How do the rural poor and the local institutions on which they rely manage multiple climate change, market and food security risks? How can research increase understanding of what climate change as a ‘risk multiplier’ means for local-level development policy? Climate risk reduction policies must become better aligned with the concerns of the rural poor, the organisations linking them to wider governance and market structures, and the politicians who represent them. Climate-aware development requires a more empirically-grounded view of climate risk. This needs to involve critical reassessment of what is already known about rural risk from the perspectives of local actors and institutions.
Climate change has become a focus of attention in efforts to understand the new challenges being faced by rural people, but undue emphasis on a single set of hazards can be misleading. Rural people face many additional risks – such as earthquakes and volcanoes – which interact with other factors such as population strain, pressures on natural resources, changing technologies and shifting levels of political commitment to address such issues.
New climate concerns are merging with and influencing existing strategies for managing food security, market and weather-related risks. Vulnerability to different combinations of hazards relates to the institutions that facilitate or hinder people’s access to the resources they need to manage risk. It is only by analysing the institutional factors that mediate access to such resources that resilience can be understood. People within local institutions have many issues to manage, limited capacity for radical readjustment of their responsibilities in order to prioritise climate change responses, and little contact with or accountability to environmental actors. It is therefore at this level that mismatches between climate and broader risk agendas are likely to cause problems. Further findings are that:
- Local actors are simultaneously managing various risks and the demands of various development models. For example, pro-poor growth and community-based risk reduction policies have differing implications for local actors.
- Local perceptions of risk differ significantly from national and international risk management frameworks for various types of risk. At national and global levels, different risks are managed by different sets of sectoral actors; compartmentalisation means that people’s exposure to multiple risks is often overlooked.
- Strategies within local institutions in mediating between micro demands and segmented macro political and administrative frameworks have received insufficient attention.
- Policy coherence in responding to multiple risks is lacking in regard to food security (among other areas), but rural people and institutions are adapting in their own ways.
In order to improve policy coherence, then, it is important to understand the risk management strategies of the rural poor. It is also important to synthesise and analyse the increasing array of policy directives placing arduous demands on rural municipalities, businesses and civil society, and to examine their implications for local capacities to adapt to multiple risks. Entry points for aligning climate and development research on risk could therefore include the examination of:
- People’s hopes and fears regarding: (a) responding to various hazardous events; (b) managing dwindling access to natural resources; and (c) dealing with increasing market demands.
- Factors within specific locations – climate ‘hot spots’ – already experiencing disaster risk, stress and potential livelihood collapse.
- Questionable win-win policies that ostensibly combine different development and risk reduction paradigms: How are these perceived and managed within local organisations?
- The centrality of resource access and tenure in understanding multiple rural risks.
- The implications of the ways in which agriculture is being resituated in new climate and other policy frameworks: The tendency in the new climate architecture to primarily situate agriculture as an add-on in REDD+ modalities seems to treat opportunities and risks-related food security as an externality. Likewise, commercialisation policies portray environmental management as an externality. How do local and non-state agricultural actors manage different incentives and potentially high transaction costs?
