A socionature approach to adaptation - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 226

and resources at the ward level, with a bottom-up assessment that helps
identify the extent to which vulnerable communities and households can
access these resources and services.
(ADB 2012, p. 58, italics in original)
While not explicitly stated, extrapolating from the more detailed
methodologies of vulnerability assessment (Olmos 2001), I interpret 'services'
to refer to environmental services as well as infrastructure like bridges, dams,
roads and communication networks.
Nepal's plans are thus progressive in the sense that they take seriously the
need to engage the grassroots and build programmes by merging national
and local perspectives and concerns. However, when absolute quantities and
qualities of resources and services are assumed to determine the ability of
people to adapt, it masks how those with greater social and political power
can harness negative changes in resources and services for their own benefit.
Political instability radically compounds this problem due to the lack of
accountability and authority to distribute and govern resources at all levels.
Struggles for authority over development programmes and distribution of
resources are how politics is played in the transitional period (Nightingale
and Ojha 2013) - with climate adaptation programmes potentially at the very
centre of these dynamics.
While most climate programmes have yet to be fully implemented, I can
cite two examples that indicate how politics are paramount in determining
outcomes. First, one member of a benefit-sharing REDD+ pilot scheme stated,
'because there is so much money, it is changing the power balance within our
user-group. This is causing problems.' Second, schemes intended to improve
access to resources intersect with household relations. A programme used local
labour to build an irrigation water tank in exchange for food. Our research
found that some people claimed one day's rice rations after working 1-2 hours
a day. Further, men who volunteered then claimed their work was done and
refused to participate in agricultural and social reproductive activities required
for household subsistence (Nightingale and Rankin 2012). Consequently
women's work burdens increased.
These examples show that adaptation responses to changes in resources are
not socially and politically neutral, but are bound up in (locally specific) (re)
configurations of power (Nightingale 2006; Peluso 2009). In the first instance
quoted, the infusion of money into the user group caused political factions to
align so as to control these new resources. My informant made it clear that she
had been excluded from a leadership position due to her gender and her political
affiliation. She held that the additional money coming from the REDD+
project motivated the dominant political party to control key positions. This
example is consistent with my previous research (Nightingale 2006) and shows
how social differences (gender, caste, political party membership) 'add up' to
present particular kinds of exclusions and inclusions.