• Energy Research

This paper uses climate-smart agriculture (CSA) in Kenya as an empirical entry point for investigating how climate actions reshape or reinforce gender relations, and how they are aimed at improving local resilience that is nested in such relations. While enhancing national food security, CSA practices could however reproduce inequitable power relations, such as gendered authority relations that produce vulnerability and inequalities. Equity and knowledge represent particularly contested aspects of CSA because it largely fails to address who wins and who loses from such interventions, who are able to participate while others are excluded, and whose knowledge and perspectives count in decision-making processes. Gender relations provide a stark illustration of the way that CSA fails to address how enduring inequalities of access in both production and consumption shape who is rendered vulnerable to climate change and who is left food insecure. In this paper, we treat CSA projects as a site of tensions between stability and contestation of gender relations, brought into view through moments where practices and knowledges are (re)shaped. We first review the concepts of authority, recognition, and resilience as a framework to understand how gendered inequalities and struggles over rights to resources are perpetuated within adaptation and resilience responses to climate variability. We analyze evidence from past studies regarding rural adaptation processes and gender dimensions in CSA projects to identify how such projects may modify the space for renegotiating inequitable gender relations. We approach gender relations as authority relations that are constantly internalized, resisted, and contested through practices and interactions between different actors associated with CSA projects, and the different knowledges that direct these practices. The examination focuses on Kenya as an empirical context to gain sufficient depth in understanding the social and political processes in which climate actions and gender relations are nested, enabling us to identify key points of intersection within these two themes. In addition, gendered dimensions of rural resource governance and adaptation are relatively well-described in Kenya, providing lessons for how climate actions can become more gender-responsive.

Health. Disability. Vulnerability. These words are often used when discussing the risks of climate disruption. These discussions warn of the potential for climate impacts to “undermine 50 years of gains in public health” (as stated by the Lancet Countdown on Climate Change). Increasingly, such discussions also acknowledge climate injustice, examining who will benefit or lose out from climate change, how and why. The embodied vulnerability of disabled people is often assumed within such discussions, with less consideration of the social, economic or political conditions that create this vulnerability. By bringing disability justice and disability studies into correspondence with care, environmental and climate justice scholarship, this reflective paper challenges the master narratives that blur differentiated experiences of disability and climate impacts into a single story of inevitable vulnerability. Recognising disabled people as knowers, makers and agents of change, it calls for transformative climate action, underpinned by values of solidarity, mutuality and care.

AbstractClimate change scenarios have significant implications for the livelihoods and food security of particular groups in society and will necessitate a range of adaptation actions. While there is a significant literature on the social as well as biophysical factors and limits to adaptation, less is known about the interactions between these, and what such interactions mean for the prospects of achieving sustainable and resilient food systems. This paper is an attempt at addressing this gap by examining changing biophysical and social factors, with specific consideration of vulnerable groups, across four case studies (Ghana, Malawi, Norway and Spain). In each case, future climate change scenarios and associated biophysical limits are mapped onto four key social factors that drive vulnerability and mediate adaptation, namely, scale, history, power and politics, and social differentiation. We then consider what the interaction between biophysical limits and socio‐political dynamics means for the options for and limits to future adaptation, and how climate may interact with, and reshape, socio‐political elements. We find that biophysical limits and socio‐political factors do not operate in isolation, but interact, with dynamic relationships determining the ‘space’ or set of options for sustainable adaptation. By connecting the perspectives of biophysical and social factors, the study illuminates the risks of unanticipated outcomes that result from the disregard of local contexts in the implementation of adaptation measures. We conclude that a framework focusing on the space for sustainable adaptation conditioned by biophysical and social factors, and their interactions, can help provide evidence on what does and does not constitute sustainable adaptation, and help to counter unhelpful narratives of climate change as a sole or dominant cause of challenges in food systems.