Do country-owned adaptation interventions reflect local level priorities? Application of a framings approach

ABSTRACT

It is claimed that country ownership enables equitable adaption by ensuring that adaptation interventions address priorities of local level vulnerable populations. This paper uses a framings approach to understand whether country owned interventions are aligned with local level adaptation needs. Three framing - the rights and responsibility, capabilities and recognition framings-are used to identify principles of justice reflected in adaptation interventions and compares them to those expressed by local level communities expected to benefit from these interventions. A case study of a Least Developed Countries Fund-funded and Global Environment Facility-administered coastal adaptation project in Tanzania is used. The analysis finds differences between framings by the project and local communities. The project portrays a rights and responsibilities framing with emphasis on government-led technocratic adaptation. Local level communities prioritize the capabilities framing, where local natural resource management institutions are considered necessary for mediating between resource access by resource-dependent households and resource conservation for coastal adaptation. The findings suggest that country ownership may not necessarily be equitable as local level adaptation priorities can fail to be reflected in country owned interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Equity
• country-ownership
• rights and responsibilities
• recognition
• capabilities
• climate risk management

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose reviews and comments tremendously improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jessica Omukuti is a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar at the University of Reading. Her research investigates the intra-state equity implications of country ownership of climate change adaptation. She has a BSc in Meteorology from the University of Nairobi and an MSc in Climate Change and Development from the University of Sussex. She has previously worked with the Green Climate Fund and with international development organisations in the Horn of Africa like Mercy Corps and CARE International, where she supported design and implementation of resilience and climate change adaptation programs and research.

Notes

1 Equity may not be a priority for some adaptation interventions (Lee, Edmeades, De Nys, McDonald, & Janssen, 2014). Instead, interventions may prioritize efficiency or effectiveness, which may compete with equity (Sasse & Trutnevyte, 2019; Stadelmann, Persson, Ratajczak-Juszko, & Michaelowa, 2014). However, equity can generate double or triple wins by enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of CCA (Stadelmann et al., 2014).

2 Other classifications of justice include structural (Devia et al., 2017) and epistemic (in)justice (also linked to recognition justice) (Chu & Michael, 2019; Temper & Del Bene, 2016). However, procedural, distributive and recognition justice are commonly used to describe climate justice in the existing literature. The linkages between social and structural justice and procedural, distributive and recognition justice are beyond the scope of this paper.

3 Some literature argue that local communities lack extensive knowledge of multi-level adaptation processes to enable them to engage in adaptation planning and implementation (Baker, Peterson, Brown, & McAlpine, 2012; Begg, Walker, & Kuhlicke, 2015), that involvement of local actors does not necessarily guarantee meaningful participation and is likely to generate elite capture (Lin et al., 2017; Nadiruzzaman & Wrathall, 2015) and that communities are not necessarily instrumental to the longer-term success of interventions (e.g. Holcombe, Berg, Smith, Anderson, and Holm-Nielsen 2018).

4 Cf. Capability approach by Robeyns (2016), which is a broader philosophical, theoretical framework.

5 Tanzania is a union state, made up of Tanganyika (the mainland) and the islands of Zanzibar.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust in Climate Justice: Ethics, Politics, Law: [grant number DS-2014-002].