Chinwe Ifejika Speranza

Researchers' roles in knowledge co-production: experience from sustainability research in Kenya, Switzerland, Bolivia and Nepal

Co-production of knowledge between academic and non-academic communities is a prerequisite for research aiming at more sustainable development paths. Sustainability researchers face three challenges in such co-production: (a) addressing power relations; (b) interrelating different perspectives on the issues at stake; and (c) promoting a previously negotiated orientation towards sustainable development. A systematic comparison of four sustainability research projects in Kenya (vulnerability to drought), Switzerland (soil protection), Bolivia and Nepal (conservation vs. development) shows how the researchers intuitively adopted three different roles to face these challenges: the roles of reflective scientist, intermediary, and facilitator of a joint learning process. From this systematized and iterative self-reflection on the roles that a researcher can assume in the indeterminate social space where knowledge is co-produced, we draw conclusions regarding training. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Drought coping and adaptation strategies: understanding adaptations to climate change in agro-pastoral livestock production in Makueni District, Kenya.

Using drought as a lens, this article analyses how agro-pastoralists in Makueni district, Kenya adapt their livestock production to climate variability and change. Data were collected from a longitudinal survey of 127 agro-pastoral households. Approximately one-third of the households have inadequate feeds, and livestock diseases are major challenges during non-drought and drought periods. Agro-pastoralists’ responses to drought are reactive and mainly involve intensifying exploitation of resources and the commons. Proactive responses such as improving production resources are few. Poverty, limited responses to market dynamics and inadequate skills constrain adaptations. Many agro-pastoralists’ attachment to livestock deters livestock divestment, favouring disadvantageous sales that result in declining incomes. To improve adaptive capacity, interventions should expose agro-pastoralists to other forms of savings, incorporate agro-pastoralists as agents of change by building their capacity to provide extension services, and maintain infrastructure. Securing livestock mobility, pasture production and access is crucial under the variable social-ecological conditions.En se servant de la sécheresse comme point de départ, cet article analyse comment les agro-pastoralistes du district de Makueni au Kenya adaptent leurs moyens de subsistance à la variabilité et au changement climatiques. Il s′appuie sur des données issues d′une enquête longitudinale auprès de 127 ménages agro-pastoraux. Environ un tiers des ménages ont des animaux mal nourris, et l′état de santé du bétail est un problème majeur aussi bien en temps de sécheresse qu′en absence de sècheresse. Les actions adoptées par les éleveurs en réponse à la sécheresse sont réactives et consistent essentiellement en une intensification de l′exploitation des ressources et des biens communaux, et peu en des mesures pro-actives telles que l′amélioration des ressources de production. La pauvreté de ces populations, leurs réponses imparfaites aux dynamiques de marché et leur manque de compétences limitent leur capacité d′adaptation. Le fort attachement de nombreux éleveurs au bétail les empêche de se désengager de l′élevage; ceci mène à des ventes de bétail défavorables aux éleveurs et entraîne un déclin de leurs revenus. Afin d′améliorer leur capacité d′adaptation, des interventions devraient être entreprises pour exposer les agro-pastoralistes à d′autres formes d′épargne. En outre, la capacité des éleveurs à fournir des services de vulgarisation agricole et à maintenir les infrastructures doit être développée. Dans un contexte de variabilité socio-écologique, il est crucial d′assurer la mobilité du bétail, ainsi que la production de pâturages et leur accessibilité.

Buffer capacity: capturing a dimension of resilience to climate change in African smallholder agriculture

Building resilience to climate change in agricultural production can ensure the functioning of agricultural-based livelihoods and reduce their vulnerability to climate change impacts. This paper thus explores how buffer capacity, a characteristic feature of resilience, can be conceptualised and used for assessing the resilience of smallholder agriculture to climate change. It uses the case of conservation agriculture farmers in a Kenyan region and examines how their practices contribute to buffer capacity. Surveys were used to collect data from 41 purposely selected conservation agriculture farmers in the Laikipia region of Kenya. Besides descriptive statistics, factor analysis was used to identify the key dimensions that characterise buffer capacity in the study context. The cluster of practices characterising buffer capacity in conservation agriculture include soil protection, adapted crops, intensification/irrigation, mechanisation and livelihood diversification. Various conservation practices increase buffer capacity, evaluated by farmers in economic, social, ecological and other dimensions. Through conservation agriculture, most farmers improved their productivity and incomes despite drought, improved their environment and social relations. Better-off farmers also reduced their need for labour, but this resulted in lesser income-earning opportunities for the poorer farmers, thus reducing the buffer capacity and resilience of the latter.

A Blueprint to Evaluate One Health

One Health (OH) positions health professionals as agents for change and provides a platform to manage determinants of health that are often not comprehensively captured in medicine or public health alone. However, due to the organization of societies and disciplines, and the sectoral allocation of resources, the development of transdisciplinary approaches requires effort and perseverance. Therefore, there is a need to provide evidence on the added value of OH for governments, researchers, funding bodies, and stakeholders. This paper outlines a conceptual framework of what OH approaches can encompass and the added values they can provide. The framework was developed during a workshop conducted by the “Network for Evaluation of One Health,” an Action funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology. By systematically describing the various aspects of OH, we provide the basis for measuring and monitoring the integration of disciplines, sectors, and stakeholders in health initiatives. The framework identifies the social, economic, and environmental drivers leading to integrated approaches to health and illustrates how these evoke characteristic OH operations, i.e., thinking, planning, and working, and require supporting infrastructures to allow learning, sharing, and systemic organization. It also describes the OH outcomes (i.e., sustainability, health and welfare, interspecies equity and stewardship, effectiveness, and efficiency), which are not possible to obtain through sectoral approaches alone, and their alignment with aspects of sustainable development based on society, environment, and economy.

Key features for more successful place-based sustainability research on social-ecological systems: A Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) perspective

The emerging discipline of sustainability science is focused explicitly on the dynamic interactions between nature and society and is committed to research that spans multiple scales and can support transitions toward greater sustainability. Because a growing body of place-based social-ecological sustainability research (PBSESR) has emerged in recent decades, there is a growing need to understand better how to maximize the effectiveness of this work. The Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) provides a unique opportunity for synthesizing insights gained from this research community on key features that may contribute to the relative success of PBSESR. We surveyed the leaders of PECS-affiliated projects using a combination of open, closed, and semistructured questions to identify which features of a research project are perceived to contribute to successful research design and implementation. We assessed six types of research features: problem orientation, research team, and contextual, conceptual, methodological, and evaluative features. We examined the desirable and undesirable aspects of each feature, the enabling factors and obstacles associated with project implementation, and asked respondents to assess the performance of their own projects in relation to these features. Responses were obtained from 25 projects working in 42 social-ecological study cases within 25 countries. Factors that contribute to the overall success of PBSESR included: explicitly addressing integrated social-ecological systems; a focus on solution- and transformation-oriented research; adaptation of studies to their local context; trusted, long-term, and frequent engagement with stakeholders and partners; and an early definition of the purpose and scope of research. Factors that hindered the success of PBSESR included: the complexities inherent to social-ecological systems, the imposition of particular epistemologies and methods on the wider research group, the need for long periods of time to initiate and conduct this kind of research, and power asymmetries both within the research team and among stakeholders. In the self-assessment exercise, performance relating to team and context-related features was ranked higher than performance relating to methodological, evaluation, and problem orientation features. We discuss how these insights are relevant for balancing place-based and global perspectives in sustainability science, fostering more rapid progress toward inter- and transdisciplinary integration, redefining and measuring the success of PBSESR, and facing the challenges of academic and research funding institutions. These results highlight the valuable opportunity that the PECS community provides in helping build a community of practice for PBSESR.

Special issue “Adaptation to climate change: analysing capacities in Africa”

Adapting to climate change is a challenge in Africa considering the prevailing livelihood conditions, the widespread poverty and food insecurity, the varying adaptive capacities, the weak institutional frameworks and the exposure to multiple stressors, which range from volatile financial and commodity markets and violent conflicts to extreme weather events. Adaptation is made more difficult by the complex interaction of impacts across sectors, which produces ‘‘cascading effects that are largely unpredictable’’ (World Bank 2012: 62). Two sets of dynamics intertwine and affect adaptation: the interactions between different biophysical impacts of global warming on the one hand (i.e. higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, impacts on biodiversity), and the processes triggered by weak social systems that may be unable to compensate for sudden ecological changes and uncertainties on the other hand. As the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continues to be elusive, the threats of climate change to ecosystems, food production and economic development are becoming more apparent. With the exception of areas in the northeast, drier conditions are projected for Africa. Sillmann et al. (2012) project significant increases in extreme precipitation in terms of the monthly or annual maximum of 5-day precipitation accumulations increasing by 20–30 % towards the end of the twenty-first century for Western and Eastern Africa. East Africa is projected to become generally wetter in the future, while dry conditions are to intensify significantly in Southern Africa with significant increases in consecutive dry days (Sillmann et al. 2012; cf. Batisani and Yarnal 2010). Much of Southern Africa will be affected by extreme droughts and particularly soil moisture decreases (Dai 2012). However, a simulation by Williams and Funk (2010) shows contrasting results for tropical Eastern Africa—during the twenty-first century, drier conditions, associated with warming in the Indian Ocean, are more likely than wetter conditions in the long-rains season (March–June). Thus, there is still uncertainty about how climate change will actually affect precipitation in the continent, but a varying range of impacts can be expected. The fundamental limits to climate predictability (Thornton et al. 2011) indicate the need for downscaled climate projections in Africa, yet the already projected unprecedented conditions have various implications for African social and ecological systems. Changes in climate variables will affect water availability. Gerten et al. (2011) show that many African regions such as North and East Africa are physically water scarce, being unable to meet the water requirements of their populations. With climate and population change, water availability per person is likely to decline in these regions. While population growth is a major driver of water stress, in a ?2 C and ?4 C world, climate change would be the dominant cause of water stress in African river basins (Fung et al. 2011). Sea level rise and saltwater intrusion also threaten parts of Africa (Nicholls and Cazenave 2010). Forests in Africa may expand in some regions while they might decline in others. In a ?2 C and ?4 C world, forest area is likely to increase in the Congo Basin, West Africa and Madagascar, although the risk of niche contraction remains mainly in the North and South of Africa (Zelazowski et al. 2011). While not all climate change C. Ifejika Speranza (&) I. Scholz Centre for Development and Environment/NCCR North–South/ Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: chinwe.ifejika.speranza@cde.unibe.ch

Flood disaster risk management and humanitarian interventions in the Zambezi river basin: Implications for adaptation to climate change

This review article examines the challenges that flood disasters in the Zambezi basin pose to development, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and humanitarian interventions. It analyses how interventions address these challenges to identify how to reduce vulnerability to floods. Data are examined from disaster database entries from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, Emergency Database, and scientific articles and other literature. Results show that development interventions and DRR are not keeping pace with the vulnerability of the population affected by flood events, as humanitarian interventions seem to dominate. The article highlights the significant role played by international humanitarian agencies, the challenges posed by inadequate preparedness and weak collaboration, the exclusion of the vulnerable from active participation, and the frequent declaration of states of emergency. If these challenges are not addressed, climate change will exacerbate humanitarian crises and competition for humanitarian aid resources. Changes in social factors that do not require finance can improve flood disaster risk management. Accessing funding for adaptation for use in DRR can further alleviate the severity of flood impacts, but development interventions remain crucial for addressing the underlying causes of vulnerability.

Gendered division of labour and feminisation of responsibilities in Kenya; implications for development interventions

Abstract Analysing gender roles as a social organisation element of a community is critical for understanding actors’ rationales and agency with regard to allocation and use of resources. This article discusses gender relations and how they determine development outcomes, based on a highland-lowland case-study of participants of Farmer Field Schools in Kakamega Central Sub-County (highland) and Mbeere South Sub-County (lowland). The gender relations at stake include the gendered division of labour, gender roles and intra-household power relations as expressed in access and control of resources and benefits and their implications for agricultural development. The study used mixed methods, the Harvard Analytical Framework of gender roles and draws on the Neo-Marxist position on exploitation, categorisation and institutionalisation of power relations, empowerment and the critical moments framework to discuss the results. Results in both Sub-Counties show that patriarchy prevails, determining institutional design, access and control of resources and benefits. Social positions shape capabilities and strategies of actors in decision-making and use of resources to justify gender-specific institutional arrangements. In Kakamega, men get the lion share of incomes from contracted sugarcane farming despite overburdening workloads on women, while in Mbeere, both men and women derive incomes from Khat (Catha Edulis) enterprises. However, women are expected to spend their earnings on household expenditures, which were hitherto responsibilities of men, thereby contributing to the feminisation of responsibilities. Development policies and interventions thus need to be based on an understanding of men and women’s differential access and control over resources and the institutions underpinning men and women’s bargaining power in order to adopt more effective measures to reduce gender inequalities.

Polycentric governance in telecoupled resource systems

Recent advances in land system science and in institutional analysis provide complementary, but still largely disconnected perspectives on land use change, governance, and sustainability in social-ecological systems, which are interconnected across distance. In this paper we bring together the emerging concept of telecoupled land systems and the established concept of polycentric governance to support the analysis and the development of sustainable land governance in interconnected social-ecological systems. We operationalize the two concepts by analyzing networks of action situations in which interactions between proximate and distant actors as well as socioeconomic and ecological processes cause land use change and affect the sustainability of land systems. To illustrate this integrated approach empirically, we analyze a case of transnational biofuel investment in Sierra Leone. We identify the characteristics of, and activities in, networks of action situations that affect the sustainability of land systems related to this case. Integration of the two concepts of telecoupled land systems and polycentric governance enables analysts to identify interactions in polycentric governance systems (1) as drivers of telecoupled sustainability problems and (2) as transformative approaches to such problems. The method provides one way for linking place-based analysis of land change with process-based analysis of land governance.

Community-based water development projects, their effectiveness, and options for improvement: lessons from Laikipia, Kenya

Using the case of 30 community-based water development projects in the Laikipia County, Kenya, this paper analyses the factors for their effectiveness and options for improvement drawing on the perspectives of 30 project management committees and 290 project members. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, and observations. The water projects improved the members’ living conditions, community cohesion, and livelihoods. Key factors for project success include public–private partnerships, participation, and ownership, while those for failure include inequity, poor leadership and accountability, and inadequate capacities regarding skills and resources. We conclude by discussing options to improve local capacity to address the identified challenges.