Social Development - RICC: Background

Proposed Framework on the Role of Local Institutions in Adaptation to Climate Change

The popular consensus on the reality of climate change, its human causes, and the severity of its impacts is perhaps no more than a decade old. Yet, a large proportion of the scholarly and policy literature holds that poor, natural resource-dependent rural households will bear a disproportionate burden of its adverse impacts: droughts, famines, floods, variability in rainfall, storms, coastal inundation, ecosystem degradation, heat waves, fires, epidemics, and even conflicts. In some parts of the world, these effects may already be in play with potentially disastrous consequences for the poor (Adger et al. 2005, Adger et al. 2007). But the rural poor have also successfully faced threats linked to climate variability in the past, even if climate change likely increases the expected frequency and intensity of such threats (Mortimore and Adams 2001, Scoones 2001). The success of historically developed adaptation practices among the rural poor depends crucially on the nature of prevailing formal and informal rural institutions.

Future efforts to address climate change and craft strategic initiatives to enhance rural poor's adaptive capacity can therefore profitably examine historical adaptive responses, their institutional context and correlates, and the role of institutions in facilitating adaptation. Indeed, documenting, understanding, and learning from past strategies, and crafting interventions that strengthen historically proven collective efforts is a critical first step and potentially one of the most effective mechanisms in the multi-stranded effort to address the adverse drastic as well as long-term impacts of climate change.

This framework focuses on how rural institutions can help shape and enhance the adaptation practices of the rural poor in relation to climate change-induced risks and how external interventions can help strengthen the functioning of rural institutions relevant to adaptation. It presents a brief typology of rural institutions using the familiar distinction between public, civic, and private sectors, surveys some important recent work on adaptation, and then outlines an analytical framework through which to view the relationship between rural institutions, adaptation due to climate change, and livelihoods of the rural poor. It applies this analytical framework to 104 cases of adaptation practices drawn from the UNFCCC's coping strategies database. The framework finally brings these points together to advance an initial set of arguments about how local rural institutions can serve as anchors to strengthen adaptation practices of the rural poor.

Two recent major surveys of climate change and its impacts have identified many areas in which there is now significant scientific consensus about the significant adverse impacts of climate change on agricultural, food, water, coastal, social, and ecological systems (IPCC 2007a, 2007b, Stern 2006). The available scientific evidence makes it evident that climate change will impose significant stress on rural livelihoods in many parts of the world. Given the nature of climate change hazards - droughts, heat waves, flooding, and storms, among others - these stresses will both reduce existing livelihood options and even more importantly, make them more unpredictable, especially in semi arid, mountainous, polar, and coastal ecological environments (Rosenzweig and Parry 1994, Pimental 1999, Yohe and Tol 2002).

Although there is significant consensus about the generally adverse impacts of climate change on rural populations, we face major uncertainties in how particular locations and groups will be affected by climate change. Policy interventions can therefore benefit from a focus improving the adaptive capacity of disadvantaged rural populations, rather than on identifying how a given group of rural poor in a particular area will be affected by climate change. Efforts to reduce vulnerability and enhance adaptive capacity of at-risk-groups need to address social processes leading rural poor into vulnerable conditions, and structural inequalities that are often at the root of social-environmental vulnerabilities (Thomkins et al. under review).

Climate change creates the possibility that many more households in vulnerable regions could periodically be driven into destitution and hunger and find it difficult afterwards to recover. Development strategies and institutional interventions that focus simply on improving total benefits to households without taking into account how households can address fluctuations in their livelihoods seem ill-suited to address the impacts of climate change. They are ill suited for two reasons. On the one hand, they ignore the most important characteristics of climate-related stresses - increased riskiness of livelihoods. On the other hand, they ignore the very real concerns of the rural poor about preventing hunger and destitution. A long tradition of scholarship in the social sciences has argued about the extent to which many rural households live close to the margins of subsistence (Scott 1976, Wolf 1969).

To strengthen the adaptive capacity of the rural poor, therefore, governments and other external actors need to strengthen and take advantage of already existing strategies that many households and social groups use collectively or singly. Examining the environmental risks that rural populations have historically faced, their cultural responses to these risks, and the institutional configurations that facilitate individual and collective adaptation strategies is therefore a fruitful area of inquiry and policy analysis for generating effective coordination with external interventions.

A policy-relevant framework for examining adaptation practices in the context of rural institutions and livelihoods needs to be sufficiently general to cover the many empirical examples of adaptation practices used by different social groups, but also needs to be based on an analytical approach that takes into account the most important characteristics of the impacts of climate change on rural livelihoods - likely increases in environmental risks, reduction in livelihoods opportunities, and stresses on existing social institutions.

The basic coping strategies in the context of environmental risks to livelihoods can be classified into five analytical categories of adaptation responses and their combinations: mobility, storage, diversification, communal pooling, and exchange (Halstead and O'Shea1989 discuss four of these). Where successful, these responses pool uncorrelated risks associated with flows of benefits from different sources.

Mobility is perhaps the most common and seemingly natural responses to environmental risks. It pools risks across space, and is especially successful in combination with clear information about potential precipitation failures.

Storage pools risks across time. When combined with well constructed infrastructure, low levels of perishability, and high level of coordination across households and social groups, it is an effective measure against even complete livelihood failures at a given point in time.

Diversification pools risks across assets owned by households or collectives. Highly varied in form, it can occur in relation to productive and non-assets, consumption strategies, and employment opportunities. It is reliable to the extent benefit flows from assets are subject to risks and risks have different impacts on the benefit streams from different assets.

Communal pooling refers to adaptation responses involving joint ownership of assets and resources; sharing of wealth, labor, or incomes from particular activities across households, or mobilization and use of resources that are held collectively during times of scarcity. It pools risks across households.

Exchange is perhaps the most versatile of adaptation responses, and can substitute for the first four when the rural poor have access to markets. It often requires high levels of specialization and institutionalization of exchange relations: consider as an example, buying insurance to cover risks of crop failure.

Four important points needs to be kept in mind about the adaptation practices mentioned above. All depend on specific institutional arrangements -- adaptation never occurs in an institutional vacuum.

First, all adaptation practices require property rights, norms of trust are necessary for exchange, storage requires monitoring and sanctions, mobility cannot occur without institutions that provide information about the spatial structure of variability, and agricultural extension institutions can facilitate diversification.

Two, adaptation practices are more or less likely depending on the social and economic endowments, networks of relationships, and access to resources and power that households and communities have. For example, the poor are more likely to migrate in response to crop failure; the rich more likely to rely on storage and exchange.

Three, the practices described above have natural affinities and incompatibilities. Storage and mobility tend not to go together. Other combinations complement each other: storage and exchange can play off temporal variability against spatial variability (Halstead and O'Shea 1989: 4).

Finally, the above classes of adaptation practices are oriented to manage risks. Their effectiveness can be enhanced by external interventions and local collective action in four ways: through institutions that help provide information to reduce unpredictability associated with climate-related events and trends; technical advances leading to higher crop or resource productivity, financial and investment supports that make the adoption of technological changes more widespread, and leadership interventions that reduce the costs of collective action (see figure 1).

Local Institutions and Climate Impacts on Livelihoods

In the figure below, local rural institutions affect climate impacts on livelihoods in three ways. They structure output and environmental risks and variability. They create the incentive framework within which present households and collectives settle upon adaptation practices. And then are the medium for external interventions to reinforce or undermine existing adaptation practices.

In this context, greater attention to the reasons why households and collectives opt for one type of adaptation practice vs. another is necessary if external interventions are to reinforce the adaptive capacity of the rural poor. Social groups that do not have secure rights to land will find it more difficult to diversify asset portfolios or engage in exchange. Lacking access to capital and infrastructure, groups may be unable to use either storage or exchange to address environmental risks. Without access to markets, social groups may pursue ways of storing their harvest carefully and need to invest resources into storage infrastructure. It is especially important to attend to these empirical patterns because reliance on particular adaptation practices can have lasting implications for the extent to which the rural poor can adapt either successfully or sustainably to future risks. MRI: Discussion Image 1

Case Evidence on Adaptation Practices and Rural Institutions

The cases collected in the UNFCCC database form a useful empirical basis for assessing the usefulness of the framework represented in figure 1. The 104 analyzed cases are distributed across 39 countries, with a preponderance from Africa (37) and Asia (54). The specific adaptation strategies identified and discussed in the 104 cases can be classified either as individual illustrations or examples of combinations of the five different categories of adaptation practices in figure 1.

Preliminary Observations

The evidence in the cases presents some useful, even provocative patterns. Perhaps the most interesting ones concern the absence of mobility in the examined cases (see table 1), and the occurrence of exchange only in combination with at least one other type of adaptation practice. For exchange to occur, households and communities must earlier have adopted other adaptation practices. Table 1 also suggests that the most common classes of adaptation responses are diversification and communal pooling on their own, and diversification and exchange as a pair.

MRI Discussion: Image 2

The data also show other interesting patterns. In nearly all cases, local institutions are necessary enablers of the capacity of households and social groups to deploy specific adaptation practices (see table 2). In 72 cases, the primary structuring influence comes for adaptation flows from local institutions. In 32 other cases, local institutions work in conjunction with external interventions. The inference is evident - without local institutions, rural poor groups will find it far costlier to pursue any adaptation practice relevant to their needs. Table 2 also indicates that when rural institutions work in conjunction with external interventions, it is more likely that benefits from adaptation practices will be shared more widely in the collective.

MRI Discussion: Image 3

Mapping Types of Local Institutions to Adaptation Strategies

Given the importance of institutions to adaptation practices, it is critical to attempt to establish how different kinds of institutions may reinforce particular combinations of adaptation practices. Although the UNFCCC data do not provide detailed evidence on the subject, it is nonetheless possible to generalize in a preliminary way about how public, civic, and private rural institutions may relate to specific classes of adaptation practices (see figure 2). The connections depicted in the figure are at best preliminary, and need substantial further work and elaboration.

MRI Discussion: Image 4

The figure essentially takes the right half of figure 1 as the domain relevant for external interventions and identifies the four main ways in which specific institution types can reinforce different livelihoods practices:

information
technological innovation
financial investment
leadership to reduce the costs of collective action.

The figure suggests that public sector institutions are more likely to facilitate adaptation strategies related to communal pooling, diversification, and storage owing to their command over authoritative action, and ability to channel technical and financial inputs into rural areas. Civic sector institutions are more flexible that those in either private or public sector, and depending on need may help strengthen all the different adaptation strategies. Finally, private sector organizations, because of their access to financial resources are likely to have special expertise in promoting exchange and diversification, but may also be able to advance communal pooling if one takes into account not-for-profit service organizations.

Conclusion

This framwork presents an analytical lens through which to view the relationship between rural institutions, adaptation due to climate change, and livelihoods of the rural poor. It has done so by suggesting that increased environmental risks owing to climate change and related hazards affect the rural poor in ways and through mechanisms that may be historically familiar, and for which the rural poor have often developed a rich repertoire of strategies and adaptive responses. Using the existing literature on risks and livelihoods, the framework proposes five major classes of adaptation practices that are available to the rural poor in varying measures depending on their social networks, access to resources, and asset portfolios: mobility, storage, diversification, communal pooling, and exchange. Using data from the UNFCCC's local coping strategies database, the framework identifies empirical patterns in the incidence and compatibility of these strategies. It also suggests some of the ways in which different types of rural institutions in the public, civic, and private sector may be able to use informational, technical, financial, and leadership inputs to strengthen the adaptation practices of the rural poor.

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