Assessing coherence between sector policies and Climate Compatible Development: Opportunities for triple wins

Climate Compatible Development (CCD) aims to deliver adaptation and mitigation without compromising development progress. To date, adaptation, mitigation and development related to key climate-sensitive sectors have often been treated separately. This paper uses qualitative document analysis, content analysis, expert interviews and a multi-stakeholder workshop to: examine the extent to which policies in climate-sensitive sectors align in framing adaptation, mitigation and development action; and identify key areas of policy coherence in Ghana. The paper answers the following questions: (i) To what extent are Ghana's agriculture, energy, water, forest and wildlife sector policies aligned with climate adaptation, mitigation and development? (ii) What is the extent of policy coherence amongst climate-sensitive sector policies? (iii) Where are the key intervention points available to enhance CCD activities? Findings demonstr ate that Ghana's climate-sensitive sector policies in agriculture, water, energy, forest and wildlife arenas have elements that demonstrate good alignment with adaptation, mitigation, and development priorities. However, as yet, there is only "limited coherence" between climate-sensitive sector policies. The paper identifies the following intervention points: (i) the need to attach greater importance to the threat posed by climate change to agriculture; and (ii) the need to address the lack of inter-agency and inter-ministerial approaches for building partnerships with other stakeholders. Multi-stakeholder workshop discussions highlighted significant challenges relating to limited coordination amongst institutions and agencies, limited institutional capacity and a lack of resources in ensuring coherence. This requires strengthening of national institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to provide appropriate mechanisms to ensure effective collaboration amongst climate-sensitive sectors to deliver "triple wins". The EPA could exert greater influence by nominating "climate champions" in sector ministries

Implementing Climate-Compatible Development in the Context of Power: Lessons for Encouraging Procedural Justice through Community-Based Projects

Climate-compatible development (CCD) is being operationalised across the developing world through projects that integrate development, adaptation and mitigation using community-based approaches—community-based CCD (CB-CCD). By incorporating and considering local people’s concerns, these projects are positioned as more effective, efficient and sustainable than ‘top-down’ climate and development solutions. However, the literature pays little attention to whether and how these projects achieve procedural justice by recognising local people’s identities, cultures and values; and providing local people with meaningful participatory opportunities. We address this gap through an analysis of two donor-funded CB-CCD projects in Malawi, drawing on household surveys, semi-structured interviews and documentary materials. Our findings show that the projects had only limited success in facilitating procedural justice for the target populations. Households’ meaningful engagement in project activities and decision-making was often curtailed because power asymmetries went unchallenged. While many households were well engaged in projects, the recognition and participation of others—including many of the most vulnerable households—was limited. Building on our findings, we present a six-step approach to help CB-CCD project staff understand, manage and challenge power asymmetries; and create widespread recognition of, and meaningful participatory opportunities for, local people

Links between climate change mitigation, adaptation and development in land policy and ecosystem restoration projects: lessons from South Africa

Links between climate change adaptation, mitigation and development co-benefits in land policy and ecosystem restoration projects are hampered by limited understanding of how multi-faceted policy, institutions and projects interact. This paper explores perceptions of co-benefits produced by two community-level projects that pursue ecosystem restoration in South Africa. It develops a new analytical framework to assess the enabling and constraining factors in delivering triple wins for adaptation, mitigation and development. The aim is to investigate the potential for integrating community perspectives into policy and project development and implementation. Data collected through mixed-methods (policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, participatory site visits and focus groups) are analysed using thematic analysis. We find that while the projects investigated have potential to deliver triple wins, siloed approaches presently hinder effective implementation. In particular, project focus on job creation hampers the achievement of longer-term mitigation and adaptation benefits. Operational flexibility, long-term goals, multi-sectoral cooperation and enabling frameworks are imperative to the achievement of triple wins. Findings provide valuable lessons that can be applied across sub-Saharan Africa towards achieving triple wins in climate and development policy and practice, especially those developed with job creation and ecological restoration aims

Climate change adaptation planning and cross-sectoral policy coherence in southern Africa

The post-2015 development agenda requires policy coherence, where achievement of development goals in one sector does not undermine the achievement of the goals of another. It also recognises that cross-cutting issues like adaptation to climate change need to be mainstreamed across multiple sectors. This paper presents a policy analysis using the cases of Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia. It analyses the water management and agricultural strategies and approaches identified in a variety of policies and plans. These include national sector policies for water and agriculture, National Development Plans, and climate change policies and strategies, including National Adaptation Programmes of Action and the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions submitted prior to the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties. It assesses the extent to which policies are coherent with one another with regard to their treatment of climate change adaptation using Qualitative Document Analysis. Findings identify that sector policies show some degree of cross-thematic coherence, in particular around their acknowledgement of the importance to address disaster management of floods and droughts. However, policy statements are typified by a relative lack of recognition of the need to develop supporting instruments and strategies that address climate adaptation needs over longer timeframes. Climate change policies explicitly call for significant investment in adaptation from the international community. Where coherence between sector and climate policies and strategies is strongest, the more recent climate policies largely repackage existing sectoral policy statements. These findings can be understood in the context of the uncertainty of climate change impacts for the longer term (for which a wider variety of adaptations are identified), alongside more event-driven disaster management planning where the impacts are more immediate and obviously evident. This prioritisation is also linked to development needs and the short-term nature of political cycles and economic gain. For climate-resilient policy decision-making to make further headway, we argue that governments need to embrace cross-sectoral planning more pro- actively in order to foster greater policy coherence and to deliver more climate resilient agriculture and water management

Climate Science, Development Practice, and Policy Interactions in Dryland Agroecological Systems

The literature on drought, livelihoods, and poverty suggests that dryland residents are especially vulnerable to climate change. However, assessing this vulnerability and sharing lessons between dryland communities on how to reduce vulnerability has proven difficult because of multiple definitions of vulnerability, complexities in quantification, and the temporal and spatial variability inherent in dryland agroecological systems. In this closing editorial, we review how we have addressed these challenges through a series of structured, multiscale, and interdisciplinary vulnerability assessment case studies from drylands in West Africa, southern Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia, and Latin America. These case studies adopt a common vulnerability framework but employ different approaches to measuring and assessing vulnerability. By comparing methods and results across these cases, we draw out the following key lessons: (1) Our studies show the utility of using consistent conceptual frameworks for vulnerability assessments even when quite different methodological approaches are taken; (2) Utilizing narratives and scenarios to capture the dynamics of dryland agroecological systems shows that vulnerability to climate change may depend more on access to financial, political, and institutional assets than to exposure to environmental change; (3) Our analysis shows that although the results of quantitative models seem authoritative, they may be treated too literally as predictions of the future by policy makers looking for evidence to support different strategies. In conclusion, we acknowledge there is a healthy tension between bottom-up/ qualitative/place-based approaches and top-down/quantitative/generalizable approaches, and we encourage researchers from different disciplines with different disciplinary languages, to talk, collaborate, and engage effectively with each other and with stakeholders at all levels

Delivering community benefits through REDD +: Lessons from Joint Forest Management in Zambia

In implementing reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), significant attention is being paid to ensuring that communities stand to benefit. Safeguards to protect local people's rights and interests have been formulated in response concerns over the potential negative impact on communities of forest preservation. To fulfil safeguards, many sub-Saharan African countries are looking to community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). Current critiques of CBNRM projects outline the importance of project design and policy context in shaping whether or not communities actually stand to benefit. This paper explores these aspects in a case study of Joint Forest Management (JFM) in Zambia, and examines the role of Zambia's REDD preparedness programme in shaping them. The case study was evaluated using stakeholder and policy document analyses, informed by interviews, and tied into the broader forest governance network. The findings highlight the way in which the politics and policies of forest governance in Zambia shape the on-the-ground JFM project and influence community benefits. In the case studied, even with careful local-level project design, JFM would be hindered in its delivery of REDD safeguards. Therefore, for REDD to deliver community safeguards, it must be considered as a broader process of political and governance change

An elastoplastic framework for granular materials becoming cohesive through mechanical densification. Part I - small strain formulation

Mechanical densification of granular bodies is a process in which a loose material becomes increasingly cohesive as the applied pressure increases. A constitutive description of this process faces the formidable problem that granular and dense materials have completely different mechanical behaviours (nonlinear elastic properties, yield limit, plastic flow and hardening laws), which must both be, in a sense, included in the formulation. A treatment of this problem is provided here, so that a new phenomenological, elastoplastic constitutive model is formulated, calibrated by experimental data, implemented and tested, that is capable of describing the transition between granular and fully dense states of a given material. The formulation involves a novel use of elastoplastic coupling to describe the dependence of cohesion and elastic properties on the plastic strain. The treatment falls within small strain theory, which is thought to be appropriate in several situations; however, a generalization of the model to large strain is provided in Part II of this paper.Comment: 42 pages, 27 figure

Questioning policy, youth participation and lifestyle sports

Young people have been identified as a key target group for whom participation in sport and physical activity could have important benefits to health and wellbeing and consequently have been the focus of several government policies to increase participation in the UK. Lifestyle sports represent one such strategy for encouraging and sustaining new engagements in sport and physical activity in youth groups, however, there is at present a lack of understanding of the use of these activities within policy contexts. This paper presents findings from a government initiative which sought to increase participation in sport for young people through provision of facilities for mountain biking in a forest in south-east England. Findings from qualitative research with 40 young people who participated in mountain biking at the case study location highlight the importance of non-traditional sports as a means to experience the natural environments through forms of consumption which are healthy, active and appeal to their identities. In addition, however, the paper raises questions over the accessibility of schemes for some individuals and social groups, and the ability to incorporate sports which are inherently participant-led into state-managed schemes. Lifestyle sports such as mountain biking involve distinct forms of participation which present a challenge for policy-makers who seek to create and maintain sustainable communities of youth participants

Consuming communities: the neighbourhood unit and the role of retail spaces on British housing estates, 1944–1958

This article challenges perceptions about the origins and objectives of the ‘neighbourhood unit principle’ that emerged in 1944, by focusing on the location and purpose of shops. It argues that the positioning of retail spaces was central, but largely overlooked, to the socio-spatial schema that lay at the heart of the neighbourhood principle. Planners saw shops as a hub of face-to-face interaction, through which nebulous objectives like ‘community spirit’ might be engendered. However, planners did not account for the way that their need-based model of shopping might be undermined by the consumer habits of inhabitants and the changing objectives of retailers

Climate change adaptation and cross-sectoral policy coherence in southern Africa

To be effective, climate change adaptation needs to be mainstreamed across multiple sectors and greater policy coherence is essential. Using the cases of Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia, this paper investigates the extent of coherence in national policies across the water and agriculture sectors and to climate change adaptation goals outlined in national development plans. A two-pronged qualitative approach is applied using Qualitative Document Analysis of relevant policies and plans, combined with expert interviews from non-government actors in each country. Findings show that sector policies have differing degrees of coherence on climate change adaptation, currently being strongest in Zambia and weakest in Tanzania. We also identify that sectoral policies remain more coherent in addressing immediate-term disaster management issues of floods and droughts rather than longer-term strategies for climate adaptation. Coherence between sector and climate policies and strategies is strongest when the latter has been more recently developed. However to date, this has largely been achieved by repackaging of existing sectoral policy statements into climate policies drafted by external consultants to meet international reporting needs and not by the establishment of new connections between national sectoral planning processes. For more effective mainstreaming of climate change adaptation, governments need to actively embrace longer-term cross-sectoral planning through cross-Ministerial structures, such as initiated through Zambia’s Interim Climate Change Secretariat, to foster greater policy coherence and integrated adaptation planning