Unintended consequences of climate change adaptation: African case studies and typologies on pitfalls and windfalls

ABSTRACTClimate change adaptation concerns mechanisms for responding to local climate change impacts to improve livelihoods of and decrease risks to affected stakeholders. In this article, we present evidence and novel insights from selected climate change adaption cases studies in Sub-Saharan Africa, shared directly by climate change practitioners. Our aim is to foster awareness and comprehension for local, national and transnational actors, enabling better decision-making, project implementation and policy design. To achieve this we describe and assess positive spillovers and negative externalities of climate change adaptation. Building on our collection of case studies, we focussed on classifying adaptation projects according to a set of typologies identified by the researchers. To further explain the typology classification related to the occurrence of (un)intended (side) effects, we identified factors that may enable sustainable adaptation scenarios based on lessons shared about the investigated projects. These systems are based on existing political economic research on the state-of-the-art ‘4E’– method (representing enclosure, exclusion, encroachment, entrenchment) evident in the literature and case study applications, which we adapted to fit our research questions. The factors include collaboration across scales, data availability and learning, bottom-up involvement/participation. We also formulated the positive counterpart of each of the four E dimensions. One finding was that the category lose-win, where the intended goal was not achieved, yet a positive spillover occurred, would be more likely to emerge with the factors ‘bottom-up participation’ as well as ‘learning across scales’ being present.KEYWORDS: Adaptationmisfits due to maladaptationresiliencesocial-ecological systems (SES) as complex adaptive systems (CAS)vulnerability AcknowledgementsWe gratefully acknowledge funding from the first Southern African Young Scientist Summer Programme (SA-YSSP) via the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria and the National Research Foundation (NRF) / Department of Science and Technology (DST), South Africa as well as the travel fund from the German IIASA-National Member Organization (NMO), the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI). Furthermore, we are deeply indebted to the interview participants and very much appreciate their time invested in this research agenda. Granted via NRF, DST, and IIASA in the first Southern African Young Scientist Summer Programme (SAYSSP) 2012/2013.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 https://www.unep.org/regions/africa/regional-initiatives/responding-climate-change.2 https://www.unccd.int/our-work/ggwi.3 https://sunfarming.de/en/blog/tag/africa.4 Equally, in the global North, good examples of adaptive actions from Europe are provided in Pijnappels & Dietl (Citation2013).5 The African focus was determined by the local Southern African Young Scientists Summer Programme (YSSP), which led to all interviewees being from an African country and with a specific focus on South Africa. The collaboration with the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (Austria) added an international perspective and the possibility to build on their previous work in the African context. Project 4 was titled Multi-scale adaptations to climate change and social-ecological sustainability – Module 1: Adaptation measures in complex social-ecological systems challenge their sustainability in Africa (see also supplementary information on the project proposal).6 The interview results determined the number and country context of the case studies. Thus identified case studies were from nine different parts of South Africa, four from Namibia, and one case study each from Ethiopia, Senegal, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Togo, and the Seychelles.7 The distinctive feature of a global institution is that it has global reach beyond continental boundaries and is widely represented, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). In contrast, an international institution may extend its reach across national boundaries, while being constrained to a few continents.8 The correlations between associated categories in a case study and the presence or absence of certain factors are detailed and illustrated in the online appendix.9 https://lorenzofioramonti.org/books/.10 Other alternative economic approaches include degrowth, post-growth, agrowth, doughnut and ecological economics, all ingraining limits – where in the above list we exemplified economic principles considering social and alternative-value attribution mechanisms.11 In our case studies, inclusion goes both ways, exemplified e.g. by grassroots learning in Zambia as well as by learning processes from an insurance corporation.12 Richard Munang also provided several case studies.13 2018 update: a serious drought of at least two years coupled with mismanagement of infrastructure maintenance and resources in the Western Cape was causing the countdown to day zero, when water distribution would have been completely interrupted and managed from a few locations.14 https://patternsofcommoning.org/patterns-of-commoning-how-we-can-bring-about-a-language-of-commoning/.15 German original version available from http://mustersprache.commoning.wiki/view/welcome-visitors/view/felder-des-commoning (English translation of 3 categories) (1) Social togetherness(2) Self-organisation by peers (on an equal footing)(3) Caring and self-determined economic activity.16 http://web.unep.org/evaluation/terminal-evaluation-unep-undp-project-climate-change-and-development-adapting-reducing-vulnerability17 http://staging.unep.org/climatechange/adaptation/GANNetwork/CCDARE/tabid/29582/Default.aspx.18 https://www.cosmolocalism.eu/.