Adaptation technologies as drivers oF social development - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 112

agriculture sector. The additional water supply facilitated by a 'hardware'
water technology may therefore feed directly into (and in practice be co-
implemented with) software agriculture technologies such as water-user
associations, implementation of more drought-resistant cropping systems,
etc. The integrated nature of many of the proposed water technologies related
to the agriculture sector thus implies that the practical balance of hardware
versus soft/orgware in water-technology implementation (and vice versa
for agriculture technologies) may be more balanced than indicated by the
distribution in Figure 6.3 .
From the above discussion on water and agriculture it seems clear that,
in order to draw general conclusions on technology intensity (the weight of
hardware versus soft- and orgware) and the ensuing practical implications, one
must first carefully consider that individual sectors may have very different
inclinations as regards the 'optimal mix' of technology elements.
Proportion of technologies that has a pro-poor dimension
As noted, the objectives of the technologies prioritized by the participating
countries are heavily dependent on national priorities. Among these objectives
is being 'pro-poor' - but when can a technology be considered to be pro-
poor? According to the definition provided by Ravallion and Chen (2003),
a technology is pro-poor if it has an immediate effect on poverty reduction.
Standard household surveys such as the Living Standards Measurement
Study (LSMS), Demographic Household Survey (DHS) funded by United
States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Multiple
Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) developed by United Nations Children's
Emergency Fund (UNICEF) include employment as an indicator in poverty
measurements. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that technologies that
support employment of the poorest population or contribute to capacity
building for unskilled labour in the sectors where the poor find work can be
characterized as having a pro-poor dimension. Seen in that way, many of the
prioritized technologies in the TNA project can be classified as pro-poor.
Evaluating each of the technologies against the criteria that they should
generate additional income or create increased employment opportunities
for the poorest people, we find that 57 per cent of the technologies do fulfil
this condition. The distribution of technologies with a pro-poor dimension
(contributing to employment generation) among the different categories of
technologies emerges as relatively equal with 53 per cent of the hardware, 57
per cent of the software and 53 per cent of the orgware technologies having a
pro-poor dimension. Again, this shows that in current TNAs for adaptation to
climate change there is not only a focus on large capital-intensive investments
such as physical infrastructure projects, but also small-scale soft technologies
that generate employment and capacity building, benefitting the poor and
those with least resources. This finding indicates that TNAs can go hand