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Adaptation for whom? Understanding the impacts of dyke policies on small-scale farmers in Ca Mau Province of Vietnam 1

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Climate Policy
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In the Vietnamese part of the Mekong Delta (VMD) the areas with three rice crops per year have been expanded rapidly during the last 15 years. Paddy-rice cultivation during the flood season has been made possible by implementing high-dyke flood defenses and flood control structures. However, there are widespread claims that the high-dyke system has increased water levels in downstream areas. Our study aims at resolving this issue by attributing observed changes in flood characteristics to high-dyke construction and other possible causes. Maximum water levels and duration above the flood alarm level are analysed for gradual trends and step changes at different discharge gauges. Strong and robust increasing trends of peak water levels and duration downstream of the high-dyke areas are found with a step change in 2000/2001, i.e. immediately after the disastrous flood which initiated the high-dyke development. These changes are in contrast to the negative trends detected at stations upstream of the high-dyke areas. This spatially different behaviour of changes in flood characteristics seems to support the public claims. To separate the impact of the high-dyke development from the impact of the other drivers – i.e. changes in the flood hydrograph entering the Mekong Delta, and changes in the tidal dynamics – hydraulic model simulations of the two recent large flood events in 2000 and 2011 are performed. The hydraulic model is run for a set of scenarios whereas the different drivers are interchanged. The simulations reveal that for the central VMD an increase of 9–13 cm in flood peak and 15 days in duration can be attributed to high-dyke development. However, for this area the tidal dynamics have an even larger effect in the range of 19–32 cm. However, the relative contributions of the three drivers of change vary in space across the delta. In summary, our study confirms the claims that the high-dyke development has raised the flood hazard downstream. However, it is not the only and not the most important driver of the observed changes. It has to be noted that changes in tidal levels caused by sea level rise in combination with the widely observed land subsidence and the temporal coincidence of high water levels and spring tides have even larger impacts. It is recommended to develop flood risk management strategies using the high-dyke areas as retention zones to mitigate the flood hazard downstream.
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The paper assessed the existing adaptation strategies implemented by farmers in the Upper East Region of Ghana to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change and variability. The paper used data collected through a series of participatory methods including focus group discussions, questionnaire surveys and key informant interviews in 4 farming communities with different socioeconomic backgrounds in the Bongo and Talensi-Nabdam Districts of the Upper East Region. Results showed that farmers’ adaptation to climate change and variability may be categorized under agricultural, water management, communal pooling and livelihood diversification techniques. Specific livelihood diversification adaptation practices identified in the study communities include charcoal or fuel wood sales, temporal and permanent migration to urban areas in search of non-existing jobs. Communal pooling, involving joint ownership and sharing of wealth, labor or incomes across households, is not widely practiced and should be enhanced. The findings showed that male and female farmers may engage in different set of adaptation practices to cope with climate change. Further, the results showed that farmers, especially female farmers, were constrained by a lack of property rights of farmlands, lack of credit facilities and lack of access to irrigation facilities, inadequate climate change information and inadequate seeds for planting. The paper recommends that farmers should be encouraged to form farmer-based associations to network socially, access credit facilities, land, insurance products, extension services and training to empower communities and women. Fostering peer exchange of information between communities will ensure best practices, and lessons learnt are shared and scaled-up. This paper contributes to the literature on mechanisms employed by farmers in dryland farming systems to cope with climate change and variability.
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This book comprehensively covers topics in knowledge management and competence in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, as well as knowledge capture and storage. Presented in accessible “chunks,” it includes more than 120 topics that are essential to high-performance organizations. The extensive use of quotes by respected experts juxtaposed with relevant research to counterpoint or lend weight to key concepts; “cheat sheets” that simplify access and reference to individual articles; as well as the grouping of many of the topics under recurrent themes make this book unique. In addition, this book provides scalable tried-and-tested tools, methods, and approaches for improved organizational effectiveness. The research included is particularly useful to knowledge workers engaged in executive leadership; research, analysis, and advice; and corporate management and administration. This book is a valuable resource for those working in the public, private, and third sectors, both in industrialized and developing countries. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO license.
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Climate variability and change threaten and impact negatively on biodiversity, agricultural sustainability, ecosystems, and economic and social structures – factors that are all vital for human resilience and well-being. To cope with these challenges, embracing sustainability in food production is therefore essential. Practising sustainable agriculture is one way of ensuring sustainability in pro-poor farming communities in low-income countries. Sustainable agricultural practices are those practices enabling farmers to meet current and future societal needs for food, fibre, ecosystem services and healthy lives. This study evaluates the dynamics of farm-level adoption of sustainable agriculture practices and their effects on maize productivity, crop income and food adequacy, using data from the Chinyanja Triangle in southern Africa. We apply joint estimation techniques to estimate consistently the impact of sustainable agriculture practices on maize productivity, crop income and food adequacy. We established that the uptake of sustainable agriculture practices significantly improves productivity, income and food adequacy. The systematic targeting of reducing gender-related imbalances, enhancing ties to boost access to social capital, diversifying revenue sources to improve wealth and facilitating access to other strategic resources can conclusively enhance the uptake of sustainable agriculture practices, thus improving livelihoods. We recommend the integration of sustainable agriculture practices into rural development policy frameworks in southern Africa.
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Flood control and irrigation play a significant role in supporting rice intensification and agricultural diversification in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Arising out of these mandatory policies have exhibited complicated realities surrounding the linkages between flood control schemes (dykes) and rural livelihoods. However, little has been known about how these development processes shape the social and physical landscapes of the delta, and how rural households have transformed their traditional livelihoods to adapt to change. This paper aims to investigate these household-led practices that have occurred in the wake of the scheme operation across three flood-prone areas in the delta. It employs the mixed methods approach that guides data collection using focus group discussions, in-depth interviews with key informants and household surveys. The analysis suggests that the rural communities have witnessed the dramatic transformation of livelihood practices to adapt to emerging social and environmental conditions. Household groups have devised and adopted a variety of livelihood strategies, which consequently gave rise to polarity among household groups. This study highlights the increased recognition of rural households’ role in contributing farming initiatives to the reframing process of local adaptation policies.
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The complex relationship between human mobility and global climate change remains contested. In this viewpoint, the themes of human mobility, adaptation and climate change are explored from a political ecology perspective. A framework of political ecology of human mobility in relation to climate change is applied to the context of Vietnam's Mekong Delta (MKD). The Vietnamese government, popular media and academic studies often present the MKD in dystopian ways in which there is sometimes no more place for poor and landless farmers as a direct result of climate change. In 2019 and 2020, the MKD faced one of its most severe droughts in recent history largely tied to upstream hydropower development. In this viewpoint article, we contend that future studies can no longer establish a direct and causal relationship between climate change and human mobility, especially in light of these recent events. The underlying drivers as well as the broader context, which are shaped by political economy, market structures and forces, power relations, government policy, geopolitics, and transboundary water issues deserve a more prominent role in the analysis of human mobility patterns in the MKD and beyond. ARTICLE HISTORY
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This article argues that, till date, a single paradigm dominates the discourse on agrarian crisis and farmers’ movement against the anti-farmer dictates of the Indian state. There is a pressing need for the organic intellectuals of the masses to build an alternative discourse to examine the agrarian crisis and its roots. To this end, the present article reasons that the neoliberal resolution of the agrarian crisis that the authoritarian-corporate nexus has imposed on the farming community will produce mass dispossession and displacement in India. It exposes the misery of traditional consciousness that rules over the current farmers’ movement in India. The article concludes that the agrarian crisis which is actually a crisis of small farmers and agricultural labourers requires modern consciousness for egalitarian and long-term resolution.
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This study examines the extent of the productivity gap between male and female bean producers, its discriminatory nature and implications for the policymakers in agriculture in Tanza-nia. Generally, women are distinctively "invisible" in agriculture, due to social norms and even from the national agricultural policy perspective. Their discrimination arises from uncounted and unaccounted for farm work, and their productivity is reduced by triple roles, limited access to education , having triple effects on access to technology, training and land rights. In research, issues of concern to them such as nutritious food crops, varietal selection on important attributes, household food security, convenient home storage and small-scale processing are widely ignored through unfavourable policy design. Given the above discriminatory issues surrounding women in agriculture, they are hypothesised to be less productive and often lag behind male counterparts in crop production. To test the above hypothesis, a three-stage stratified sampling method was used to collect cross-sectional data in 2016 across four regions of Tanzania. Then, an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method (at means) was used to apportion the sources of the difference between men and women into explained and unexplained variations. Further improvements through the newly developed Re-Centered Influence Functions (RIFs) remarkably improved outcomes as the differences were analysed through unconditional partial effects on quantiles. Using a counterfactual approach and correcting for selection bias, the model provided consistent estimates for easy comparison of the two groups. Besides this, it emerged that interventions such as providing improved bean seed varieties and training farmers on good agricultural practices reduced the gender yield gap and provided a potential avenue for addressing the discrimination observed in productivity among males and females. Controlling for selection bias also improved the model, but the real discrimination was observed at the 50th percentile, where the majority of the respondents lay within. However, if a female's age, family size, additional years of schooling and discretion to spend income from beans were taken away, they would be worse off. Our study finds that females comprised 25 percent of the sample, had 6 percent lower productivity, provided 64.70 percent on-farm labour and had 0.32 hectares less land compared to males, ceteris paribus. Access to improved varieties contributed to a 35.4 percent improved productivity compared to growing indigenous/local varieties. The implication is that the gender yield gap can be reduced significantly if efforts are focused on preventing or correcting factors causing discrimination against women. Citation: Nchanji, E.B.; Collins, O.A.; Katungi, E.; Nduguru, A.; Kabungo, C.; Njuguna, E.M.; Ojiewo, C.O. What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries? Sustainability 2021, 13, 77. https://doi.
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This article investigates the dynamic relationship among physical infrastructure, financial development, human capital and economic growth in Bangladesh, employing Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound co-integration and Granger causality test for the period 1985–2019. The study finds a significantly positive long-term impact of physical infrastructure and human capital on economic growth. However, the effect of financial development on growth is found to be negative, and the result suggests that financial development will take place with economic growth. From the policy perspective, this study emphasises increasing investment in physical infrastructure and human capital for Bangladesh to foster long-term economic growth.
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Sharing lessons is critical for ensuring that finite funding for climate change adaptation is deployed in ways that provide the most value and impact. Successes are celebrated, but failures are habitually obscured, leaving a major knowledge base untapped. This commentary calls for the urgent sharing of failures as a source of critical learning.
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Increased understanding of global warming and documentation of its observable impacts have led to the development of adaptation responses to climate change around the world. A necessary, but often missing, component of adaptation involves the assessment of outcomes and impact. Through a systematic review of research literature, I categorize 110 adaptation initiatives that have been implemented and shown some degree of effectiveness. I analyze the ways in which these activities have been documented as effective using five indicators: reducing risk and vulnerability, developing resilient social systems, improving the environment, increasing economic resources, and enhancing governance and institutions. The act of cataloging adaptation activities produces insights for current and future climate action in two main areas: understanding common attributes of adaptation initiatives reported to be effective in current literature; and identifying gaps in adaptation research and practice that address equality, justice, and power dynamics.
Chapter
This chapter discusses how agrarian relations within particular national contexts have been shaped by Southeast Asia’s wider, post-colonial political economy. Class relations and conflicts surrounding agriculture have fundamentally changed in this region over the past 50 years, through a shift from a peasant rural economy to a neoliberal era defined by globalisation, marketisation, livelihood diversification, and precarity, including growing exclusions and enclosures that alienate people from their land. Capitalist development has led to dramatic changes in land access and usage, with the rise of large agribusiness plantations, the construction of hydropower dams, forestry and mining all displacing smallholders from their land. This has bred growing resentment, as well as collective and individual resistance to various forms of dispossession and quieter micro-processes of exclusion. In some cases, rural grievances have helped to fuel the rise of populism.
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Renewed attention for ecosystem dynamics when considering flood related interventions has been instrumental in shaping initiatives to ‘de-polder' lands, i.e. returning previously reclaimed land to the waters. This is a substantial paradigm shift in land and water management, as poldering has been crucial to the development of both the Dutch and Bangladeshi deltas, where wetlands have been turned into productive agricultural areas by constructing peripheral embankments to separate water in rivers from water within polders. Although these interventions have contributed significantly to increased food production and safer livelihoods within the embankments in the short run, negative socio-environmental effects also surfaced. Constructing flood preventive embankments also means preventing the deposition of sedimentation. As a consequence, soil subsidence and the increase of economic value in the built-up area behind the embankments, turned a 'high-incidence, low-consequence' flood risk situation into a 'low incidence – high consequence' one. It also led to changes in social structures, decision-making power and trade-offs between when and how much water is taken in or drained out – (re-)distributing hydrological risks between stakeholders. It is against this background that polder embankments have come in for strong criticism and reconsideration. They were cut, reduced in height, moved or even completely removed, in the cases central in this paper. As a result of such ‘de-poldering’, flood dynamics (riverine/freshwater or tidal) have reappeared in formerly enclosed lands. Proponents of ecosystem-based approaches to water and flood management have been instrumental in encouraging this practice. This contribution describes and analyses two cases from the Dutch and Bangladeshi deltas, where these kinds of interventions have taken shape over the last 10–20 years. The article highlights the complexity and interaction between environmental, technological and socio-political drivers for (and against) dyke removal and restoration of flood dynamics to reduce flood disaster risk. The Dutch case emphasises how a de-poldering project had redistributive consequences, when farmers felt they had to pay the price for other people's safety from flooding. The Bangladesh case study shows how controlled tidal flooding addresses another water related risk: prolonged water logging within delta polders. Originating in a popular practice of the region, this DRR strategy met with varying degrees of success when implemented as a top-down intervention.
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Within the current global challenges, energy plays a key role for the achievement of basic human needs, socioeconomic development, environmental protection and global security. At the light of this interconnection, a proper impact evaluation metric able to assess the main effects of energy projects at local level becomes necessary in order to highlight successful strategies. Relying on the Sustainable Livelihoods concept, this study proposes an Impact Evaluation Framework (IEF) to measure project impact as changes of target community's livelihoods. First, the IEF establishes a Capitals-Based Evaluation Hierarchy, taking its rationale from the literature: this first step responds to the needs of providing a standard and harmonized structure applicable to different projects. Secondly, the IEF develops a further Five-Step Procedure to respond to the concurrent need of flexibility and customization of specific projects. The conceptual methodology of the IEF might be used at different stages of project design: as a supportive methodology donors use in their programme of funds allocation or as an instrument experts use to quantitatively support their ex-post project evaluation. In the paper, the IEF is presented in the light of this second application and the procedure applied to a real project in Ethiopia. The set of information obtained with the IEF is compared to the final expert evaluation, commissioned by the donor and performed at the end of the project, showing the usefulness of IEF as a supportive methodology in the evaluation process.
Book
This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO license. This book comprehensively covers topics in knowledge management and competence in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, as well as knowledge capture and storage. Presented in accessible “chunks,” it includes more than 120 topics that are essential to high-performance organizations. The extensive use of quotes by respected experts juxtaposed with relevant research to counterpoint or lend weight to key concepts; “cheat sheets” that simplify access and reference to individual articles; as well as the grouping of many of these topics under recurrent themes make this book unique. In addition, it provides scalable tried-and-tested tools, method and approaches for improved organizational effectiveness. The research included is particularly useful to knowledge workers engaged in executive leadership; research, analysis and advice; and corporate management and administration. It is a valuable resource for those working in the public, private and third sectors, both in industrialized and developing countries.
Chapter
One component of adaptation to climate change is the promotion of innovations. Who says innovation, also talks about innovation adoption, and thus ultimately taking a decision. Decision making in relation to innovation adoption is a social process, because the decision maker often involves the participation of other members of society, including sometimes the members of his or her own family group. The elements of the social system that need to be taken into account in an innovation diffusion process are the norms that reflect the established patterns of behaviour for members of the social system. Recognized leadership in opinions is a major way in which a person can informally influence the attitudes of others so that they make changes in a desired direction. Such a change agent is thus someone who is able to influence the innovation decisions of others, including in a direction that the change agent endorses.