Limited room For manoeuvre - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 254

as they relate to five particular case studies conducted from 2008 to 2011: three
in Bolivia, Colombia and Nicaragua, 2008-2009 (Kronik and Verner 2010a,
2010b), and two among semi-nomadic Bedu of Syria and Tunisia (Kronik 2011;
Kronik and Clément 2013), as outlined in Table 14.2 . The original aim of the
research was to understand if - and how - indigenous people perceive climate-
change phenomena; how and why their access to livelihood assets have been
affected over time; and what opportunities and obstacles they experience in the
face of climatic and other changes. To capture the complexity of the impacts of
climate change on poor and vulnerable indigenous communities, as well as their
responses, communities were selected from larger eco-regions, in order to cover
a wide range of climate-change phenomena, as well as social, cultural, economic
and political contexts.
To facilitate systematic analysis of these complex variables in different contexts,
the research described here has drawn on key elements of anthropological,
social, institutional and environmental analysis, with a particular focus on
capturing and understanding local vulnerability contexts, livelihood strategies
and assets as well as opportunity structures. The conceptual framework and
ensuing fieldwork strategy is inspired by the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
(SLF, from Department for International Development 2001), which seeks to
provide a holistic and comprehensive picture of local livelihood options and
how they change over time, as well as a picture of the complexity within a local
situation. The Department for International Development's (DfID's) original
SLF framework includes human, social, natural, financial and physical capitals, and
provides a tool for assessing these interrelated influences on people's livelihood
security. The SLF approach puts people (as opposed to resources) at the centre
of the analysis; however, it lacks a comprehensive understanding of cultural
assets, or cultural capital (as framed by Bourdieu 1973, 1986). In addition, the SLF
was not developed to address climate-change issues, and the attention to human
resources is often inadequate (Morse et al. 2009; de Haan 2012).
For the study described here, the SLF framework was used with modifications
partially addressing some of these criticisms. Cultural capital was added, in order
to fully consider this dimension of livelihood - which (as described below) is
particularly important for indigenous peoples. Furthermore, institutional and
environmental mapping and climate-change scenario exercises were developed
and supplemented by open-ended inquiry and semi-structured interviews based
on a series of concrete and ranked closed questions, with respondents selected
through maximum variation sampling. The number, place, time and criteria of
these questionnaires are presented in Table 14.1 .
The data regarding key livelihood indicators collected among the Bedu in
Syria and Tunisia are presented in Figures 14.1 and 14.2 , graphed along with
perceptions of drought intensity, shown as mean values for 2010 and 1990. As
these figures show, the most important changes to the Bedu livelihood system
can be explained in terms of decreasing access to social, cultural, financial and
environmental assets.