
Patrick KirkbyUniversity of Tasmania · School of Geography and Environmental Studies
Patrick Kirkby
BSc (w/ Honours), MEnv
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Publications (7)
Many consider Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) to be a ‘vital approach to the threat climate change poses to the poor.’ However, no concise yet comprehensive overview of CBA exists. This briefing paper seeks to fill that gap by providing an overview of CBA, its core principles and challenges.
Community-based adaptation (CBA) is an approach to strengthening the adaptive capacity of local communities vulnerable to climate change. The CBA approach increasingly features in discussions among policy makers, planners, advocates, and researchers, and has been endorsed and adopted by numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations. Howe...
From 27—30 April 2015, over 400 representatives from governments, civil society, the scientific community, and international and non-governmental organisations gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, at the 9th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) to climate change. CBA is a participatory, community-led and environmentally sustainable a...
Research Questions • How should notions of 'culture' be conceptualised in the context of CBA? • How do local cultures influence, enable and constrain pathways and outcomes of CBA? How do these dynamics work in a 'vulnerable' case study community? • How do the institutional cultures of CBA donors, governments and non-governmental implementing agenci...
The 8th international CBA conference reported on in these proceedings was held in Kathmandu, Nepal, 24-30 April 2014. The theme was “Financing Local Adaptation” in recognition of the need to understand how best to finance the growing number of CBA project and programme activities. Roughly 450 people from 58 different countries attended, including r...
Questions
Questions (5)
In terms of adaptation to climate change.
What insights can be drawn from the rural non-farm economy literature?
I am interested in insights from studies that have looked at how local culture can be understood and built upon to enable appropriate development. My research is in the field of climate change adaptation, but I am interested in insights drawn from other disciplinary literature. I believe that understanding, and respectfully and appropriately engaging with local cultural forms is an imperative in developing effective, sustainable and culturally appropriate adaptation strategies. If planning does not take into account local cultural forms then the resultant strategies are likely to be ineffective, maladaptive and oppressive, and can lead to further disdain and distrust from local community towards the 'development sector'.
I'm interested in frameworks or strategies (to be used in a participatory manner) that can be used to better conceptualise local socio-cultural forms at a community-level. This will allow community-based adaptation (CBA) projects to appropriately and sensitively build on local socio-cultural forms so that resultant adaptation strategies are empowering, effective, appropriate and sustainable. Perhaps no frameworks exist in the CBA space, but analogous examples exist in the CBDRM, CBNRM or participatory development literature.
I am interested in how local culture, indigenous knowledge (IK) and 'traditional perspectives' can influence community adaptation pathways in the face of climate change. I believe that culture and IK can both be an enabling factor and a constraint to effective and appropriate adaptation to climate change. I believe that communities should be enabled to plan for their own self-driven development, and that in addition to being appropriate to current and future climate change projections, adaptation strategies should be appropriate and sensitive to the local culture, socio-economic circumstances and geographic environment. I am interested in the community-based adaptation (CBA) approach, and how this can effectively account for local cultural considerations through appropriate policy. I will be exploring these questions through ethnographic fieldwork with an indigenous community in coastal Bangladesh.