Anne Jerneck

Why resilience is unappealing to social science : Theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience

Pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would facilitate integrated sustainability research. Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences (system ontology, system boundary, equilibria and thresholds, feedback mechanisms, self-organization, and function). Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research.

Adaptation and the poor: development, resilience and transition

Risk minimization is no longer a sufficient survival strategy for poor people in livelihood systems increasingly exposed to frequent extreme events. This calls for comprehensive adaptation to climate change. Within the climate change regime, adaptation is as central as mitigation but needs to be much more explicitly addressed at local, national and global levels. There is also a need for policy renewal in other international regimes that are central to adaptation, such as environment, human rights, development and trade. Accordingly, this article addresses poverty-relevant adaptation through the medium of three discourses: development, resilience, and transition theory. Development, as a post-war project of theories, strategies and policies, spells out the links between rich and poor countries and offers modernization trajectories but few solutions for adaptation and sustainability transitions. Resilience, as an analytical framework emerging in ecology in the 1970s in reaction to ideas of equilibrium, depicts incremental changes and capacity to preserve systems within given frames but does not recognize that social change mainly implies transitions to renewed forms of production, consumption and distribution with new combinations of organization, institutions and technology. Transition theory focuses on profound multilevel changes in complex (sub)systems, thereby offering a powerful framework for theorizing empirical findings and promoting adaptation as a transition to sustainability.

Food first! Theorising assets and actors in agroforestry: risk evaders, opportunity seekers and 'the food imperative' in sub-Saharan Africa

Despite widely recognised and well-established benefits, it is difficult to adopt the multifunctional activity of agroforestry into the landscape and lifeworld of small-scale agriculture, if poverty, itself a main reason for adopting agroforestry, stands in its way. Based on participant observations and interviews with small-scale farmers in western Kenya, we explore and theorise agroforestry adoption as a process of socio-ecological and socio-technological change. Proceeding from sustainability science and a modified livelihoods approach we use grounded theory in ‘narrative walks’ to analyse adoption and non-adoption of agroforestry in a setting where farmers continuously interpret, adjust to and invest in their environment. Given the diversity and complexity of such livelihoods, the analysis is structured around reproductive and productive chains, strategies and practices defined by uncertainty and risk, and conflicting interests. Findings indicate that food secure farmers may act as entrepreneurially inclined ‘opportunity seekers’ and venture into agroforestry, whereas the ‘food imperative’(alongside the ‘health imperative’) makes it more difficult for agroforestry to take root among the ‘poorest of the poor’ who act as ‘risk evaders’. Hence, agroforestry adoption must be understood within an integrated human–environment frame recognising the socio-ecological relations of technology adoption and the wider political aspects and power structures of food security.

Searching for a Mobilizing Narrative on Climate Change

Global environmental change is real and everywhere, and so is inequality. Such a warmer, stormier, and divided world will create highly differentiated socioecological impacts and responses to climate change with stronger effects on people, places, and livelihoods that contributed the least. This necessitates mitigation, adaptation, and a solid understanding of their interactions with persistent problems such as poverty because uneven distribution of impacts and responses may reinforce existing inequality and vulnerability. Within a frame of political ecology, sociology, and sustainability science and informed by three transnational discourses—sustainability, development, and globalization—this article suggests a mobilizing narrative to think and act. In this format, the narrative must include direction (toward sustainability), distribution (global inclusiveness), and diversity (multiple approaches, methods, and solutions). It must also support arenas for multiscalar dialogs and practices while aiming to replace deep divisiveness and distorted understandings that prevent the emergence of just and synergetic responses to climate change.

Living without buffers—illustrating climate vulnerability in the Lake Victoria basin

Exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity are essential, albeit theoretically vague, components of climate vulnerability. This has triggered debate surrounding how these factors can be translated into, and understood in, an empirical context subject to present and future harm. In this article, which draws on extensive fieldwork in the Lake Victoria Basin of Kenya and Tanzania, we illustrate how exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity play out in the context of climate vulnerability and discuss how they interact in situ. Using a mixed methods approach including survey data, rainfall data and a suite of participatory methods, such as focus groups and interactive mapping of seasonal calendars, we identify how climate-induced stressors affect smallholder farmers’ well-being and natural resources. Drawing on the seasonal calendar as a heuristic, and climate vulnerability terminology, we illustrate when, where and how these climate-induced stressors converge to constrain farmers’ livelihoods. Our analysis indicates that farmers in the basin face a highly uncertain future with discernible, but differentiated, adaptation deficits due to recurring, and potentially worsening, patterns of hardship.

Understanding Poverty: Seeking Synergies Between the Three Discourses of Development, Gender, and Environment

Policies and strategies to fight global environmental degradation, gender inequality, and poverty are often inadequate, ineffective, or insufficient. In response, this article seeks potential synergies and leverage points between three significant interrelated discourses that are often treated separately—development, gender, and environment. Proceeding from a brief history of development thinking and poverty definitions, I describe indicators, strategies, and approaches to poverty reduction and gender equality. Second, I analyze how targeting, mainstreaming, and market-based initiatives all fail both to distinguish empirical from analytical gender and to incorporate environment and gender into development policy and action—despite their key role in meeting the normative goal of poverty reduction. Third, through a political-ecology lens, I suggest an integrated approach to poverty, inequality, and socioenvironmental challenges that arise at the intersections of development, gender, and environment, and for that, I draw examples from research on social and environmental change and action in sub-Saharan Africa.

Taking gender seriously in climate change adaptation and sustainability science research : views from feminist debates and sub-Saharan small-scale agriculture

People, places, and production contributing the least to climate change will suffer the most. This calls for adaptation as a key climate change response. But adaptation is surrounded by problems. Finance is uncertain and fragmented, mainstreaming into development is complicated, and technical solutions often overshadow existing social relations and institutions. From a gender perspective, and as a critical research initiative to support the building of sustainability science as an umbrella field, this article raises three pertinent questions on adaptation in the global South: what is its purpose, how can development inform it, and what institutions in terms of rights and responsibilities are core to it? Focusing on sub-Saharan small-scale agriculture, three main points emerge. Regarding the purpose, adaptation should be a transformative pathway out of poverty, ill-health, and food insecurity. Regarding development, adaptation can learn from how development theory, policy, and practice have addressed women, gender, and environment in varied settings and debates. Regarding core institutions, adaptation must address gender regimes that regulate access to, use of, and control over resources, especially those defining land distribution, labour division, and strategic decision-making power. To conclude, I propose gender-informed research questions for further inquiry.