Abstract
AbstractClimate change is projected to have severe implications for smallholder agriculture in Africa, with increased temperatures, increased drought and flooding occurrence, and increased rainfall variability. Given these projections, there is a need to identify effective strategies to help rural communities adapt to climatic risks. Yet, relatively little research has examined the politics and social dynamics around knowledge and sources of information about climate-change adaptation with smallholder farming communities. This paper uses a political ecology approach to historically situate rural people's experiences with a changing climate. Using the concept of the co-production of knowledge, we examine how Malawian smallholder farmers learn, perceive, share and apply knowledge about a changing climate, and what sources they draw on for agroecological methods in this context. As well, we pay particular attention to agricultural knowledge flows within and between households. We ask two main questions: Whose knowledge counts in relation to climate-change adaptation? What are the political, social and environmental implications of these knowledge dynamics? We draw upon a long-term action research project on climate-change adaptation that involved focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys, and participatory agroecology experiments with 425 farmers. Our findings are consistent with other studies, which found that agricultural knowledge sources were shaped by gender and other social inequalities, with women more reliant on informal networks than men. Farmers initially ranked extension services as important sources of knowledge about farming and climate change. After farmers carried out participatory agroecological research, they ranked their own observation and informal farmer networks as more important sources of knowledge. Contradictory ideas about climate-change adaptation, linked to various positions of power, gaps of knowledge and social inequalities make it challenging for farmers to know how to act despite observing changes in rainfall. Participatory agroecological approaches influenced adaptation strategies used by smallholder farmers in Malawi, but most still maintained the dominant narrative about climate-change causes, which focused on local deforestation by rural communities. Smallholder farmers in Malawi are responsible for <1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet our results show that the farmers often blame their own rural communities for changes in deforestation and rainfall patterns. Researchers need to consider differences knowledge and power between scientists and farmers and the contradictory narratives at work in communities to foster long-term change.
Highlights
Climate change poses a major challenge and threat to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), largely reliant on rain-fed farming systems (Niang et al, 2014)
We focus on mixed methods data illustrating how farmers described their views about climate change, as well as the importance of agroecology as a climate-change adaptation strategy
This study is one of the few participatory action research studies using agroecological approaches for climate-change adaptation, and the only one at the time of writing which explicitly focused on working with highly vulnerable groups as co-researchers in SSA, addressing a significant research gap (Bellamy Sanderson and Ioris, 2017)
Summary
Climate change poses a major challenge and threat to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), largely reliant on rain-fed farming systems (Niang et al, 2014). Women are typically responsible for cooking, child care, food processing, fuelwood and water collection and caring for the ill, and these multiple roles, combined with limited control over decision-making leave women in a vulnerable context in relation to climate change and food security (Bezner Kerr et al, 2016a) Another key marker of vulnerability and social inequality is HIV status: approximately 10% of adults in Malawi are HIV positive, with adolescent girls three times more likely to contract HIV than adolescent boys due to inadequate economic, social, educational and legal support (Underwood et al, 2011). Under the first democratically elected President Muluzi in 1994, sharp devaluation and subsidy removal required by the IMF and World Bank led to the collapse of the agricultural credit system and combined with increased input costs, dramatic reductions in smallholder production (Peters, 2006) These broader political economic shifts transformed the country from being maize self-sufficient in non-drought years, to one highly dependent on donors and imported food aid. Major reason for selection of these sites is a longer-term partnership with farmer groups
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