A socionature approach to adaptation - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 227

In the second case, a programme aimed at key aspects of vulnerability -
food shortages and lack of irrigation water - had the unintended consequence
of creating a vulnerability differential within households. Women found they
benefited minimally from the scheme, and their workload increased. In these
examples, social differences are not fixed, but are performed and contested in
everyday life. In terms of climate adaptation, this means that assumptions about
men's and women's adaptive capacity, as well as tasks they undertake in order
to adapt, have significant consequences for how social and power relations will
change.
Furthermore, in adaptation programmes, struggles over power are not simply
social justice questions. Which stakeholders and institutions are considered
'right' are strongly shaped by gender and intersectionality, with tangible
environmental outcomes. Disempowered members of forest management
committees break rules to exert power, or more powerful members break rules
with impunity due to the inability of others to control their actions. I have
witnessed all of these at work in Nepal (Nightingale 2005, 2006). As regards
climate adaptation, it is essential to understand how adaptation programmes can
serve as a context for people to control diminishing resources, gain access to new
resources and exclude others, or to gain social power by controlling distribution
- all of which have ecological consequences and thus implications for long-term
adaptation. As such, these 'localized' relations have socioecological implications
well beyond individuals, households and communities. The process of natural
resource management is therefore a key site wherein social inequalities are
contested and reinforced, again drawing into question whether it is resources that
drive adaptation needs, or if it is social power relations.
Given these precedents, it is disquieting that (apolitical) community-based
groups are proposed as solutions to most adaptation and distribution concerns in
the NAPA and LAPA documents. Only watershed and regional habitat networks
are defined as scales that require oversight by government Ministries 'at the
appropriate level' (GON/MoE 2010, p. 33). Nevertheless, in some respects
the promotion of community-based adaptation is a progressive response to
questions of equity and justice in Nepal. This emphasis certainly derives in part
from Nepal's exemplary record in promoting community resource governance.
However, intersectionality cannot be ignored, and participation itself becomes
another site of contest over social power. Well-functioning community forestry
user groups, for example, reflect community inequalities, causing conflict
over management and environmental change to erupt in unpredictable ways
(Nightingale 2005; Thoms 2008); true inclusion remains elusive.
While not challenging the need for local control, I do question the efficacy
of participatory approaches when they are framed outside contentious politics.
Local user groups as well as regional and national governance programmes are
hotly contested in the political transition; they are key sites where 'development'
is occurring but also where the patterns of political patronage and violence are
cemented. Careful attention to intersectionality is required, along with how