Towards An Ethnography of Climate Change Variability: Perceptions and Coping Mechanisms of Women and Men from Lambani Village, Limpopo Province

Abstract

Attention to gender and equity has lagged behind in climate change research, programming, national policy-making and in the international negotiations. Studies on climate change and gender links with climate change have initially and by necessity been somewhat speculative in nature. While all societies are affected by climate change, the impacts also vary by location, exposure, and context specific social characteristics, identity, power relations and political economy. This draws attention to recognition of difference and sameness and the way in which common, confusing, contradictory results emerge across and within terrains. In its concern for gender-blindness, this paper specifically considers the way in which climate variability impacts on men and women in a given locale and captures the enriched narratives and voices of both rural women and men in two selected villages in Lambani, Limpopo Province, South Africa. To build women's participation in national climate change adaptation planning and to take heed of the multiple entanglements around this topic, participatory processes are required that enable diverse groups of disadvantaged women's as well as men's voices to be heard by policy-makers. We use participatory action research (PAR) to capture people's emotions and perceptions around climate change. In our context, difference is not positioned as the opposition to sameness. It is also incorporated into the self as difference within and is seen as a means of becoming. We consider climatic impacts to be moments where the human and non-human rub up against each other and where human affect becomes tangible. Here our attention to affect is twofold. Not only does it allow for a more realistic reflection of entanglements with nature but also we see affect as being more than emotion as it is a dynamic opening up to possibilities that can effectuate change.