Adaptation technologies as drivers oF social development - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 107

providing one or several indicators for each criterion. For economic impact,
examples of criteria used include job creation, improving farmer income and
ability to reinvest, and catalysing private investments. Very broad criteria, such
as 'environmental impacts', could make it difficult to assess technologies against
this, even though the dimension of environmental impacts would be important.
Therefore some countries specified sub-criteria like 'biodiversity conservation'
and 'contribution of the technology to protect and sustain ecosystem services',
as with the economic criteria as exemplified above.
The 'social development' criterion was, when made more specific, evaluated
against indicators such as impact on health, job creation and community
involvement. Some criteria, like water management, are nevertheless highly
specific. A criterion like 'political and institutional stability' seems very
contextually contingent and was applied by only one country.
That the vulnerability criterion emerged as the most used criterion may
not come as a surprise, although it is ranked only as number 6 in terms of the
weighting attributed to the criterion, which reflects the relative importance
of each criterion in comparison to the other criteria. It may also appear a bit
misleading to have the 'political and institutional stability' criterion listed as
one of the highest weighted criterion since it was used by only one country,
whereas 'vulnerability' was applied by a full 22 of the 25 countries. When we
take a closer look at the range of weights for each criterion, the 'social' and
'vulnerability' criteria show the greatest discrepancies in the range of weighting
assigned by countries. Ranking seventh among the most used criteria is 'social
suitability and acceptability to local population'. Stakeholders in one country
who used this criterion in their prioritization process explained that the
technology was evaluated against the extent to which it would be culturally
and socially acceptable, including considerations of indigenous knowledge and
practices. Similarly, another focus group said, in referring to this criterion, 'a
good technology option must be accepted by the public and farmers for effective
implementation'.
Only one country included 'women's participation in management' as a
criterion. This was measured as the potential of the technology to enhance/
increase the participation of women and other vulnerable groups in the planning,
implementation and management of the system introduced by the technology.
Distribution among technology types - hardware, software
and orgware
The distribution of technologies among the different technology types is
shown in Figure 6.1 . It would appear that the bias towards hardware in national
adaptation planning noted by several authors is not prevalent in the data sets
from the current TNA project. Participating countries do not seem to have
any clear preference for hardware technology solutions to adaptation, but have