Sustainable adaptation under adverse development? - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 191

Building adaptation measures on local problem understanding, strategies to
manage climatic events and customary law is important to ensure livelihoods
as well as the environmental integrity central to sustainable adaptation.
However, although Ethiopia's current climate change National Adaptation Plan
of Action (NMA 2007) mentions that collaboration of local people is desired,
it fails to indicate how their representation in key decisions or planning could
be strengthened. Despite formal acknowledgement of 'capacity building and
institutional strengthening of the local community' as a general adaptation
option across sectors, the specific adaptation measures identified in the Plan of
Action as relevant to pastoralism emphasize de-stocking, restricting free-range
grazing and promoting stall feeding, as well as introducing mixed farming and
irrigation schemes (pp. 40-41). This attitude toward pastoralism is reflected
also in the recent Afar state Programme of Plan on Adaptation to Climate Change
(Biru et al. 2010). Although this state programme recognizes that 'most
adaptation strategies adopted by pastoral communities are crucial' (p. 58) in
building resilience against climate change, it promotes investment in irrigation
agriculture and other (non-pastoral) livelihoods as a long-term adaptation
strategy (p. 60), reconfirming the deep-seated divergence of values and interests,
as well as the marginalization of local knowledge in decision-making. By
contrast, a sustainable adaptation approach would focus on building up formal
mechanisms that give local knowledge real power and influence in decision-
making, including more dynamic modes of policy formulation with multiple
local interests continuously evaluated and negotiated in light of considerations
of communal adaptive capacity and changing vulnerability contexts.
Principle 4: consider potential feedbacks between local and
global processes
This normative principle builds on the recognition that actions by one group may
affect others. Previous analyses of local-global linkages in sustainable adaptation
(e.g. Eriksen et al. 2011) have focused on how adaptation in one place may
lead to increased carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions or threaten environmental
integrity at higher spatial scales (local-to-global linkages). What the Afar
situation highlights is the importance of including an analysis of how groups and
individuals are affected by and respond to global scale processes (global-to-local
linkages). For example, the process of large-scale land investments appears to
influence the allocation of large tracts of land to industrial irrigation agriculture
in Afar. Another important insight is that the need for CO 2 mitigation in high-
emission societies, resulting in high demand for biofuels, may redistribute large
land areas for biofuel production (such as sugar cane in Afar), with unexplored
effects on local adaptive capacity. Therefore, efforts to strengthen adaptation in
developing countries cannot be delinked from global processes of mitigation and
Western models of development. This insight challenges the current simplistic
integration of adaptation into development aid and underlines the need to ensure