A socionature approach to adaptation - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 220

mitigation' programmes with a stronger techno-engineering emphasis, making
lessons gleaned from this shift instructive for Nepal as well as other contexts.
My analysis shows that it is not the quantities and qualities of resources and
services that determine the ability of people to adapt: rather I find that those with
greater social and political power can harness negative changes in resources and
services to their own benefit, and thus shape adaptation outcomes. As such, the
chapter explores how adaptation questions are less about techno-engineering
schemes and more about attention to social relations and 'socionature' issues.
It shows that the current approach to planning is too static to allow the kinds of
renegotiations that are required in order to address social inequalities within the
core of adaptation programmes.
Various discourses and programmes have been emerging to tackle both
climate adaptation and mitigation at the 'Third Pole' (the Himalayas). For
example, 'Readiness' efforts for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and
Degradation (REDD+), a mitigation programme aimed at sequestering carbon
in forests, emphasizes benefit sharing, diversification of livelihood opportunities
and other social programmes that can easily be classified as 'adaptation'. Nepal
has developed a National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA), among other
climate-specific plans. While these efforts purport to tackle the 'new' challenges
posed by climate change, in many respects they mirror the development efforts
of the past 30 years.
In addition to climate change, there are the many political challenges
presently facing Nepal. In 2006, a popular movement unseated the monarchy
and brought the Maoist People's War to an end. The insurgency (1996-2006)
was an ideologically driven movement that sought to overturn the monarchy and
entrenched feudal relations that date back to at least the 17th century (Hutt 2004).
Since 2006, the political transition has been characterized by unpredictability
and power struggles. This instability has also impacted upon the functioning
of environmental governance, most notably at the national level, where key
officials are often moved on a monthly basis and have limited authority. Many
of the new programmes for natural resource management that were enacted in
the 1990s have been disrupted. Thus resource and socio-political change are
not separate processes. Rather, the approach adopted here helps to shed light on
how climate change and political transition are inextricably bound together in
shaping the overall trajectory of socionatural change.
Further, the feminist political ecology approach employed draws attention
to the processes through which social inequalities are maintained, such that
climate change produces differential impacts within societies. Other feminist
work on gender and climate change has stressed the potentially disproportionate
impacts on women due to their household roles and to violence against women
(MacGregor 2009; Arora-Jonsson 2011). My analysis departs from this work in
using feminist theory to explain how gender and other social relations can serve
to create vulnerabilities, and serve as a point of friction through which resources
are struggled over. This kind of analysis draws out the multi-scalar and multi-