Floods and Sustainable Development: The Case of Nsanje District

Abstract

A section of Nsanje District has been experiencing floods for over a decade and was declared a flood prone area the same time (GoM, 2006). Therefore, firstly, this research seeks to understand how the communities that live in the flood prone areas perceive their vulnerability to floods and how some of them have been coping with the floods since 1952, just over 6 decades. The overall aim of the research was to understand the impact of floods on sustainable development and how communities living in flood prone areas perceive their vulnerability to floods and climate variability, to investigate the power dynamics at household and community level and to explore the complexities associated with local adaptation programs in the flood prone areas. This research contributes towards framing vulnerability based on the perception of the different groups of people that are vulnerable to climate variability and have experienced environmental changes throughout their everyday lives. The communities living in the flood prone areas perceive floods as part of their livelihood. The communities have experienced floods for over 5 decades and have been implementing adaptive strategies to help them cope with the floods during this time. Temporary migration is one of the effective adaptive strategies that the communities living in the flood prone areas implement during floods. This research also presents evidence that the complexity of local adaptation arises from the political, economic, social, cultural and institutional factors and processes that interplay within the households and communities. Sometimes, these same factors and processes work against effective local adaptation at both household and community level. However, Engle (2011) claims that adaptive capacity of a nation or community that is affected by climate variability is influenced by the institutions, management and governance. The findings presented in this thesis illustrate that at household level, women are not given a chance to contribute to household resilience to climate variability because of cultural values that suggest that women are subordinates and that therefore only men have the authority to actively participate in such developmental activities.