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under climate change. That means there is an urgent need to build adaptive
capacity through processes that can integrate communities into adaptation
planning, enabling local voices to be heard when risks and responses are defined
for today's challenges, and contributing towards enhanced capacity to adapt to
future changes.
Securing opportunities and incentives for power sharing in Maputo is a
particular challenge. Engagement with climate change is limited among those
affected and those with the responsibility to act, while relationships of power and
influence are mediated through formal and informal governance arrangements
that make decision-making opaque and outcomes difficult to predict - as
also concluded in other studies of adaptation in Mozambique (see Artur and
Hillhorst 2012). The challenge of sustaining spaces to meet uncertainty through
participatory planning and learning among a mass of interests and conflicting
perceptions of risk and capacity is a formidable one. Development actors will
need to identify and work through overlapping regimes of power, facilitating
interactions that can engage key players and build trust through concrete
actions. Avsi's approach, which locates them as an interlocutor, accepted and
trusted by both the communities and the authorities, may prove prudent. It
also demonstrates the utility of the existing formal and informal structures as
channels of communication already existing within the city, even if they may
result in imperfect representation of needs. Such imperfection may mean that
more needs to be done if adaptive capacity is to be supported. Many voices are
not heard - including those of women (who trade within the quarteirões and have
many ideas for improvement but lack the means to test them) and youth (who
dominate the population but lack a voice within the household or at other scales).
The interests of effectiveness, fairness and resilience in the face of complexity all
suggest that there is an urgent need to disaggregate the 'community', to enable a
better understanding of the range of perspectives and experiences, so that these
can be built into a shared process of adaptation planning.
In direct contradiction to a resilience perspective on adaptive capacity,
knowledge of climate-change risks in Mozambique is dominated by an
understanding of environmental change as predictable and controllable, and
(possibly because) it is skewed towards identifying threats to current economic
assets. This situation is by no means unique to Mozambique. Against this
backdrop, the approach taken by the municipality, which aims to inform
planning with localized perceptions of risk, is a positive step that appears to
build cross-scale linkages between residents and policy-makers. However, the
significance of these developments is potentially undermined by the lack of
connections to power sharing (through which actors with different perspectives
and from different scales could be drawn into shared decision-making), as well
as the failure to recognize that different forms of knowledge are pertinent in
defining solutions as well as problems. Today it is a challenge to see whether and
how these initiatives can overcome the politics inherent in adaptation decision-
making and the power relations that define whose knowledge ultimately counts.
 
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