Culture and community-based adaptat

Culture and community-based adaptation The community-based adaptation approach implicitly acknowledges these principles. However, it is our belief that explicit reference to the role of culture is necessary to ensure that this inherent strength of community-based adaptation is delivered in practice. Community-based adaptation has been defined as a process focused on those communities that are most vulnerable to climate change, based on the premise of understanding how climate change will affect the local environment and a community’s assets and capacities (Huq and Reid, 2007). It is rooted in the local context and requires those working with communities to engage with indigenous capacities, knowledge and practices of coping with past and present climate-related hazards. The difference between a community-based adaptation project and a standard development project is not principally in the intervention, but in the way the intervention is developed: not what the community is doing, but why and with what knowledge. The aim is to enable the community to understand and integrate the concept of climate risk into their livelihood activities in order to increase their resilience to immediate climate variability and long-term climate change. Community-based adaptation is essentially an action research approach to the problem of climate change impacts on livelihoods . By seeking to work with communities to identify local problems and locally appropriate solutions, community-based adaptation can naturally build on social forms (working with cultures) and provides an opportunity to extend the local context of choice (effecting change from within, through dialogue and developing a local understanding of the challenges of climate change ). Rooting the process of adaptation in communities allows important communal practices and collectively held metaphors or sayings to be identified and used to facilitate change from within, rather than attempting to force change from without. In particular, cultures that lack a tradition or history of adaptation (to climate or other environmental challenges) require an approach that builds from existing social forms and is sympathetic to local notions of well-being. This may be more or less of a challenge depending on how radical a transformation is required and whether the existing cultural context of choice is narrowly defined or deeply entrenched. The role of culture outlined here indicates the need for a nuanced approach to adaptation that is grounded in a highly developed appreciation of local social dynamics. It may be that situations are encountered ‘where “local culture” is oppressive to certain people’ and may rob the most vulnerable within a group of a voice (Cleaver, 2001, p. 47). However, an understanding of culture can also help to transcend a simplistic view of power relations as oppressive, and instead point to the complex role that power holders play in well-being and the entry points that they offer into communities (Ensor, 2005, p. 266). Community-based adaptation demands that a line is walked between the ‘we know best’ and ‘they know best’ positions (Cleaver, 2001, p. 47) by seeking to work within cultures to build and develop dialogue on the challenges of climate change. As Twigg notes in the context of disaster-resilient communities, success will see the approach to adaptation become a shared community value or attitude. However, reaching this point also requires an enabling environment – a ‘political, social and cultural environment that encourages freedom of thought and expression, and stimulates inquiry and debate’ (Twigg, 2007, p. 26). Engendering such an environment may be a key challenge in the process of moving community-based adaptation beyond isolated development projects and into institutionalised policy frameworks .