Climate Change and development - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 281

Development practitioners can play a key role in shaping the adaptation
process - as mediators facilitating dialogue between the various actors involved
in adaptation decisions including local communities, businesses and national
authorities, and through their on-the-ground actions and identifying of entry
points and specific tools for development work. The entry points for reducing
vulnerability to climate change are not always obvious. Often, important leverage
points for transformation in the political and personal spheres are overlooked in
adaptation strategies and plans. In discussing systems change, Meadows (1999)
has pointed out that most attention goes towards low-impact interventions, some
of which counterintuitively exacerbate the problem at hand. In contrast, very
little attention goes to the higher leverage points of increasing information flows,
redefining the goals of the system, or transforming the paradigm from which the
systems arise. In the following, we present six recommendations for adaptation
interventions that address adaptation through all three spheres of transformation,
again with reference to the findings in the chapters of this volume.
Recommendation 1: prioritize building contextual knowledge
among development actors
This recommendation is perhaps the simplest and most obvious to emerge
from the chapters in this volume, but is also one of the most challenging, for it
has several implications for how development actors operate. First, prioritizing
contextual knowledge requires that the policy-makers and practitioners involved
in adaptation efforts are 'close to' the local context: they must get to know and
understand the local context well. This means understanding not just the day-
to-day context of project work in the practical sphere, but also the systems and
power relations in the political sphere, as well as the beliefs, values and worldviews
in the personal sphere. This takes time and often builds on personal experience.
Administering adaptation efforts through staff who are frequently rotated to
new settings, or operating remotely through a set of standard procedures or
project criteria, will not be adequate. The people themselves, and the way they
relate to the local community and to other development actors, are what matter
here. Community-based adaptation has much to offer in terms of methods and
approaches (Schipper et al. 2014). Second, and related to this, taking the local
context as a starting point demands that development actors themselves reflect
on their own position in political and social relations, including what they
themselves see as 'good' adaptation and 'good' development. This may mean
questioning individual and shared assumptions, and being open to new types
of knowledge and new ways of thinking about adaptation and development.
This means, in particular, that development and climate finance institutions
need to strengthen their own social science capacity and knowledge of methods
and tools. Without this, contextual knowledge is unlikely to contribute to the
transformative changes needed to reduce vulnerability and promote global
sustainability.