Edward R. Carr

Applying DPSIR to sustainable development

The DPSIR framework was devised in the late 1990s as a tool for the reporting and analysis of environmental problems, ranging in scale from global systems to localized watersheds. Since then, international organizations have begun to apply this framework to the evaluation of sustainable development initiatives, to better understand and overcome barriers to sustainability. While this may seem a logical application for an integrated environmental assessment tool, the use of DPSIR in sustainable development will likely perpetuate the least satisfactory outcomes of development. DPSIR cannot address the impact of aggregated, informal responses on the drivers and pressures related to environmental problems and sustainability challenges. This problem is not merely an oversight of the framework, but an issue that emerges within the structure of DPSIR itself through the unexamined, unacknowledged hierarchy of actors that this framework implicitly creates with its typology. Therefore, a DPSIR-centered approach is not a new direction for development within international organizations, but instead, a reproduction of existing inequalities between actors and stakeholders within current approaches.

Livelihoods as Intimate Government: Reframing the logic of livelihoods for development

Abstract Livelihoods approaches emerged from a broad range of efforts to understand how people live in particular places. They have since cohered into often instrumentally applied frameworks that rest on the broadly held assumption that livelihoods are principally about the management of one’s material circumstances. This assumption limits the explanatory power of livelihoods approaches by shifting a range of motivations for livelihoods decisions outside the analytic frame. This article extends efforts to recover a broader lens on livelihoods decisions and outcomes by conceptualising livelihoods as forms of intimate government, local efforts to shape conduct to definite, shifting, and sometimes contradictory material and social ends. By employing a Foucault-inspired analytics of government to the study of livelihoods in Ghana’s Central Region, the paper presents a systematic, implementable approach to the examination of livelihoods and their outcomes in light of this reframing, one where material outcomes are one of many possible ends of intimate government, instead of the end. By opening the analytic lens in this manner, we can explain a much wider set of livelihoods outcomes and decisions than possible under contemporary approaches.

The millennium village project and African development problems and potentials

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) has come to embody hope for a new development path that might succeed where previous efforts have failed. A closer consideration of this project, however, suggests that this hope might be misplaced. Because of a general dearth of critical thought in key areas of project conceptualization, the MVP risks reproducing the problems of previous top-down, expert-driven development efforts. This article examines the conceptual issues raised by this absence of critical thought, and the reasons why project supporters have generally overlooked these issues. It then presents a critical grassroots framework which, if incorporated into existing MVP practices, might allow for the creation of a realistic, sustainable development path in Africa.

Understanding Women’s Needs for Weather and Climate Information in Agrarian Settings: The Case of Ngetou Maleck, Senegal

AbstractWhile climate services have the potential to reduce precipitation- and temperature-related risks to agrarian livelihoods, such outcomes are possible only when they deliver information that is salient, legitimate, and credible to end users. This is particularly true of climate services intended to address the needs of women in agrarian contexts. The design of such gender-sensitive services is hampered by oversimplified framings of women as a group in both the adaptation and climate services literatures. This paper demonstrates that even at the village level, women have different climate and weather information needs, and differing abilities to act on that information. Therefore, starting with preconceived connections between identities and vulnerability is likely to result in overgeneralizations that hinder the ability to address the climate-related development and adaptation needs of the most vulnerable. Instead, as is demonstrated in this paper, the design and implementation of effective gender-s...

Enhancing and expanding intersectional research for climate change adaptation in agrarian settings

Most current approaches focused on vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation to climate change frame gender and its influence in a manner out-of-step with contemporary academic and international development research. The tendency to rely on analyses of the sex-disaggregated gender categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as sole or principal divisions explaining the abilities of different people within a group to adapt to climate change, illustrates this problem. This framing of gender persists in spite of established bodies of knowledge that show how roles and responsibilities that influence a person´s ability to deal with climate-induced and other stressors emerge at the intersection of diverse identity categories, including but not limited to gender, age, seniority, ethnicity, marital status, and livelihoods. Here, we provide a review of relevant literature on this topic and argue that approaching vulnerability to climate change through intersectional understandings of identity can help improve adaptation programming, project design, implementation, and outcomes.

Vulnerability assessments, identity and spatial scale challenges in disaster-risk reduction

Current approaches to vulnerability assessment for disaster-risk reduction (DRR) commonly apply generalised, a priori determinants of vulnerability to particular hazards in particular places. Although they may allow for policy-level legibility at high levels of spatial scale, these approaches suffer from attribution problems that become more acute as the level of analysis is localised and the population under investigation experiences greater vulnerability. In this article, we locate the source of this problem in a spatial scale mismatch between the essentialist framings of identity behind these generalised determinants of vulnerability and the intersectional, situational character of identity in the places where DRR interventions are designed and implemented. Using the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach to identify and understand different vulnerabilities to flooding in a community in southern Zambia, we empirically demonstrate how essentialist framings of identity produce this mismatch. Further, we illustrate a means of operationalising intersectional, situational framings of identity to achieve greater and more productive understandings of hazard vulnerability than available through the application of general determinants of vulnerability to specific places and cases.

Evaluating Poverty–Environment Dynamics

Developing indicators to more effectively evaluate poverty–environment dynamics and inform policy is an urgent research priority. It is critical that these indicators are used in ways that accurately represent the relationship they are meant to inform. This article evaluates the theory and use of poverty–environment indicators, a relatively new tool developed to aid in the design and evaluation of poverty reduction strategies in the context of environmental change. We argue that while they have great potential, in their current form and use, poverty–environment indicators may contribute to critical misunderstandings of processes on the ground. These issues stem from a problematic and largely unacknowledged process of simplifying particular poverty–environment relationships. This article lays out the problematic character of this simplification process, and suggests how we might address these problems to create more useful understandings of poverty–environment dynamics to inform policy.

Understanding the Connections Between Climate Change and Conflict: Contributions From Geography and Political Ecology

Purpose of ReviewThe connections between climate change and conflict inherently raise questions related to space, scale, and nature-society relations, all themes central to modern geographic thought. The geographic and political ecological literature—and the literature informed by geography and political ecology—generally explores the relationship between climate change and conflict through case studies, employing a wide range of methods that enable understandings not accessible through exclusively large-n quantitative studies. As a result, this literature focuses on questions and challenges that are generally overlooked in the wider climate-conflict literature, including the importance of spatial and temporal scale and the ways in which vulnerability and resilience frame this relationship.Recent FindingsThis literature uniquely challenges the dominant “threat multiplier” framing of climate change’s impact on climate, questioning this narrative’s unidirectional flow from climate vulnerability to conflict, exploring how climate change can create opportunities for peacebuilding as well as conflict, and identifying how climate adaptation activities can themselves become catalysts for conflict.SummaryWhile geographic and political ecological lenses on the relationship between climate change and conflict do not have all the answers needed to address the challenges and opportunities presented by this relationship, the framings these lenses offer are essential to building meaningful, actionable understandings going forward.

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Incorporating a Commitment to Fieldwork throughout an Academic Career

In this paper, four researchers who share a commitment to applied research and fieldwork methodologies reflect on the ambiguities associated with maintaining and adapting this commitment to changing professional, personal, and contextual situations. The authors focus on the use of fieldwork for the study and support of agricultural change in sub-Saharan Africa, as an example of a setting and topic in which long-term work in the field can improve understanding and support contextualized development. In analyzing a range of experiences associated with maintaining and adapting fieldwork approaches, we complicate and build upon the assertion that professional development pulls international development practitioners and applied researchers away from the field. The experiences analyzed in this paper suggest that the situation of changing orientations toward the field is not dichotomous, and that instead, a commitment to fieldwork can result in innovative approaches to remaining at least partially focused ‘outward’ and ‘downward.’ We argue that the epistemological underpinning of situated fieldwork, which recognizes partiality in knowledge and understanding, also requires reflexivity on the part of applied researchers. The reflections and analysis presented here broaden and ground conversations about research ethics, methodological consistencies, and innovative approaches to fieldwork.

Conclusions – engaging critical perspectives in development policy and implementation

This symposium began with a broad question: can critical perspectives exist in development policy and implementation? These contributions force us to think about this question in ways that are considerably more complex and, we would argue, considerably more interesting. Taken as a whole, this symposium illustrates Bebbington’s challenge to stop assuming that critical thought and approaches only exist on one side of a supposed academic–implementer divide, thus undermining the unspoken assumption at the heart of our initial question. We argue that these contributions also call into question who we should be thinking critically about. Critical development studies have taken both ‘the developing’ (however problematic that term may be) and ‘developers’ (again, a contested and problematic term), as well as ‘development’ itself (in both its senses as noun/state and immanent process) as its objects. These studies do not, however, turn the critical lens on the role of critical thought and theory as a part of the very development machine that academics purport to critique. If we cannot assume that critical thought is the exclusive purview of one group, we must then turn a critical lens on academic practice. Relatively little work in development studies has done this, and even this body of work has engaged debates within academia, as opposed to thinking about how development academics construct themselves in relation to their object. When we turn the critical lens on critical development studies, important lessons emerge. The first of these is that critical development studies has, for too long, treated bilateral donors and implementing organisations as backward, uneducated, venal and foolish, in need of the salvation of critical scholarship if they are ever to find their way forward in the world. Long after critical development scholars rejected those terms and assumptions for the communities and peoples with which they worked, they have allowed them to persist, usually rather uncritically, in assessments of development studies’ other object, the donor or implementer. As many of the contributions to this symposium illustrate, donors and implementers are far from the monolithic objects of much critical development work. In these contributions we hear individuals employed by