to accelerated rates of greenhouse gas emissions, but also increase vulnerabilities to many types of extreme climatic events including hurricanes, wildfires and droughts. Although climate variability, in itself, is considered a ‘normal’ risk, increasing global temperatures are likely to lead to increased climate variability and more extreme events, including a lessened predictability of weather and more droughts, storms and floods in some areas.

Another type of link between the financial crisis and climate risk is manifest through changes in the property insurance industry. Areas that are subject to hurricanes, fires and other weather related risks face higher premiums or a complete elimination of private coverage options. These changes in insurance practises may create new types of risks and uncertainties, which, in some cases, may require new responses and tools on the part of households, communities and local governments. We further illustrate some of the connections between climate change and financial crisis in the brief example below.

Climate change vulnerability and the financial crisis: California’s Central Valley California is the largest farm producer in the United States, producing nearly half of the country’s fruits, nuts and vegetables. According to Roland-Holst and Kahrl (2008), the agricultural sector, including the direct, indirect, and induced linkages, contributed to an estimated 6.5 percent of the state of Califonia’s value added in 2006. Most high value agriculture in California requires irrigation although much of the state is subject to drought. In the case of California’s Central Valley, a three-year drought has recently devastated many agricultural communities. Farmers have responded to the lack of rain and to limited availability of other state or federally supplied water by fallowing fields and planting low maintenance, low labour crops (McKinley 2009). The drought has contributed to unemployment and increased food prices.

Among the most vulnerable to the negative economic impacts of the drought are field workers, processing handlers, food packers, truckers and those working in services linked to agriculture as well as the local businesses that serve on these various groups. Although the drought is not necessarily reflective of climate change, it is nonetheless representative of the types of conditions that may occur more frequently as the climate changes. Broadly speaking, the implications of climate change for water availability in California and the US Southwest are not promising, and it is likely that agriculture in the Central Valley will have to adapt to new and more complex conditions (Roland-Holst and Kahrl

IHDP Update 2.2009

2008). In many instances, climate change adaptation is likely to require financial resources that go above and beyond ‘normal’ maintenance expenses. This is especially true in the case of water infrastructure, where adaptation requires increasing the resilience of water supply systems to extreme climate events. Other options, such as more efficient water allocation, will require a review of regulatory approaches, including systems of legacy entitlement and public/private cost sharing (Roland-Holst and Kahrl 2008). Yet drought and climate change are not the only crises facing farmers in the Central Valley. The collapse of the housing sector in the Central Valley as well as other parts of the state has directly impacted credit markets and local economies, contributing to a state-wide financial crisis.

Many households and communities in the

Central Valley are “double exposed” to both climate extremes and financial shocks, with the outcomes of the two shocks reflecting far more than just additive effects.

The state has a limited capacity to intervene, both because it cannot raise property taxes due to institutional and legal constraints and because there are few funds available for social services that might benefit vulnerable populations. In the Central Valley, median sale price of homes has plummeted, and there are thousands of foreclosures on the market. Local housing markets are not expected to recover until these foreclosures have been absorbed (Streitfeld 2008). Many households and communities in the Central Valley can be considered “double exposed” to both climate extremes and financial shocks, with the outcomes of the two shocks reflecting far more than just additive effects. The interactions between the two processes that are highlighted by the double exposure framework include: • Overlapping outcomes, for example, households are impacted by unemployment and higher food prices linked to drought, as well as to a loss of shelter and equity linked to the housing and financial crises; • Changing contexts for responding to shocks, for example, farmers are unable to borrow money from banks for investments in high value, drought-tolerant and water efficient crops, and homeowners are unable to find second jobs to meet higher mortgage payments due to unemployment; • Feedbacks between the two processes, for example, the economic impacts of drought exacerbate the effects of the financial crisis and vice versa.

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Climate Change and The Global Financial Crisis

Conclusion: Identifying Positive Synergies

Although the double exposure framework shows how the environmental change and globalisation interact to increase inequality and vulnerability, it also suggests that there may be synergies between the two processes. The potential for positive connections between responses to the financial crisis and the climate crisis have not gone unnoticed.

There is increasing recognition, articulated by US President Barack Obama, UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner, journalist Thomas Friedman, and others, that the solution to the financial crisis and climate crisis go hand in hand. Efforts to transform energy systems and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions can create new jobs and a better environment. With reference to the social and economic programs enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the idea of a Green New Deal has been sounded as a way to simultaneously address the financial crisis, the climate crisis and the energy crisis. One specific solution offered by the UK based Green New Deal Group (2009) calls for reregulating finance and taxation while at the same time drastically reducing the use of fossil fuels.

Efforts to transform energy systems and

dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emis-

sions can create new jobs and a better environment.

In the UK, decarbonising the economy involves increasing energy efficiency while developing combined heat and power systems and renewable energy for millions of homes and buildings. Such efforts would need to be backed by a strong legislative framework and price signals from the market that accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies, such as through the retrofitting of buildings to improve energy efficiency and the development of alternative energy sources.

The idea of simultaneously addressing both the financial crisis and climate crisis through a combination of government regulation and free market incentives is aimed at both transforming energy systems and creating new jobs. As such, it represents an innovative and transformative strategy. However, what is left out of this Green New Deal is attention to the myriad of underlying factors that make people vulnerable to the interacting shocks in the first place. The concept of adaptation, which involves strategies or behaviours that reduce the impacts of a particular shock or stressor, is generally absent from “green new deal” or “green revolution”

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thinking. The social programmes that went hand in hand with economic programmes during the Great Depression, for example, are necessary to increase resilience to both financial and climatic changes, but are not addressed through the currently proposed solutions.

Both economists and climate scientists warn that dramatic changes are underway, and that many individuals, households, communities, sectors, and regions will be confronted with impacts in the future, whether through shifts in investments and sectoral upheaval, or through more extreme weather events. The double exposure framework shows that addressing the processes by, for example, controlling global financial markets with regulations and incentives or reducing climate change through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, is necessary but not sufficient. There is an urgent need to address the underlying context that makes people vulnerable to shocks and to simultaneously deal with the uneven outcomes that contribute to increasing inequality.

AUTHORS Robin Leichenko, Associate Professor and Graduate Director, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA rleichen@rci.rutgers.edu Karen O’Brien, GECHS Scientific Chair and Professor, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. karen.obrien@sosgeo.uio.no William Solecki, Professor, Department of Geography, Hunter College, New York and Director, CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, NY, USA. wsolecki@hunter.cuny.edu REFERENCES Green New Deal Group. 2009. A Green New Deal: Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices. First Report of the Green New Deal Group. Available online at http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/2ajogu 45c1id4w55tofmpy5520072008172656.pdf Leichenko, Robin and Karen O’Brien. 2008. Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. New York: Oxford University Press.

Leichenko, Robin and Solecki, William D. 2005. Exporting the American Dream: The Globalization of Suburban Consumption Landscapes. Regional Studies 39.2: 241-253.

McKinley, Jesse. 2009. Drought Adds Hardships to California. New York Times, February 21, 2009.

Roland-Holst, David and Fredrich Kahrl. 2008. California Climate Risk and Response: Executive Summary. University of California at Berkeley. Report available at www.next10.org.

Streitfeld, David. 2008. In the Central Valley, the Ruins of the Housing Bust. New York Times, August 24, 2008.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

Climate Adaptation as Risk Management: Limits and Lessons from Disaster Risk Reduction Mark Pelling and Lisa Schipper

Adapting to climate change requires that risk management be integrated into development planning and practices. This paper identifies lessons and limits for climate change adaptation from disaster risk reduction.

Keywords: Disaster risk reduction, development, climate change adaptation Drinking Water to Assist the Victimos of Tropical storm Hanna in Gonaives, Haiti.

Copyright UN/ Logan Abassi

Introduction In April 2009, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agreed to undertake a Special Report on Extreme Events and Disasters. If initial discussions are any indication of the content of the final document, due in 2011, it promises to be path breaking. At its heart, the argument put forward recognises that risk associated with climate change is a product of human vulnerability as well as local and global environmental change, with disaster risk management well positioned to reduce risk and loss as a component of adaptation. This conceptualisation supports the framing of climate change risk as an outcome of both development and natural processes, albeit with anthropocentric forcing. Early on in its life as a policy domain, climate change adaptation to extreme events has the potential to be recognised as an activity that unfolds on both a political-developmental and technical level. Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from disaster risk reduction, adaptation to extremes, vulnerability and hazard exposure are all products of the distribution of wealth, information and decision-making capacity in a society. Academic literature on adaptation has long upheld the importance of social institutions for shaping the distribution of adaptive capacity and action, also helping to pave

IHDP Update 2.2009

the way for a developmental understanding of adaptation as risk management. In this short note we hope to outline the lessons on and limits of knowledge and action on disaster risk reduction so as to encourage further work on climate change adaptation. If the lessons learned thus far are not taken into account, there is a danger that the climate change community might both reinvent the theoretical wheel and impose unnecessarily novel structures for risk management rather than integrating with and supporting established mechanisms. Such mechanisms abound and range from the internationally agreed upon Hyogo Framework for Action on Disaster Reduction down to local, community-led initiatives. We first outline some of these critical lessons and limits, subsequently exploring a developmental framing of risk and disaster management in more detail. In conclusion, we look at the conceptual and policy openings for an integrated risk management approach to extremes associated with climate change.

Lessons and Limits

What are the limits and possible lessons to be learnt from our understanding of disaster risk reduction for future

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Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

Table 1: Some lessons and limits of knowledge for adaptation from disaster risk reduction

Field

Lessons Social capacity can extend coping or risk reduction capacity well beyond financial limits.

Governance

Mass risk reduction is best facilitated through government initiatives in partnership with civil society.

Limits The potential for private sector actors to support risk reduction has so far been very limited – are there tipping points for engagement?

Are there alternative organisational and institutional forms that can support widespread adaptation in the face of a weak state or one lacking political will?

Does risk reduction require buy-in from all stakeholders? Will lack of commitment by some adversely affect others?

Can enhance risk reducing behaviour when supported with information and regulation.

Insurance and risk transfer

Perceptions

Rights and ethics

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Can successfully spread risk over time, place and between risk categories (be redistributional of risk).

Can commercial insurance be extended to the poor without exacerbating everyday poverty?

How far can micro-insurance schemes based on local saving and social capital stand up to extensive disaster events?

Will insurance mechanisms encourage risk taking in already marginal livelihood conditions?

Risk and the propensity for risk reducing behaviour is distorted by social media.

What forms of education and learning arrangements can best stimulate risk reducing behaviour and values?

Organisations and individuals tend to be slow to accept new risks, but can change behaviour quickly after events.

What are the psychological and institutional barriers that make it difficult for individuals and organisations to accept risk that cannot be coped with?

Individuals are motivated by pressure from social groupings to which they belong, but risk can be seen as a political pawn and not taken seriously also.

How do cultural differences in perceptions of acceptable risk levels affect society as a whole?

Those at risk frequently chose to return to places exposed to hazard or to expend resources on immediate or more tangible benefits rather than invest scare resources to reduce risk from future potential harm.o.

What planning tools exist to open dialogue between those at risk and risk managers?

What tools exist to enable discussion and agreement between top-down, scientific, sectoral and bottom-up cultural, holistic worldviews?

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Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

climate change adaptation work? Recent studies on linkages between adaptation and disaster risk reduction (Schipper and Pelling, 2006; Thomalla et al., 2006; Mitchell and van Aalst, 2008; O’Brien et al. 2008; Venton and La Trobe, 2008; Schipper, 2009) observe great similarities between thinking and action with regard to the disaster risk reduction and risk management aspects of adaptation, terms which often differ only by name. It would thus follow that a search for the limits to climate change adaptation (Adger et al., 2009) could directly benefit from research on disaster risk reduction.

Table 1 identifies key lessons and limits in knowledge for the adaptation of a range of policy domains already contributing to disaster risk reduction.

Most work on disaster risk reduction has been at the local scale, examining the capacity of local organisations and communities to undertake risk reduction in the face of apathzy (e.g., Wisner et al, 2004; Schipper, 2009). A key lesson is that social capacity can extend the local limits to adaptation when financial assets are limited and governmental structures are weak, but that it is very difficult to scale-up local efforts and successes without the supporting structures of local and national governments (ProVention, 2008; Venton and La Trobe, 2008). The psychological limits to adaptation faced by those making hard choices on what to preserve when confronted by mounting climate change associated risk are less well studied (e.g. Adger et al., forthcoming). This is a key limiting factor, not only for individuals but also for organisations such as ministries, developmental NGOs and local development groups, as it is directly related to institutional inertia as well as to the entrenchment of goals and established incentives for organisational survival (Pelling et al, 2007). Hard questions will soon need to be asked in locations facing frequent and extreme hazards. Under what logic is it justifiable to invest in protecting such places as risks increase, including those that may be lost to sea-level rise? How might efforts to reduce risk inadvertently result in supporting marginal livelihoods in areas where the pressure on natural resources is already so high as to question their viability for sustaining human settlements? Work on small island states is at the forefront of this problem but has only juxtaposed economic diversity and security against specialism to maximise revenue, all the while increasing vulnerability (e.g. Pelling and Uitto, 2001). There is, as of yet, insufficient knowledge to help guide decision makers through this changing landscape of tradeoffs between security, risk and development.

Legitimacy in risk management comes partly from what is technologically and economically feasible, but also from what is perceived to be acceptable both in identifying levels of risk and in what might have to be foregone to enable

IHDP Update 2.2009

risk reduction. Just as the social challenges of early warning are proving more intractable than the technical, the social construction of disaster risks are currently less well understood than our engineering options. It is not unusual for humanitarians to express dismay when those at risk chose to spend reconstruction funding on immediate needs rather than on long-term risk reduction, for example, by sending children to school rather than retrofitting houses. A study looking at the recovery process in Nicaragua 10 years after Hurricane Mitch suggests that risk of another similar or smaller event does not prevent people from relocating to their old homes, indicating that factors other than risk are more influential in driving livelihood choices (Christoplos et al, 2009). Acceptable levels of risk are clearly deeply rooted in people’s senses of identity and attachment to place and community, but also to judgments that are built on partial understandings of risk and future scenarios. Adaptation planning must face this challenge, which is as much one of ethics as it is of education.

There is, as of yet, insufficient knowledge

to help guide decision makers through this

changing landscape of tradeoffs between security, risk and development.

Kates argues that “adjustments to extreme events… are ancient, widely implemented, primarily household based, and costly in effort expended” (2000: 9). Kates’ statement opens one of the most important areas of current work on disaster risk reduction– its cost effectiveness relative to risk management through disaster response and reconstruction.

Ironically, it was also through the Stern Report’s framing of adaptation in terms of how much additional cost society will have to bear if no immediate action is taken that adaptation vaulted to the top of political agendas worldwide. Any costbenefit analysis is fraught with methodological problems and data scarcity. It is certainly difficult to measure the benefit derived from a disaster risk reduction investment in terms of losses avoided. Costs of reconstruction, including direct loss as well as loss of stock and market share, can be calculated and are universally shown to be orders of magnitude greater than the investment required to protect structures from hazard. For example, DFID (2004) report that reconstruction costs for a new deepwater port in Dominica, hit by Hurricane David, were equivalent to 41% of the original investment, compared with about 12% extra for building the port to a standard that could resist such a hurricane. The extent

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Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

to which it is cost effective to hazard-proof multiple assets in the expectation than only a small proportion will be exposed in a given time period, however, is still open.

Faced with this challenge, risk transfer through formal and informal insurance mechanisms is part of the solution. Such transfer mechanisms are being vigorously developed by private sector interests and international financial institutions like the World Bank, as well as civil society organisations through micro-insurance programmes (Arnold, 2008). Such programmes reiterate the importance of social capital in extending risk reduction and adaptation capacity beyond straightforward economic limits. From a developmental viewpoint, some have raised concerns that the expansion of commercial insurance interests may serve to extract economic value from those at risk. The question remains, can insurance mechanisms that facilitate a more equitable distribution of wealth and risk be developed?

These are just some of the frontiers of research in disaster risk reduction that can contribute directly to the development of policy and understanding of adaptation. There are still many unanswered questions that make the transfer of knowledge less than easy. First, the increasing frequency and loss (albeit not in terms of life) experienced in recent extreme events indicate that many aspects of prevention and response capacity continue to be inadequate. This is the case in most countries, rich and poor alike. Clearly the development community has not yet learned from disaster risk reduction. Will the adaptation community be more open to learning? Can the disaster risk reduction community frame its knowledge to better promote the transfer of ideas and practices? How

do coping strategies brought on by the threat or impact of disaster relate to adaptation? If we have examples of responses to current extreme events, can these be applied to future extreme events?

Framing Risk Management Within Development: An Environmental Social Contract At the heart of social relations lies a tension between security and freedom. Hobbes imagined the social contract as an agreement enshrined in culture and formal legislation between the State and its citizens, in which the latter ceded some level of individual freedom to the former in exchange for the promise of security and the upholding of the rule of law.

This notion has been extended in the environmental social contract to show both how the distribution of environmental risks and losses in society interact with citizenstate relations and to what extent disaster events associated with climate change can be triggers for wider social, political and technical change.

Disasters are a manifestation of failure in the environmental social contract. In many disaster situations, security has somehow not been delivered by the State or other dominant parties, and this opens existing governance regimes up to legitimacy challenges. Disaster events can, in such circumstances, become a trigger for change in political, social and technological systems as social interests exert influence though politics, the market, knowledge or violence to shape the distribution and management of future risk. These moments of change also

Women and men in Andhra Pradesh in India bringing food to a celebration. Copyright by Lisa Schipper

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

The towns of Oak Ridge and Jonesville, on Roatรกn, are basically built right over the water. There are a lot of house on stilts, docks, piers and boats. When Hurricane Mitch went through Honduras in 1998, Oak Ridge was almost destroyed. The community has since rebuilt, but some consequences remain. Copyright by Littlewoodenman.

offer opportunities for political actors to assert their vision of development, be it more inclusive or elitist.

The extent to which triggers are translated into change, the balance between technological, social and political vectors for change, and how fixed any post-disaster changes become has been explored using secondary historical accounts by Pelling and Dill (2006). They find that change is dependent upon the extent to which post-disaster accounts of responsibility in everyday gossip, the media and international comment frame the disaster as an outcome of failed development. Such accounts can thus lead to the questioning of State legitimacy. Indeed, the degree to which critical actors can mobilise to present an alternative development discourse is key to the relative success of any State response to this discourse challenge, be it through acts of reform or control, of suppression or the co-opting of critical individuals or organisations. Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar is one an extreme example of a potential tipping point in the social contract being contained by the State through the denial of international access and the control of local voices of discontent. Wider examples in which disaster events have contributed as tipping points for profound political change include earthquakes in Nicaragua (1972) and Mexico City (1985) and the tsunami in Indonesia (2004). An example from El Salvador shows that the deep distrust of the Government that already existed as a consequence of the civil war ending in 1991 convinced a large portion of the population affected by Hurricane Mitch 7 years later that the impacts were caused by the Government.

The implications of this research go beyond tracking the political impacts of climate change extremes. Instead, they question existing humanitarian post-disaster practice, which has seen a mounting drift in resources from the local to the global level as humanitarians increasingly fund international sub-contractors for reconstruction. This is at-

IHDP Update 2.2009

tractive, as it allows humanitarians to rapidly disburse large sums of money and provide tangible indicators of impact in terms of houses built etc., but it undermines longer-term development goals by failing to build local skills, strengthen the local economy and support local social and political development (Pelling and Dill, 2009).

Conclusion: Openings For Conceptual And Practical Integration Living with climate change requires two modes of adaptation. First, the internalisation of risk management into the development agenda responds to increased levels of uncertainty associated with greater levels of climate variation and larger extremes in weather events.

Second, the climate proofing of development decisions for long-term investments aims to take gradual changes in climatic regimes into account alongside other future components such as demographic change, affecting investments from agricultural science to infrastructure projects.

For both modes of adaptation, the demands of greenhouse gas emission mitigation as well as the existing challenges of social justice and ecological sustainability must also be considered. Available decision making tools have already begun to incorporate long-term and gradual climate change aspects, and there is time to refine this intrinsically political process. Capacity building for adaptation to extreme weather risks that are unexpected or that exceed management capacity is, however, urgently needed. Policy responses to cope with extreme disaster risk have far reaching implications for the social and spatial distribution of wealth andpower.

This distribution needs to be changed if the risk to property and life from extreme weather events is to be reduced. Fortunately, the lessons learnt from the science and practice of

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Climate Adaptation As Risk Management: Limits And Lessons From Disaster Risk Reduction

disaster risk reduction as well as the existing institutional frameworks and organisational forms for its implementation can go quite some way in meeting this challenge. The climate change community is, however, in danger of wasting time and money re-inventing the wheel if this knowledge is not soon translated from disaster risk reduction into climate change adaptation (Schipper and Pelling, 2006).

Disaster risk reduction offers approaches and tools with which to tackle the proximate and root causes of risk.

The selection of tools depends on the political context and technical capacity of those at risk. Ideally, approaches can combine work on the proximate and root causes to ameliorate human vulnerability by, for example, improving housing standards to reduce exposure and susceptibility through participatory methods that can enhance accountability and legitimacy in local leadership. Substantial tool kits and directories of research are managed by the UN-ISDR and ProVention Consortium. The timely integration of risk management into development and climate change adaptation is likely to be best facilitated by boundary organisations that position themselves at the interface between the disaster risk reduction, the development and the climate change communities.

Examples include the ProVention Consortium (http://www. proventionconsortium.org) and the Dutch Red Cross/Crescent Climate Centre (http://www.climatecentre.org).

The disaster risk reduction community has also advocated for proactive and progressive risk management, and this fits well with climate change adaptation goals. Proactive risk management places an emphasis on investing to reduce risk before any event rather than managing risk through response. This argument has long been made on human rights grounds but recent economic arguments have had more impact on policy communities, for example, leading to DFID’s ear-marking of 10% of bilateral emergency relief funding for risk reduction. The post-disaster period offers great potential for building risk reduction into development, but there is only limited evidence that this happens. Too often, the time pressures and political expediencies of reconstruction lead to risk being built back into development. Progressive risk reduction acknowledges the close tie between risk and development and the opportunity that adaptation to climate change opens for enhancing development opportunities amongst the poorest as part of risk reduction investments.

The diversification of livelihoods or access to micro-credit, for example, can act to distribute risk and provide new livelihood opportunities.

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AUTHORS Mark Pelling, Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. mark.pelling@kcl.ac.uk Lisa Schipper, Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), 15 Floor, Witthyakit Building 254, Chulalongkorn University, Chulalongkorn Soi 64 Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand. lisa.schipper@sei.se REFERENCES Adger, N.W., Dessai, S., Goulden, M., Hulme, M., Lorenzoni, I., Nelson, D.R., Naess, O-L., Wolf, J., Wreford A. (2009) ‘Are there social limits to adaptation to climate change’ Climatic Change, 93 (3-4) 335-354.

Adger, N.W., Lorenzoni, I., O’Brien, K. (eds). Living With Climate Change: Are there Limits to Adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming) Arnold, M. (2008) The role of risk transfer and insurance in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, Policy Brief for the Commission on Climate Change and Development, accessed from www.ccdcommission.org Christoplos, I., Rodríguez, T., Schipper, L., Narvaez, E.A., Bayres, K., Mejia, M., Buitrago, R., Gómez, L., Pérez, J.F. (2009) Learning from Recovery after Hurricane Mitch Project Report to ProVention Consortium by Glemminge Development AB. Kates, R.W. (2000) ‘Cautionary Tales: Adaptation and the Global Poor’ Climatic Change, 45 (1) 5-17.

Mitchell, T., van Aalst, M. (2008) Convergence of Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation Paper commissioned by DFID, London.

O’Brien, K., Sygna, L., Leichenko, R., Adger, W. N., Barnett, J., Mitchell, T., Schipper, L., Tanner, T., Vogel, C. , Mortreux, C. (2008) Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation and Human Security. Report prepared for the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project, GECHS Report 2008, 3.

Pelling, M., Dill, K. (2009) Disaster politics: Tipping points for change in the adaptation of socio-political regimes, Progress in Human Geography doi: 10.1177/0309132509105004 Pelling, M., Dill, K. (2006) ‘Natural disasters’ as catalysts of political action, ISP/NSC briefing paper 06/01, Chatham House, London Pelling, M., Uitto, J.I. (2001) Small island developing states: natural disaster vulnerability and global change, Environmental Hazards: Global Environmental Change B, 3, 49-62 Pelling, M., High C., Dearing J., Smith, D. (2007) Shadow spaces for social learning: a relational understanding of adaptive capacity to climate change within organisations Environment and Planning A 40 (4), 867-884 ProVention (2008) ProVention Annual Forum 2008 Report: From Grassroots to Global: People-Centered Disaster Risk Reduction, April 8-10 - Panama City, Panama, accessed from http://www. proventionconsortium.org/?pageid=85 Schipper, L. (2009) ‘Meeting at the crossroads?: Exploring the linkages between climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction’ Climate and Development 1(1): 16-30.

Schipper, L. and Pelling, M. (2006) Disaster risk, climate change and international development: scope and challenges for integration, Disasters 30 (1) 19-38.

Thomalla, F., Downing, T., Spanger-Siegfried, E., Han, G., Rockström J. (2006) Reducing hazard vulnerability: towardsa common approach between disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. Disasters, 30 (1): 39-48.

Venton, P. and La Trobe, S. (2008) Linking Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction. Teddington, UK, Tearfund.

Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis I. (2004) At Risk: natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disaster, London, Routledge.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Critical Global Poverty Studies and Human Security

Local producers of Jatropha seeds explain their work and business to a visiting group of researchers and policy makers in Zambia. Copyright by Kirsten Ulsrud.

Global Poverty Studies and Human Security Victoria Lawson and AsunciÓn Lera St. Clair

Keywords: Global poverty and climate change, social justice, political economy

IHDP Update 2.2009

Introduction

The Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project (GECHS) defines human security as an integral concept, as a state that is achieved “when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or adapt to threats to their human, environmental and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options.”

GECHS’ emphasis on agency and on people’s capacity to respond to social, human or environmental threats, presumes that, for real people and communities, there is no fundamental difference between harms and threats to agency caused by entitlement failures, pervasive conditions of poverty, food insecurity, ill health or environmental changes. GECHS’ respect for people’s own capability to respond to structural and environmental conditions as well as its focus on the freedom to act are founded on the idea that there a local producer group of Jatropha seeds explains their work and business for a visiting group of researchers and

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Critical Global Poverty Studies and Human Security

Dominant Poverty Knowledge

Homeless person in West Side Broadway Copyright Ed Yourdon

policy makers. lations between conditions of poverty and environmental variability are part of a single frame. Karen O’Brien and Robin Leichenko have identified economic and environmental relations as “double exposures”, arguing that discourses on globalisation and discourses on global environmental change are often wrongly presented as separate issues. Furthering this line of thinking, we argue that the dominant poverty studies are ill prepared to lend insights for the joint framework of GECHS. We introduce the field of critical global poverty studies and argue that rethinking climate change as a matter of human security requires a critical understanding of poverty, as relational, historically grounded and embedded in global political economy. Historical relations and modernist ideas about progress and development in the minority world or global North have privileged market based forms of production, perpetuating high levels of consumption, wealth and privilege for some. We argue that these forms of economic development have produced and perpetuated poverty in the majority world, the global South, while leading to the current climate change crisis. It is ironic that these synergistic yet malignant processes are presented as separate issues by the dominant climate change and poverty discourses.

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Dominant poverty knowledge embodies the following fundamental characteristics: it is economistic and based on neoliberal premises, it is blind to the ethical and social justice aspects of poverty, and it disassociates the majority and minority worlds, depicting poverty as outside social and geographical relations. First, dominant poverty knowledge is economistic, arguing for the primacy of economic causes for poverty, and defining poverty in narrow, quantitative and aggregative terms, or solely in terms of income. Indeed, econometrics has become ‘the science’ of poverty and has been influential in discounting alternatives. This approach is also methodologically individualistic, constructing ‘poor people’ as a category that stands outside social relations.

Such perspectives present ideas and data in an ahistorical manner. They ignore the role of economic and political power differentials in creating and perpetuating poverty as well as the role of culture and the agency of people and collectives. Dominant poverty knowledge is based on neoliberal premises to the point of even privatising poverty, shifting the burden of responsibility onto individuals. Such knowledge also privatises the possible policy solutions, often by situating the task of poverty reduction under the mandates of global development agencies, which are typically driven by neoliberal aid politics consistent with the goals of global capitalism. One of the most pervasive and perverse consequences of this economistic and neoliberal view of the poor is that it ignores processes of accumulation and wealth creation that have produced and helped perpetuated situations of poverty across the globe.

Second, dominant poverty knowledge blinds us to the ethical and justice related aspects of poverty and the poor by treating poverty issues as technical matters with managerial solutions, removed from social relations. Such treatment leads analysts to ignore the fundamental importance of social relations between poorer sectors, the middle classes and elites as major determinants of lasting solutions to poverty.

The most influential global ideas about poverty follow the ethic of the market, that is, they are built on the idea that market relations are the fairest way to allocate resources.

They thus condemn those in structural traps to their own destinies and lead to ineffectual policy solutions that are later reframed as market failures. The space that the ethic of the market occupies has further consequences, as it displaces a serious reflection about the extent to which poverty is, in fact, not a market failure but a moral failure. Making poverty a technical question simply prevents ethical thinking, while the dominant perception of economics as the sci-

IHDP Update 2.2009

Critical Global Poverty Studies and Human Security

ence of poverty leads to the rejection of ethics and global justice as sources of relevant knowledge. This technocratic understanding of poverty makes the role of the non-poor’s agency irrelevant, ignoring their actual capacity to act and change the situation of the poor and ignoring the many ways in which poor people themselves are able to cope and to creatively act in seeking alternatives. Dominant poverty knowledge also dismisses the enormous importance of global norms, such as the relations between the Treaty on Intellectual Poverty Rights (TRIPS) and the lack of entitlement to medicines for the poor, or the role that global trade agreements crafted by WTO have in perpetuating unfair global systems that benefit elites at the expense of the majority.

Finally, dominant poverty knowledge disassociates the majority and the minority worlds by making poverty a problem that occurs only in the global South and by ignoring the role of global and historical economic and political relations across countries and peoples. It is, in this sense, methodologically territorial, framing poverty as spatially static and contained. Poverty is mapped or conceived as a problem of specific places, despite the fact that such places are integrally connected through a multiplicity of processes that are continuously produced and reconfigured. Methodological territorialism enhances the misguided idea that poverty is not relational while further hiding the role of the non-poor in either producing or helping to eradicate poverty. This disassociation also serves to make invisible the millions of people in advanced economies who also experience conditions of relative poverty and, in some cases, live close to absolute poverty. Perhaps the most perverse consequence of this dislocation is the blindness it fosters towards very important lessons from advanced economies in minimising poverty and protecting the poor from the negative consequences of markets and capitalism. This dominant knowledge also avoids the very serious factual question of how feasible it is, after all, to eradicate poverty. In times of unprecedented wealth, the abolition of severe poverty is less costly than the bailouts the governments of most western countries have recently showered upon selected private sector companies.

These characteristics of dominant poverty knowledge are incompatible with GECHS’ goal of human security in relation to environmental change. If poverty is viewed through an economistic lens and action is based on neoliberal premises, then this diffuses rather than promotes collective responsibility, negating rather than embracing social relations.

Very importantly, employing a similar frame for environmental change will lead society to view climate change along similar lines. The dominant discourse on climate change already assumes that we understand what poverty is and what

IHDP Update 2.2009

Migrants, who often meet at shopping malls in Southern Spain, are dwarfed by advertising images of products they often cannot afford Copyright by Dr John2005

the poor need in order to escape. It frames the relations between climate change and poverty as if climate change were a threat to our ability to reduce poverty or as if we were already on the path towards a just world, were it not for the intruding threat of climate change.

Our Critical Global Poverty Studies (CGPS) approach was developed by an interdisciplinary group of poverty scholars from sociology, human geography, philosophy, global social policy studies and economics. CGPS has its basis in a general dissatisfaction with these characteristics of the dominant perspectives on poverty, arguing instead for alternative framing principles that are more suited for an integrated, relational, agency based and equitable joint framing of both challenges. After summarising these principles, we develop four reasons for the importance of thinking about critical global poverty studies in relation to climate change.

Framing Principles for a Critical Global Poverty Studies Agenda The CGPS approach begins with the proposition that poverty occurs in all parts of the globe, both in the majority and minority worlds. CGPS thus raises research questions about the interconnected, global material and discursive dimensions of poverty processes. We take poverty to be relational, produced through material social relations and discursive processes in the context of specific histories, geogra-

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Critical Global Poverty Studies and Human Security

phies and ecologies. We analyse poverty as produced by the changing political economy of globalised capitalism across both majority and minority worlds, considering the ecological connections between human beings and the places they inhabit as key to understanding poverty. We argue that the ways in which poverty is pictured and addressed in different places are connected. How the poor are depicted in the majority world or global South, for example, helps us understand constructions of the poor and poverty policy in the minority world or the global North.

CGPS addresses the contradictions of purely market based approaches to poverty reduction. This includes critiques of the extension of market relations into almost everything and the implications of neoliberal rollbacks in institutional involvement with poverty reduction at various scales and with different profiles in different places. We explore how market based approaches to poverty reduction are related to shifts in the political economy of globalised capitalism across places. We work from the insight that market approaches to poverty reduction are deeply political despite their apolitical claims, in terms of how ‘the poor’ are categorised and who is counted as deserving or undeserving, as well as in their exclusion of care activities and relations and in how the State is reframed as a neoliberal actor in policy reduction.

CGPS analyses the cultural politics of poverty in addition to political-economic processes, posing questions about how cultural productions and discursive formations come to frame people and places as 'poor'. We investigate how these cultural productions work to reproduce poverty through processes of exclusion, exception and arguments for the remaking of people and places. We highlight the importance of spatial dynamics for shaping poverty processes, including the construction of geographical imaginaries and of spaces in which only certain things are possible. Considering the coproduction of poverty, our research attends to how people accommodate poverty while seeking to maintain dignity and civility rather than resisting either representations or material productions of poverty and inequality. We consider how global actors engaged in poverty policy coproduce bureaucratic social orders and institutional power relations while producing knowledge, also considering how people interpret and challenge both the category of poverty and processes producing it. Examining how people on the ground coproduce, contest and negotiate poverty processes, we question the strategies and politics of movements that have brought about significant changes in resource distributions.

In approaching global poverty from an ethical perspective and as a question of social and global justice, CGPS

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looks at these themes and their links to solidarity, virtues, care and social cohesion. We build a relational approach to analysing poverty with insights from development ethics, global justice and critical care ethics, as well as arguments about global social justice and social inclusion. We engage fully with participants from other places, understanding that they may define the issues quite differently. We are committed to research that raises moral awareness for global poverty and is both policy and action oriented.

CGPS is committed to producing research results for a variety of audiences and in a variety of forms, employing a many methodologies to expand the range poverty analysis and to enhance the information on poverty that enters into policy practice and action. Critical and global ethnography, qualitative field work and a range of quantitative analyses are among these methodologies. We are careful to conduct comparative research that considers the twinned dimensions of space and time, often making use of mixed methods.

In summary, we share a social constructionist political economy approach to understanding poverty. Our CGPS group views poverty as produced through political, economic and discursive/cultural mechanisms, connected and recurrent across space and coproduced by both actions and places. We argue for the simultaneous operation of material processes and social constructions of poverty, focusing on social and global justice and viewing the poor as creative agents with capacity to define their actions and futures.

Our work has clear ethical dimensions that are concerned with global and social justice. We are committed to engaging multiple audiences including policy actors, academicians, non-governmental organisations and the public. We explicitly separate policy and action, arguing that there are multiple forms of action and social change emanating from multiple places and politicies.

Relevance to Reframing Climate Change We argue that global environmental change and global poverty are integrally related sets of processes. Unlike the dominant poverty discourse, our principles provide a point of departure that may lead not only to a more socially just and pro-poor discourse on environmental change, but also toward more feasible, empirically grounded and long lasting solutions to the problem. The goals of GECHS for reaching human security as defined at the outset of this report suggest the urgent need for critical perspectives such as the principles outlined here. We think there are four fundamen-

IHDP Update 2.2009

Critical Global Poverty Studies and Human Security

Mexico City, Mexico; Copyright Terrazas Glavan Monica/UNEP/Still Pictures

tal reasons for the merging of critical research agendas relating poverty and climate change. First, it is of fundamental importance to unsettle the dominant poverty discourse and to prevent its uncritical adoption by rapidly emerging research on the human dimensions of climate change. Such uncritical adoption of a discourse that has fundamentally failed to eradicate severe poverty or to protect people from vulnerability to poverty conditions will lead to unsuccessful adaptation measures.

The uncritical acceptance of poverty and development discourses will not encourage the crucial self-reflection needed on how processes of production and consumption are linked with the dominant economic development paradigm, and how they are a primary cause of current climate crises.

If we continue along this same path, mitigation will never be achieved. Second, in the same way, approaches to solving poverty have failed to lead towards the idealised outcomes promised by elite experts, we risk similar outcomes for market based solutions to climate change. Third, reframing of global poverty as a matter of social justice and global solidarity is exactly what is needed in the reframing of climate change. There are no easy answers to complex global problems with uncertain outcomes. Precisely because of these characteristics, these problems call for protection, fairness,

IHDP Update 2.2009

acceptance of responsibility and equity. Lastly, it is precisely by seeing climate change and poverty together within a joint framework that is critical of dominant discourses, guided by solidarity and justice concerns, and informed by political economy, consumption and production that feasible and equitable solutions to both climate change and poverty may be crafted. It is by seeing both issues in an integral manner, as questions of agency and human actions and as moral and ethical challenges related to human beings with distinct values and world views that a balanced solution may be found for both mitigation and adaptation.

AUTHORS Victoria Lawson, Professor of Geography, University of Washington, and member executive board of the West Coast Poverty Center, Seattle, USA. University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195 lawson@u.washington.edu AsunciÓn Lera St. Clair, Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, and Scientific Director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP), International Social Science Council (ISSC). Asun.st.clair@sos.uib. no.

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Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising local and global equity and environmental integrity

Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising Local and Global Equity and Environmental Integrity Siri Eriksen

Keywords: Sustainable adaptation, climate change, poverty, vulnerability

The concept of sustainable adaptation has emerged from an awareness that adaptation can have unintended negative effects both on peoples and on the environment and that there is a need to qualify exactly what types of adaptation are desirable. This article describes the background to the concept, discusses the perspectives on the concept from several presentations at a session at the recent IHDP Open Meeting 2009 session devoted to the topic, and outlines some challenges ahead.

tify measures that both reduced poverty and vulnerability at the same time (see figure 1). Eriksen and O’Brien argue that sustainable adaptation measures need to specifically target vulnerability-poverty linkages, which are manifested as failure to secure well-being in the face of climate change.

The need for adaptation to be socially sustainable

The concept of sustainable adaptation grew out of a concern that poverty and vulnerability to climate change are two major challenges that need to be addressed together, and that so far, attention paid to the role of sustainability in climate change responses has focused on mitigation of emissions (Markandya and Halsnæs, 2002; Yohe et al., 2007). The climate change adaptation and poverty literatures have largely remained separate. The fact that poor people are often also highly vulnerable is often used as a justification for implementing adaptation, but whether the proposed measure will actually assist poor groups is seldom assessed.

There is a need to qualify the types of adaptation required since it cannot be assumed that all adaptations are necessarilily ‘benign’. Any and every adaptation intervention does not automatically reduce poverty and inequality, and some poverty eradication measures could aggravate vulnerability. Eriksen and O’Brien (2007) show that poverty eradication and climate change adaptation are interconnected but distinct, and that understanding the distinction, and the relation, in any given vulnerability context is important in order to iden-

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Figure 1 (opposite): Conceptual overview of vulnerability-poverty linkages and sustainable adaptation measures (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007)

Specificity of vulnerability-poverty linkages

Sustainable adaptation measures were described by Eriksen and O’Brien as activities that target the linkages between poverty and vulnerability by addressing three aspects of climate adaptation: 1) Reducing climate risk to well-being of the poor (climate forecast information, disaster management, drought

IHDP Update 2.2009

Processes

Adaptive Capacity

Climate Risk

Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising local and global equity and environmental integrity

Vulnerability-poverty linkage

Sustainable adaptation measure

Threat to lives and incomes from flood, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones in rural and urban areas

Improving early warning and evacuation procedures

Agricultural production inhibited by climate variability and change

National agricultural insurance schemes Planting of windbreakers Diversification of crops

Melting of glaciers, floods and droughts threatening water supply of the poor

Water conservation, construction of wells

Energy supply interrupted

Improve local renewable energy options

Damage to infrastructure and accessibility to social infrastructure

Make physical infrastructure and housing more climate resilient

Unsanitary conditions during flood and drought and spread of disease

Strengthen health and education facilities and their accessibility to the poor

Reduced school attendance

Adjust timing of school fee payment

Multiactivity and multilocality

Strengthen multiple economic sectors in which the poor engage Enable migration and movement across frontiers

Migration with cattle to access grazing

Improve services along livestock migration routes Ensure rights to drought grazing areas

Adjustment of crop types

Conservation and research in local strains and crop types

Social networks and informal income options

Ensure equitable access to key adaptation resources like water Investment in and support for local adaptation strategies

Construction of drought water sources and small scale irrigation

Strengthen on-farm planting of indigenous trees and enhance flexible drought access to forest

Use of forest products

Improve value adding and processing of local forest products

Deagrarianisation and declining profitability of agriculture

Enhance status and investment in small-scale agriculture

Marginalisation of non-farm incomes

Legalisation and regulation of non-farm drought incomes, such as charcoal Removing restrictions on the urban informal sector

Reduced formal employment options

Address unequal resource access structures, barriers of poor to access formal non-farm income opportunities, gender inequality

Economic globalisation

Improved marketing channels and pricing of local products, facilitate local trade

Spread of HIV/AIDS

Strengthen health and education services, target HIV/AIDS

Environmental degradation, reinforced by climate change

Disempowerment

Conflict and political processes

Mitigation of environmental change Enhanced local participation in natural resource management Enhanced democratic participation in development Bringing together of formal and informal regulatory systems in urban planning Strengthen collective management of natural resources important for local adaptation strategies Strengthen peace committees, civil society and local democratic control over development funds Strengthen social welfare programmes for the destitute

Table 1: Exemplification of sustainable adaptation actions (from Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007)

IHDP Update 2.2009

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Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising local and global equity and environmental integrity

resistant agriculture etc) 2) Strengthening adaptive capacity of the poor (diverse livelihoods, social capital, financial and technological capacity) 3) Targeting the causes of vulnerability of the poor (economic, social and political)

Some of these measures are illustrated in Table 1 below and are further illustrated in Ulsrud et al (2008). This implies that the mode of implementing adaptation measures must capture the specificity of these linkages to any given context. Initially, most focus has been on identifying these linkages and potential measures that may effectively target them in a development context. In the case of a dryland area in eastern Kenya, Lind and Eriksen found that conflicts that disrupt trade, farming and livestock rearing; the exclusion of people from accessing forest products due to conservation regulations concerning a hilltop forest; ensuing migration, landlessness, and a shift from livestock rearing to settled farming had led to a loss of drought livelihoods, as well as inequality and impoverishment. These processes comprised the local vulnerability context. In order to target these vulnerability-poverty linkages, sustainable adaptation measures could entail democratisation and strengthening of civil society and peace committees in specific, increase the flexibility of local forest management rules to allow some drought uses of the forest, as well as addressing local inequities in land ac-

cess (Lind and Eriksen, 2006; Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007).

Local Measures are Not Enough

As illustrated above, the local vulnerability context is often affected by processes such as state conservation policies or democratisation. Sustainable adaptation draws attention to the need to address such extra-local processes in addition to addressing local climate risks and strengthening local coping and adaptation strategies. Hences sustainable adaptation focuses on the local vulnerability context but is not restricted to local level measures.

Relations generating vulnerability operate across geographic levels, across geographic regions, but also across social groups and issues. These relational issues are derived from political ecological and multiple stressor explanations of vulnerability and environmental change (O’Brien et al., 2007). A focus on local sustainable livelihoods or sustainable development alone is not sufficient to target vulnerabilitypoverty linkages because these relational issues need to be considered. Sustainable adaptation is based on an understanding of vulnerability as contextual; that is, environmental, social, cultural and political conditions that determine vulnerability are continuously influenced by socio-environmental changes and transformations.

Society’s responses to these changes can create outAdaptation in developed countries too needs to be sustainable, such as constructing housing that has reduced energy requirement while at the same time being well adapted to changing climatic conditions.

Photo Siri Eriksen

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising local and global equity and environmental integrity

comes such as poverty, and both the responses and outcomes may in turn change the vulnerability context and feed back into the transformations (O’Brien et al., 2009). There are four main implications of this: first, that other than the purely climatic processes create vulnerability and people’s responses are aimed at a multiplicity of changes and interactions that make up the vulnerability context; second, that the vulnerability context varies between individuals and over space and time; third, outcomes and adaptation responses among one group may affect the vulnerability context of other groups elsewhere; and fourth, adaptation responses may affect socio-environmental transformations such as environmental degradation or climate change. This fourth implication in particular draws attention to the fact that in addition to building principles of social sustainability, that is reducing poverty and inequality, the term sustainable adaptation measures reflects the need for environmental sustainability in adaptation.

Ensuring equitable access to land, water and other natural resources used in responding to climatic variability and change is an important sustainable adaptation measure. Photo Siri Eriksen

Limits to the Poor and Vulnerable in Adapting on there is a misfit between short-term interventions, often fotheir Own

Presentations at a double session devoted to sustainable adaptation at the IHDP Open Meeting in Bonn in April 2009 (www.openmeetin2009.org) reflected that focus has so far been directed at the first three aspects of sustainable adaptation related to social sustainability in particular, while focus on the environmental sustainability aspect of adaptation is emerging. Petra Tschakert’s presentation highlighted that livelihoods strengthening and building capacity, rather than building infrastructure and services, are important to reducing vulnerability among poor groups in West Africa.

Lars Otto Næss illustrated that in a site in Tanzania local institutions are changing their focus from reciprocal relations to business transactions, thus is leading to the exclusion of the poorest. In Mozambique, other societal processes, such as liberalisation of the agricultural sector and privatisation of land are creating inequities. Importantly, Siri Eriksen argued in her presentation that influence over decisions that determine people’s vulnerability, such as trade relations and natural resource access, has to some extent shifted from local community institutions to private commercial actors.

Increased wealth and ability to manage climate variability among some actors have hence reinforced the powerlessness of the vulnerable.

Nationally, there is little space for the multiple stressor approach required for long term responses to reduce vulnerability. Sithabiso Gandure showed that in Zimbabwe,

IHDP Update 2.2009

cusing on reactive grain distribution, and the need for longer term predictable support. There are limits to people’s local strategies, many of which have great social costs, such as the separation of families. Due in part to lack of external support, local responses to multiple stressors including climate change may aggravate the vulnerability context in the long term.

Trærup confirmed that in Mozambique as well, focus has often been on natural disasters while longer term climate change concerns are seldom integrated in external interventions. While national governments often demand climate projections to be able to address climate change as a discrete issue, Scholz emphasised that such a separation of climate change from development planning is hindering adaptation. The implication is that sustainable adaptation necessitates integration among ministries at the national level but also the strengthening of local authorities capacity and power to deal with the local vulnerability context.

Challenges ahead: Sustainable Adaptation as a Global and Environmental Issue

Hans Martin Fussel, however, drew attention to sustainable adaptation as a global issue, such as in the unequal distribution of responsibility and risk in the climate change issue. This latter presentation represented a departure from the

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Sustainable Adaptation: Emphasising Local And Global Equity And Environmental Integrity

development context bias of sustainable adaptation so far. The main challenges in developing sustainable adaptation may be in extending current consideration of local equity in adaptation approaches, and addressing the global and environmental sustainability implications of adaptation. Since outcomes and adaptation responses among one group may affect the vulnerability context of other groups elsewhere and adaptation responses may affect socio-environmental transformations, sustainable adaptation is fundamentally a global environmental issue. It follows from the vulnerability context framework that forms of adaptation that feed back into environmental changes, such as pollution or loss of biodiversity, also alter the vulnerability context in a nega tive way and are not sustainable. Sustainable adaptation is not just a matter of directing the right sort of interventions at the vulnerable and poor, therefore. Equally important is to examine actions by relatively non-vulnerable, such as adaptation responses by people and institutions in developed countries.

The environmental sustainability aspects emphasises that adaptation needs to not endanger the environmental or economic integrity, neither for other groups at present or for future generations. Therefore, mitigation of greenhouse gases becomes an important part of sustainable adaptation criteria. In high emission societies in particular, adaptation to climate change needs to take place in a way that does not increase emissions and hence aggravate the vulnerability of others. Increased use of air conditioning as a response to rising temperatures may not be a sustainable form of adaptation, for example. From focusing on local level development type measures, sustainable adaptation has come to have global significance. Sustainable adaptation is required among all groups, it is not geographically or socially constrained.

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AUTHOR Siri Eriksen, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. P.O.Box 1096 Blindern. NO-0317 Oslo, Norway Email: Siri.eriksen@sgeo.uio.no REFERENCES Eriksen, S., O’Brien, K., 2007. Vulnerability, poverty and the need for sustainable adaptation measures. Climate Policy 7, 337-352.

Lind, J., Eriksen, S., 2006. The impacts of conflict on household coping strategies: Evidence from Turkana and Kitui Districts in Kenya.

Die Erde 137, 249-270.

Markandya, A., Halsnæs, K., 2002. Climate Change and Sustainable Adaptation: Prospects for Developing Countries. Earthscan, London.

O’Brien, K., Quinlan, T., Ziervogel, G., 2009. Assessing vulnerability in the context of multiple stressors: the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI). Environmental Science and Policy 12 (1), 23–32.

O’Brien, K., Eriksen, S., Sygna, L., Nygaard, L., 2007. Why different interpretations of vulnerability matter in climate change discourses.

Climate Policy 7, 73-88.

Ulsrud, K., Sygna, L., O’Brien, K., 2008. More than rain: Identifying sustainable pathways for climate adaptation and poverty reduction. GECHS/The Development Fund, Oslo.

Yohe, G., Lasco, R.D., Ahmad, Q.K., Arnell, N.W., Cohen, S.J., Hope, C., Janetos, A.C., Perez, R.T., 2007. Perspectives on climate change and sustainability’, in M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P.Palutikof., P.J. van der Linden, C.E. Hanson (eds), Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 811-841.

IHDP Update 2.2009

Challenges for Trans-border Environmental Governance in Latin Amerinca

Challenges for Trans-border Environmental Governance in Latin America Alexander L贸pez and Alicia Jimenez1

A young boy with his pet parrot in Santarem in the Amazon region, Brazil. Copyright UN/Shelley Rotner

Numerous ecological hot spots in Latin America1 have experienced rapid environmental degradation over the past decades. One of the main challenges these areas face relate to the increased internationalisation of environmental problems coupled with environmental and resource management systems that lie mostly with national governments.

For example, crucial environmental resources such as rivers and watersheds remain largely within the regulatory ambit of states. The internationalisation of environmental problems and the lacking capacity of national structures to deal with new dimensions has a profound effect on how such resources are managed and also on the potential for conflicts. This internationalisation, as it is occurring in Latin America, reveals that new trans-border governance structures are needed to enhance environmental sustainability within and between nation states. This calls for new responses and ways of effectively managing and controlling resources in an increasingly interconnected world (L贸pez:2002b). New forms of governance are needed both to improve environmental and transboundary resource management among nations and to reduce potential conflicts over these resources. In the follow1

This work is based in a report entitle: Environmental Conflict and Coopera-

tion: The Mesoamerican Biological Corridor as a Mechanism for Transborder Environmental Cooperation. The report was produced for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), under the Initiative on Environment and Conflict Prevention of Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA). Nairobi, Kenya.

IHDP Update 2.2009

ing article, we will take a closer look at the ongoing internationalisation of environmental problems in Latin America and reasons for this trend.

Drivers of the Internationalisation of Environmental Problems in Latin America

In Latin America, the internationalisation of environmental matters is, in most cases, the product of four conditions. The first relates to an emerging understanding of the international dimensions of global environmental change. Latin American countries are directly involved, both as sources and as recipients, in the global effects of environmental change processes. Ongoing deforestation, for example, is a large source of carbon emissions in many of the Amazon countries. At the same time, the effects of climate change constitute real threats in these areas as extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.

Secondly, the ongoing internationalisation of the Latin American economy also makes environmental problems a global issue, as pressures on local ecological systems tend to intensify with increasingly open economies. Economic globalisation as well as increased trade and production volumes have shown to directly result in environmen-

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Challenges for Trans-border Environmental Governance in Latin Amerinca

tal problems such as pollution, waste production and the depletion of non-renewable natural resources. The linkages between the global economy and local environmental issues are articulated in several areas and sectors. The expansion of land devoted to soybean production as the global soybean prices rise is one example. Another comes from the logging industry, with Asian logging companies increasingly moving into the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon in search of new timber resources after the exhaustion of raw material in countries like Malaysia.

The third condition has to do with the fact that a more interconnected world generates awareness at different scales about the linkages between economic globalisation and environmental conditions involving new actors. The internationalisation of environmental politics is reflective of efforts by international actors such as the World Bank and Greenpeace to influence domestic policy agendas. One such example regards a conflict that took place in 2005 between Argentina and Uruguay, in which Uruguay allowed to two transnational companies to erect paper mills near the Uruguay River on the Argentinean border. Greenpeace, an international, environmental, non-governmental organisation, got involved in this conflict, denouncing the transnational companies for the contamination of the river and promoting protest campaigns, among them, the closing of the bridges that join the two countries.

The fourth factor adding to the internationalisation of environmental problems in Latin America concerns natural ecosystems that are shared by two or more states and the trans-border externalities produced by the exploitation of the resources therein. Latin America provides examples of how trans-border natural resources and associated activities have been greatly influenced by border disputes. One example of this occurred during the 150 year conflict for the establishment of Peru and Ecuador’s borders, which ended in 1998. In the 1940s, disagreements between these two countries were sustained over the rights to the Condor mountain range.

The Brazilian arbitration argued that the border should go over the peaks of this mountain range, but in 1996, Ecuador claimed that the border had been falsely demarcated, demanding the complete mountain range. A military confrontation thus ensued, known as the Cenepa War.

The complex processes by which some Latin American states were shaped and the long history of armed and political conflicts that produced their present political boundaries did not take conservation and environmental management into consideration. Paradoxically, natural resources have frequently been used by states to draw the lines that separate them. This has typically been the case with rivers, which have

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historically been used for demarcating frontiers. The case of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and the dispute for the navigation in the San Juan River is one good example2. There are also many cases of this in South America, where the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers have an important role in linking as well as dividing several countries. As such, conflicts have emerged among nations regarding navigation, development activities and rights to resource use on these rivers (Whiteford, et al 2004). With increased internationalisation of environmental problems, Latin American countries are confronted with the challenging task of preventing conflicts and enhancing cooperation.

The Dynamics Of Environmental Conflicts And Cooperation

Over the past decade, the link between the environment and conflict has been a subject of discussion. Whereas the evidence of the links between environmental change and conflict remains inconclusive, such links have been established in many developed country contexts where natural resource issues are critical to political and economic stability as well as the pursuit of strategic goals around the world3.

Environmental factors such as natural resource scarcity and environmental degradation can, thus, be significant sources of conflict. However, a more recent literature deals with the “other side of the coin”, examining how environmental abundance can be also a source of conflict and how the process of environmental change can be a tool for peace building and even regional integration4.

Regardless of the contributions of environmental changes to conflict, peace and regional integration, it is extremely difficult to place the environmental variable as the only one shaping conflict and regional integration. Instead, environmental change appears in a multitude of contextual factors that shape and guide both the environmental variable itself, as well as its linkages to conflict, peace and regional integration. Studies that focus on environmental conflicts in general start from the question, “What is the contribution of environmental change to social conflicts?” In Latin America, the contribution of environmental change to social conflicts could be understood as indirect and/or interactive.

2

For details information on the San Juan River see: López, Alexander ed.

(2002) Conflicto y cooperación ambiental en cuencas internacionales centroamericanas: Repensando la soberanía nacional. UNA, UCR, FUNPADEM, KUKULKAN. San José, Costa Rica.

3

Excerpt from speech by Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State

under the Clinton Administration Quoted in Matthews, R. 2000. ‘The environment as a national security issue.’ Journal of Policy History, 12, 101-122.

4

See: Dabelko, Geoffrey.2008. Global Security Agenda." Environment Vol. 50

(3): 32-45; Dabelko, Geoffrey, Ken Conca and Alexander Carius. 2005. "Building Peace Through Environmental Cooperation", State of the World 2005: Redefining Global Security (Norton, 2005): 144-155

IHDP Update 2.2009

Challenges for Trans-border Environmental Governance in Latin Amerinca

This means that social conflicts are understood partially as the outcome of the social and environmental side effects of environmental change. In this context, the process of environmental change coincides with other factors that can add to the cause of conflict. In some cases, environmental change can be seen to trigger conflict, for example, when environmental change releases accumulated non-environmental social pressures.

Environmental change can also act as an aggravating factor that adds to existing pressures, which, together, generate conflicts. In the Amazon basin, for instance, the tropical terra firme soils have such a low ecological carrying capacity that they limits colonisation and agropastoral activities.

Thus, the rapid decrease in agricultural production on colonised soil inhibits capital accumulation, settlement stability and consequently the construction of stable social relations.

This situation causes permanent migration accompanied by further deforestation that, in most cases, results in open conflicts about access to land resources (López: 2000a).

In Latin America, environmentally related conflicts can occur when one party’s claim to or use of any given good negatively affects the interests of some other party, and when no alternative that will satisfy the aspirations of the parties involved exists. Such a situation may occur because there simply is not enough of the good to meet the basic needs of the parties involved, a condition known as basic scarcity. An ample supply of a valuable good, however, can also induce competition over access to or use of that good.

This type of situation explains conflicts between the indigenous population and the garimpeiros in Roraima,

Brazil, which are not generated by a strong pattern of scarcity, but rather by the richness of the subsoil. In this case, conflicts emerge because the claim made by a party such as garimpeiros to use or exploit a given good, such as gold, negatively affects the interests of some other party, in the case of Roraima, the Yanomani and Makuxi. Conflict, therefore, does not arise only in situations in which the goods or services provided by the environment are scarce (López: 2000).

As in the case of Roraima’s rich subsoil, the environmental change produced by the exploitation of bountiful resources may negatively affect one party, a situation aggravated by the rigid desire of both parties to use the good and the good’s market value.

Are National Management Systems A Constraint To Regional Cooperation?

Confronted with increased internationalisation of environmental problems in Latin America, individual states and the international community need to find new ways of managing trans-border environments that generate cooperation and prevent conflicts. This new scenario creates important challenges, thus the central question is, “What are the main problems to overcome in the construction of regional trans-border environmental cooperation? The first problem to be solved is that of the type of institution required to cope with environmental change as a transnational threat. Current structures in Latin America do not correspond to the

Maya women and men waiting for a bus in Guatemala. Copyright UN Photo

IHDP Update 2.2009

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Challenges for trans-border environmental governance in Latin Amerinca

The Silala River – Where Scarcity Results in Conflict The Silala River has its source in the Bolivian land, but with its upper basin in Bolivia and its lower basin in Chile, there is controversy between Bolivia and Chile in defining whether it is an international river. The conflict is complex. Bolivia has denounced Chile’s indiscriminate use of Bolivian water, which is affecting several Bolivian border communities, as well as the fact that Chile has not compensated in any way for the use of this resource. Chile, in turn, refutes these arguments, claiming that the Silala waters enter naturally into Chilean land, and that Chile therefore has the right to use it.

Chile further argues that the country is dependent on the river for its mining

activities in the area. This ca shows how an environmentaconflict created as a result of the indiscriminate use of a limited resource, in this case, water by mining companies in the Atacama area, is related to border conflicts, raising political tensions between two

new reality, as most of them are based on national considerations.

A second set of problems results from the way in which transnational threats are handled, which drives the reconceptualisation of national security, sovereignty and territoriality. Trans-boundary environmental problems necessarily undermine state sovereignty, so while states may claim sovereignty over natural resources, they have come under mounting pressure to manage their resources according to international norms. In Latin America, states still feel a strong link to the classical notions of sovereignty, territoriality and national interests. However, the national territorial component of the sovereignty concept is losing its importance. There are some key examples in which the existence of trans-border ecosystems has contributed to more flexible notions of national security, territoriality and national interest, central to the nation state. One such example is that of them the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC). The MBC serves as as conflict prevention tool and cooperation mechanism. Developed as an attempt to address ecosystem fragmentation using the biological corridors approach, the MBC is seen as a way to put regional integration processes in practice and find ways to protect trans-boundary resources, the management of which is affected by the political fragmentation (CCAD:2002). The MBC is defined as, a system of land use planning that features areas under various administrative arrangements including core natural areas, buffer zones, multiple use zones, and corridor areas. These are organised and consolidated in a manner that offers environmental benefits

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and services to Central America and the world. The MBC will provide opportunities for people to participate and promote investment in the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. The purpose is to improve the quality of life of the Mesoamericans (CCAD: 2002 & Miller, K. C., Elsa; Johnson, Nels: 2001). As conceived, the MBC will stretch from the southeast of Mexico along the Atlantic coast of Belize and Guatemala, continuing down the Atlantic Coast of the isthmus and spreading into the interiors of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

The Corridor will wind down the Atlantic coast of Panama and finish, for now, in the Choco region of Panama and Colombia (see figure 1). One of the most cited arguments explaining cooperation at the regional level is that, if participants perceive that they have common interests and that the benefits or the payoffs of joint actions are greater than those of unilateral action, they are likely to co-operate and then possibly form a regime. The MBC exemplifies this, having established itself as an international regime in which actions require multilateral implementation. Such multilateral implementation is essential, for ecosystems do not respect frontiers and, at the policy level, multilateral actions have more impact due to the trans-boundary nature of the resources. Inappropriate unilateral environmental management generates negative externalities for the other users, and therefore, it should be in all actors’ interest to develop collaborative management.

Although the MBC initiative was not designed as a conflict prevention mechanism, it has, in several cases, miti-

IHDP Update 2.2009

Challenges for trans-border environmental governance in Latin Amerinca

Figure 1. Proposed elements of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

(Color Code: Light green: Corridor Areas. Dark Green: protected Areas already established. Red: Proposed protected areas. Yellow: Other uses) (Corrales, Ballestero. 2001)

gated existing tensions and conflicts. One important achievement is that it has enabled the conditions to bring together several social actors that were in conflict before, such the Indigenous and Peasant Regional Organisation (ACICAFOC) and environmental NGOs. Another of its achievements is the development of policy instruments for regional environmental management. The acceptance of the MBC by organisations like the ACICAFOC exemplify how actors that were in conflict with conservation attempts and firmly opposed the MBC at the beginning, are now actively promoting this initiative and implementing actions under the MBC framework.

Another enabling factor for trans-boundary cooperationpromoted by the MBC is the development of transboundary biological corridors. These types of projects have had more positive than negative aspects, as they foster an enabling environment that helps build trust and encourage cooperation in a practical way, despite of the conflicted history of these trans-boundary areas. For example, border conflicts also exist between Costa Rica and Nicaragua and between Belize and Guatemala, but these political tensions do not prevent the cooperation of local and national groups to jointly establish projects such as the biological corridors.

The Binational Commission of El Castillo-San Juan-La Selva biological corridor enables collaborative efforts between civil society and the Belize and Guatemalan governments.

The signature of Selva Maya Memorandum of Understanding for Cooperation implied an explicit recognition of the legitimacy of both countries, starting a process of coordinated

IHDP Update 2.2009

management of their shared resources. In the Coraz贸n del MBC area, there are no political conflicts between Nicaragua and Honduras per se, but indigenous populations have been in conflict with the national governments as they feel marginalised from public policy and decision making processes.

With this biological corridor project, the governments are reaching out to many of these marginalised groups so as to find ways to collaborate with them on the resource management in the area. Here, environmental themes have been used to build trust and confidence in various trans-boundary conflict situations. The environment will likely impact other policy issues for these governments in the future.

Conclusion

The increased internationalisation of environmental problems and the limitations of traditional natural resource management within national spheres constitute major challenges for the sound and sustainable trans-border governance of natural resources. Failures to address these challenges may generate conflicts and the loss of opportunities for cooperation. This calls for new institutions for regional environmental cooperation in the region. Such efforts may involve reducing the internal territorial power of sovereign states while simultaneously guaranteeing that the state will maintain an important role in the management of shared ecosystem at regional level. Such shifts in governance structures may be a necessary prerequisite to avoid future environmental conflicts. The experience from the MBC shows that one of the

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Challenges for trans-border environmental governance in Latin Amerinca

most important payoffs of trans-border environmental cooperation, is, in fact, that they can enhance the trans-boundary governance of regional natural resources. Without effective governance, these regional natural resources could fall victim to the “tragedy of the commons”. Trans-border environmental cooperation can create conditions for environmental conflict resolution by enhancing regional cooperation.

Miller, K. C., Elsa; Johnson, Nels (2001). Defining common ground for the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, WRI. Olivares, Eduardo. 2005. Gobierno advierte a compañías mineras que autorizaciones para uso de aguas en el norte llegó a su límite http://www.olca.cl/oca/chile/mineras/agua00.htm Whiteford, S; Jiménez, A. 2004. Transboundary Waters in Latin America. In: Water Encyclopedia. Wiley Publishers.

AUTHORS Alexander Lópes, Director of the Institute for International Affairs of the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, Costa Rica.

Enauk: alexmilieu@hotmail.com <mailto:alexmilieu@hotmail.com> Alicia Jimenez, Institute for International Affairs of the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, Costa Rica.

REFERENCES Conflicto Ecuador-Perù. Global Affaire. http://www.globalaffairs.es/ Noticia-313.html CCAD - Comisión Centroamericana de Ambiente y Desarrollo. 2002.

El CBM: Una Plataforma para el Desarrollo Sostenible Regional.

Serie Técnica 1.

Proyecto para la Consolidación del CBM. Managua, Nicaragua. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicto_Per%C3%BA-Ecuador López, Alexander (2000). Environmental Change and Social conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon. Exploring the Links. Doctoral Dissertation. Department of Political Science, University of Oslo.

López, Alexander (2002a) The relationship between national environmental policies, national sovereignty and international forces dealing with environmental problems in Latin America. In Revista Relaciones Internacionales No. 62-25. Primer semestre 2002.

Heredia, Costa Rica.

López, Alexander ed. (2002b) Conflicto y cooperación ambiental en cuencas internacionales centroamericanas: Repensando la soberanía nacional. UNA, UCR, FUNPADEM, KUKULKAN. San José, Costa Rica.

The Condor Mountain Conflict One example where transborder ecosystems have contributed to cooperation can be seen in the establishment of borders between Peru and Ecuador, a conflict which lasted for over 150 years, until 1998. In the 1940s, disagreements between these two countries emerged over the rights to the Condor mountain range. The Brazilian arbitration concluded that the border should go over the peaks of this mountain range. However, in 1996 Ecuador claimed that there were mistakes in this demarcation and demanded the complete mountain range. A military confrontation (known as the Cenepa War) resulted when the Ecuadorian army settled down in area that was considered Peruvian land.

Given the difficulty in solving the conflict between Peru and Ecuador, intervention by Argentina, Chile, Brazil and the United States was necessary. In 1998, they resolved the situation by redefining the border section where discrepancies were present, according what was established in the 1942 Treaty. Nevertheless, Ecuador was given 1/3 square mile (1 km2) in the border area of Tiwinza to execute non-military exercises; it was also given the right of free navigation on the Amazonas River and northern streams, with permission to establish two commercial dowcks on its banks. An interesting aspect was the establishment of a Binational Protected Area, which is a sign for peace between the two countries and a symbol of a possibility in the joint management of areas in this mountain range (Olivares, 2005)

Shavante Indian woman making a basket using Buriti fiber from the Amazon tree and its leaves, in Mato Grosso, Brazil Copyright UN/Joseane Daher

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IHDP Update 2.2009

Imprint IHDP Update is published by the Secretariat of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, United Nations Campus, Hermann-Ehlers-Str. 10, D-53113 Bonn, Germany The IHDP Update magazine features the activities of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and its research community.

ISSN 1727-155X Editor-in-Chief: Gabriela Litre (V.i.s.d.P.) Co-Editor: Johanna Wolf, Linda Sygna and Karen O'Brien (GECHS) Copy Editor: Sarah Mekjian Layout: Tande Chilenge

IHDP Update 2.2009

IHDP Update is published triannually. Sections of the Update may be reproduced with acknowledgement to IHDP. Please send a copy of any reproduced material to the IHDP Secretariat. This magazine is published using funds by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the United States National Science Foundation.

The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of IHDP nor those of its sponsoring organizations.

Cover photo: Siri Eriksen, Selling Fruits in the Local Market

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Contact Addresses

Department of Science Studies, Instituto Venezolano de Investiaciones Cientificas hvessuri@gmail.com

Frank Biermann, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands frank.biermann@ivm.vcc.nl

IHDP- SC Appointed Members Katrina Brown

GECHS

IHDP Secretariat Hermann-Ehlers-Str. 10, 53113 Bonn, Germany ph. +49 (0)228 815 0602 fax +49 (0)228 815 0620 secretariat@ihdp.unu.edu www.ihdp.unu.edu

IHDP Core Projects ESG Earth System Governance c/o Ruben Zondervan, Executive Officer Earth System Governance International Project Office (ESG IPO), Bonn, Germany. ipo@earthsystemgovernance.org www.earthsystemgovernance.org

GECHS Global Environmental Change and Human Security c/o Linda Sygna, Executive Officer GECHS IPO, Oslo, Norway. info@gechs.org www.gechs.org

GLP Global Land Project c/o Tobias Langanke, Executive Officer GLP IPO, Copenhagen, Denmark. tla@geo.ku.dk www.globallandproject.org

IT Industrial Transformation c/o Anna J. Wieczorek, Executive Officer IT IPO, Amsterdam, Netherlands. anna.wieczorek@ivm.vu.nl www.ihdp-it.org

LOICZ Land-Ocean Interactions in Coastal Zones c/o Hartwig Kremer, Executive Officer LOICZ IPO, Geesthacht, Germany loicz.ipo@loicz.org www.loicz.org

UGEC Urbanization and Global Environmental Change c/o Michail Fragkias, Executive Officer UGEC IPO, Tempe, AZ fragkias@asu.edu http://www.ugec.org

Joint ESSP Projects GECAFS Global Environmental Change and Food Systems John Ingram, Executive Officer GECAFS IPO, Oxford, UK john.ingram@eci.ox.ac.uk www.gecafs.org

GCP Global Carbon Project Josep Canadell, Executive Director GCP IPO, Canberra, Australia pep.canadell@csiro.au www.globalcarbonproject.org Shobhakar Dhakal, Executive Director GCP IPO, Tsukuba, Japan shobhakar.dhakal@nies.go.jp

GWSP Global Water Systems Project Lydia Dumenil Gates, Executive Officer GWSP IPO, Bonn, Germany lydiadumenilgates@uni-bonn.de www.gwsp.org

University of East Anglia, UK k.brown@uea.ac.uk

Karen O'Brien, University of Oslo, Norway karen.obrien@sgeo.uio.no

Ilan Chabay

GLP

University of Gothenburg, Sweden ilan.chabay@sts.gu.de

Annette Reenberg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark ar@geogr.ku.dk

Patricia Kameri-Mbote International Environmental Law Research Centre, Nairobi pkameri-mbote@ielrc.org

Gernot Klepper Kiel Institute of World Economics, Germany gernot.klepper@ifw-kiel.de

Liu Yanhua China's Vice-Minister for Science liuyanhua@mail.mos.gov.cn

Elena Nikitina Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia enikitina@mtu.net.ru

Balgis Osman-Elasha

GECHH Global Environmental Change and Human Health

Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources, Khartoum, Sudan balgis@yahoo.com

Mark W. Rosenberg, Kingston, Canada rosenber@post.queensu.ca

Germán Palacio

MAIRS Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study Frits Penning de Vries, Executive Director MAIRS-IPO, Beijing, PR China info@mairs-essp.org

Chair Oran R. Young University of California, Santa Barbara, USA young@bren.ucsb.edu

Treasurer Sander van der Leeuw Arizona State University, USA vanderle@asu.edu

Vice Chairs Geoffrey Dabelko Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, USA geoff.dabelko@wilsoncenter.org

Roberto Guimarães

School of Public Administration, Getulio Vargas Foundation roberto.guimaraes@fgv.br

Andreas Rechkemmer, IHDP, Bonn, Germany secretariat@ihdp.unu.edu

IT Frans Berkhout, Vrije Universiteit Amstedam, Netherlands frans.berkhout@ivm.vu.nl

LOICZ Alice Newton, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Algarve, Portugal anewton@ualg.pt

UGEC Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez, University of California, Riverside, CA roberto.sanchez-rodriguez@ucr.edu

UGEC

Amazon branch of the National University of Columbia galpalaciog@unal.edu.co

Karen Seto, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT karenseto@yale.edu

Henry Shue

DIVERSITAS

University of Oxford, UK henry.shue@politics.ox.ac.uk

Harold Mooney, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University hmooney@stanford.edu

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker IHDP Scientific Committee

IHDP

University of California, Santa Barbara, USA ernst@bren.ucsb.edu

IHDP-SC Ex-Officio Members ICSU

IGBP Carlos Nobre, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Sao Paulo, Brazil nobre@cptec.inpe.br

WCRP

Deliang Chen, International Council for Science, Paris, France. thomas.rosswall@icsu.org

Antonio Busalacchi, ESSIC, University of Maryland, USA tonyb@essic.umd.edu

ISSC

START

Heide Hackmann, International Social Science Council, Paris, France issc@unesco.org

Hassan Virji, International START Secretariat, Washington, DC hvirji@agu.org

UNU

ESSP

Konrad Osterwalder, Rector, United Nations University rector@hq.unu.edu

Rik Leemans, Environmental Systems Analysis Group, Wageningen University, The Netherlands Rik.Leemans@wur.nl

ESG

Hebe Vessuri

52

IHDP Update 2.2009