Abstract
Climate adaptation efforts are recurrent in the science and policy spheres, especially in the context of the adaptation of community-driven, small-scale farming systems. One such is subsistence farming, which constitutes the backbone of most rural sub-Saharan African (SSA) economies, including Cameroon. Significant research and policy efforts have been directed towards overcoming barriers to climate adaptation. Such efforts have tackled a range of socio-economic and exogenous institutional constraints. However, knowledge gaps exist in the climate adaptation literature, particularly with regards to the extent to which endogenous cultural institutions (customary rules) in SSA shape gender (in)equality in access to productive resources like land. Based on a representative survey of 87 female-headed households in rural Cameroon, we contribute to bridge this gap by determining endogenous cultural institutional constraints to rural women’s climate adaptation, specifically with regards to their access to land for subsistence farming. Results were obtained with logistic regression analysis and a chi-square test of independence, showing that: (i) an inverse relationship exists between discriminatory cultural practices and women farmers’ capacity to adapt to climate change, and that (ii) tenure insecurity and inequality amplifies farmer’s vulnerability to long- and short-term climatic change. While this paper contributes to existing theoretical frameworks on climate adaptation from an institutional perspective, it equally makes a succinct request for further studies to be undertaken to ground this theoretical assertion.
Highlights
Climate change variation is no longer an abstract issue; its impacts are felt across the globe, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) [1], where it imposes new pressures that are profoundly shaping ecological and socio-economic interactions
The results indicated that 79% of the women were married, while most (69%) belonged to households with sizes between 4–6 persons
This study adopts a holistic thinking and argues that increasing women’s access to farmland should be combined with other measures that focus on tightening legal loopholes such as legal pluralism or gaps in implementation
Summary
Climate change variation is no longer an abstract issue; its impacts are felt across the globe, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) [1], where it imposes new pressures that are profoundly shaping ecological and socio-economic interactions. As part of the global system, Cameroon is witnessing the effects of climate change which is mirrored through increasing temperatures (average increase of 0.95 ◦C between 1930 and 1995), and a drop in rainfall by over 2% per decade since 1960 [6]. Current trends indicate an increasing feminization of subsistence farming due to the significant male out-migration [7] It is, still unclear how socio-cultural factors influence adaptation from a gendered perspective in access to land resources. Women need different assets, including an enabling environment to tackle these effects [12,13]
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