Alex Arnall

Promoting Resilient Livelihoods Through Adaptive Social Protection: Lessons from 124 Programmes in South Asia

Adaptive Social Protection refers to efforts to integrate social protection (SP), disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA), the need for which is increasingly recognised by practitioners and academics. Relying on 124 agricultural programmes implemented in five countries in Asia, this article considers how these elements are being brought together, and explores the potential gains of these linkages. It shows that full integration is still relatively limited but that, when it occurs, it helps to shift the time horizon beyond short-term interventions aimed at supporting peoples’ coping strategies and/or graduation objectives, towards longer-term interventions that can help promote transformation towards climate and disaster resilient livelihood options.

Perceptions of informal safety nets: A case study from a South African informal settlement

The relevance and importance of informal safety nets that buffer poor households from livelihood hardships have been given little attention in South Africas development programmes to date. This article contributes to the understanding of informal safety nets by investigating local perceptions in a South African informal settlement. The main findings of the study are that families perform an important safety net function, but that these sources of assistance can be susceptible to social isolation. Immediate neighbours and friends also play an important safety net role, but these reciprocal-based sources of assistance may be difficult to secure. Community-wide threats can have a severe impact on peoples ability to engage in safety net transfers. Many of these difficulties stem from South Africas structural unemployment crisis. This factor is the greatest danger to the future of the informal safety net system in the informal settlement.

NGOs, elite capture and community-driven development: perspectives in rural Mozambique

This article examines the problems of elite capture in community-driven development (CDD). Drawing on two case studies of non-governmental organisation (NGO) intervention in rural Mozambique, the authors consider two important variables – (1) the diverse and complex contributions of local elites to CDD in different locations and (2) the roles that non-elites play in monitoring and controlling leader activities – to argue that donors should be cautious about automatically assuming the prevalence of malevolent patrimonialism and its ill-effects in their projects. This is because the ‘checks and balances’ on elite behaviour that exist within locally defined and historically rooted forms of community-based governance are likely to be more effective than those introduced by the external intervener.

Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: The management and maintenance of touristic nature

This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of ‘sustainable tourism’ in recent decades. Rather than preventing further destruction of the ‘natural’ world, or fostering the reproduction of ‘natural’ processes, this article argues that the tourist sector actively seeks to alter and manage local environments so as to ensure their continuing attractiveness to the high-paying tourists that seek out idyllic destinations. Additionally, by drawing on an example of tourism development, environmental change and local conflict in the Maldives, it shows how interventions by tourism managers can result in conflict with local people who, possessing different imaginaries, interests and priorities, may have their own, often long-established, uses of the environment undermined in the process. The article concludes that the growing diversity and increasing environmental awareness of tourists is currently producing a range of complexities and ambiguities that preclude any easy and straightforward environmental response by the sector, and ultimately might destabilise the Western-based tourist imaginary itself.

Resettlement as climate change adaptation: what can be learned from state-led relocation in rural Africa and Asia?

There is growing interest in helping people in developing countries cope with climate change by reframing population relocation as an adaptation strategy. However, there is also ongoing uncertainty surrounding what the advantages and disadvantages of resettling poor and vulnerable communities might be. This article helps address this knowledge gap by considering what might be learned from recent and ongoing state-led relocation programmes in rural Africa and Asia. It draws on a review of planned displacement and resettlement in eight countries, and six months’ experience researching a relocation programme in central Mozambique, to make three arguments: first, there is a need to uncover long-standing governmental perceptions of rural populations and the ways in which these affect state-led responses to climate shocks and stresses; second, it is necessary to develop a more sophisticated understanding of human choice, volition and self-determination during resettlement as adaptation; and third, greater attention should be paid to how development narratives are generated, transmitted and internalized during climate-induced relocations. Taking into account socioeconomic, political and historical realities in these ways will help to avoid situations in which present-day interventions to assist populations experiencing or threatened by climate displacement simply repeat or reinforce past injustices.

Here and now: perceptions of Indian Ocean islanders on the climate change and migration nexus

ABSTRACT Empirical studies exploring the links between climate change and migration are increasing. Often, perceptions are not fully explored from the people most affected by the climate change and migration nexus. This article contributes to filling this gap by eliciting and analysing perceptions regarding climate change and migration from an understudied population labelled as being amongst those most immediately and directly affected by climate change: Indian Ocean islanders. Open-ended, semi-structured interviews were conducted in two case-study communities in Maldives (Kaafu Guraidhoo with 17 interviews and Raa Dhuvafaaru with 18 interviews) and two case-study communities in Lakshadweep, India (Kavaratti with 35 interviews and Minicoy with 26 interviews). The results present the interviewees’ perceptions of climatic variability and change that they experience; how they perceive the causes of these changes; and links to migration decisions. The interviews demonstrate that perceptions of climate change, of migration, and of the links or lack thereof between the two are centred on the interviewees’ own experiences, their own locations, and the immediate timeframe. External information and direction have limited influence. Their perceptions are framed as being the ‘here and now’ through topophilia (here) and tempophilia (now). The islanders’ views do not avoid, but rather encompass, long-term livelihoods and the future. Such a future might be in another location, but the anchor is expressing future hopes and aspirations through the here and now. It is not linked to the wide-scale, long-term issue of climate change.