Climate vulnerability as a relational concept

Abstract

Within the rapidly expanding literature on the human dimensions of climate change, the ways in which the term vulnerability is used have proliferated. With the increasing influence of the concepts of adaptation and social resilience, there has been the tendency to treat vulnerability as a characteristic of individuals or social groups. In this respect, various quantitative measures of poverty are used as indicators of vulnerability. These approaches run counter to approaches that embrace context and most importantly the social relations that shape the multidimensionality of vulnerability. This paper engages these different viewpoints by juxtaposing the wealth trajectories of the members of 54 households in western Niger from 1984–1994 with an understanding of the changing social relations among these individuals gained from surveys and open-ended interviews of household members. Data analysis shows that poverty alone is an incomplete measure of an individual or household’s vulnerability to loss due not only to the randomness of biophysical hazard but also to different obligations and entitlements attached to wealth. Shifts in wealth following the historic drought of 1984, were more related to longer-term changes in social relations tied to recurrent drought during and before the study period than to the 1984 “trigger” itself. Women and junior men gained wealth relative to senior men. The gains in wealth among women do not reflect their lower vulnerability compared to senior men but rather, their reactions to address their vulnerable positions. In this way, measures of poverty, uninformed by an understanding the changing qualitative nature of social relations, are poor measures of vulnerability in the Sahelian region.