Climate change adaptation: community-based adaption in multistakeholder landscapes

7-8 December 2017. Utrecht. The Netherlands. Climate change adaptation: community-based adaption in multistakeholder landscapes. This interactive seminar was a follow up from last year’s conference Climate Change Interventions as a Source of Conflict, Cooperation and New Mobilities.

Bottom-up, participatory, community-based approaches – where local actors participate in the selection of and decision-making about adaptation strategies to be pursued in their area – are commonly presented as a requirement for successful interventions. This notion is fundamentally embedded in popular adaptation programming, such as Ecosystems-Based Adaptation (EBA) and Community-Based Adaptation (CBA).

Yet despite the emphasis on community participation in adaptation, the ‘communities’ themselves are increasingly implied as abstracted, isolated, homogenous and static units, through which resilience is automatically strengthened. In reality, we know very well that communities are also sites of internal conflict and changing patterns of cooperation. They exist in complex, multi-stakeholder landscapes where competing claims to natural resources are intertwined in fragile and sometimes violent relations between different livelihoods, ethnicities, gender, generation and political affiliations, with, in many instances, very different definitions of sustainability.

Extracts of the LANDac – UU – TICCI 7th December Programme

• Towards inclusive climate change interventions in African Drylands Sebastiaan Soeters, Utrecht University 
• Biodiversity and farmer-pastoralist conflict in Burkina Faso Babou Bationo, INERA
• Dam rehabilitation (developing agriculture in pastoral landscapes) in Kenya Patrick Twala and Stanley Riamit Kimaren, ILEPA
• Top down analysis for bottom up adaptation: filling knowledge gaps for data scarce environments of urban SubSaharan Africa Eduardo Pérez-Molina, University of Twente