A gendered perspective of vulnerability to multiple stressors, including climate change, in the rural Eastern Cape, South Africa

abstract

Rapid global environmental change combined with other stressors is increasing the vulnerability of poor people worldwide. In South Africa, HIV/AIDS and climate variability, interacting with other localised risks are having differential impacts across communities, households and individuals. These stressors have the effect of undermining livelihood assets, decreasing adaptive capacity and constraining the ability to respond to new threats such as those expected under a changing climate. This Article considers the gendered implications of multiple stressors on livelihoods drawing on empirical data from a four-year research project in two sites in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The research was broadly framed within a livelihoods-entitlements approach and methods included a household survey, interviews and focus group discussions. Using data from these sources, this Article explores gender-differentiated vulnerability through an analysis of household livelihoods and assets, perceptions of vulnerability and food security, and the types of responses employed when faced with shocks and stress. Our findings indicate that although women and female-headed households are generally poorer and more at risk than men and male-headed households, in some situations women may be more innovative in their individual and collective responses to stressors and may have more social capital to draw on. Furthermore, men and male-headed households also face specific gender related vulnerabilities. We comment on the need to understand the underlying causes of vulnerability and the heterogeneity that exists at the local level, and consider how such knowledge can be translated into approaches that address vulnerability now and in the future.

keywords:

• gender
• climate change
• multiple stressors
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Ecohealth Programme and the National Research Foundation (NRF), South Africa (Sheona Shackleton's Incentive Grant) for funding. We also acknowledge Monde Nshudu for invaluable assistance in the field and the communities and social learning group members of Lesseyton and Gatyana without whose support and cooperation we could not have completed this work.

Notes

1. In 2012, the South African government provided 15.2 million people with grants. These are mostly child grants (the guardians of 10 million under-18s benefit), followed by 2.5 million pensioners’ grants for people older than 60. The remainder are made up by war veterans’, disability, foster-care and care-dependency grants (Khulekani Magubane, ‘Social grants benefit retailers in township malls’, 8 August 2012, Business Day Live).

2. Mental maps are “qualitative representations of a system consisting of variables and the causal relationships between them” (Bunce et al, 2010: 414). For our study, these took the form of a spider-gram drawn on large sheets of paper, with key stressors being linked via directional lines to other stressors. HIV/AIDS was suggested to participants as an initial item, to which they added the various cause and effects of this disease until they felt these were covered and were comfortable with the process. They then added further stressors and began connecting these with what was already on the map, until they felt they had exhausted all the key factors contributing to their vulnerability. All links and decisions were discussed.

3. Social learning refers to a shift in understanding among participants involved in a given process. This shift in understanding (or new learning) is expected to go beyond these individuals and become located in their wider social networks, for example their families and communities of practice, and such knowledge sharing is expected to occur through social interactions. Processes that support social learning are understood to involve long-term interactions and knowledge sharing in a trusting environment (Cundill et al, 2014).

4. Participant conceptualisations of vulnerability covered shocks and stressors (drought, illness), ‘community problems’ (truancy amongst the youth, crime, rape of women and girls) and structural aspects such as poverty, poor education and unemployment, and so included both the exposure and adaptive capacity elements common in formal definitions. Clarke's (2012) work found that the factors people identified as contributing to their vulnerability were also mentioned separately as key barriers to adaptation (for example, theft, poor education, poverty).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sheona Shackleton

SHEONA SHACKLETON (PhD) is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University, where she has been on the full-time staff since July 2008. She has worked extensively at the interface between rural development and natural resource management for the last 30 years, undertaking research in such spheres as community conservation, rural livelihoods and vulnerability, ecosystem services and human wellbeing, forest product use and commercialisation, and climate change adaptation. She has participated in several large international, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research programmes, and teaches aspects of inter- and transdisciplinarity and complex social-ecological systems in her undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Email: [email protected]

Leigh Cobban

LEIGH STADLER has a BA honours, majoring in French and History, and an MSc in Environmental Science from Rhodes University, South Africa. For her MSc she researched rural household capital stocks and livelihoods in the context of HIV/AIDS and climate change. She had since moved to London where she has worked with a non-profit urban food growing campaign, and more recently on a government-backed social lending programme which funds loans to entrepreneurs and start-up businesses. Email: [email protected]

Georgina Cundill

GEORGINA CUNDILL (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is interested in linked social-ecological systems, and much of her research focuses on the human dimensions of natural resource management. Georgina's research interests include community based resource management, collaborative and adaptive management, social learning, land rights, participatory methodologies, transdisciplinarity and complexity. Email: [email protected]