New discourses but same old development approaches? Climate change adaptation policies, chronic food insecurity and development interventions in northwestern Nepal

Abstract

The study investigates whether Nepal’s Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) policies represent new conceptualizations and approach to address local vulnerability, compared to the country’s food security policy and local level perceptions of vulnerability in four villages in the region of Humla, northwestern Nepal. The study finds that Nepal’s National Adaptation Programme of Action, NAPA, and Local Adaptation Plans, LAPA, consistently address “outcome vulnerability” at the expense of “contextual vulnerability”, and that they offer little new in terms of challenging the sructural root causes of vulnerability compared with “development as usual” approaches. Because these CCA policies build on an apolitical analysis of vulnerability, they not only promote one-dimensional technocratic solutions that ignore the drivers of local vulnerability, they also run the risk of reinforcing existing vulnerability patterns and even reducing the adaptive capacity of the most vulnerable. This article argues that – in order to effectively respond to the impacts of climate change on local vulnerability – adaptation policies need to integrate a contextual vulnerability analysis and promote responses that contribute to change the conditions that create vulnerability in the first place.