Adaptive livelihoods? Climate change, agrodiversity, and food security amid development transitions in Rwanda

Open Access
- Author:
- Clay, Nathan Jared
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 11, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Karl Stephen Zimmerer, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Karl Stephen Zimmerer, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Brian Hastings King, Committee Member
Heather D Karsten, Committee Member
Carolyn Elizabeth Sachs, Outside Member - Keywords:
- food security
climate change
agroecology
sustainable intensification
adaptive capacity
environmental governance sub-Saharan Africa
development geography
political ecology
climate change
food security
agroecology
sustainable intensification
adaptive capacity
environmental governance
sub-Saharan Africa
development geography
political ecology - Abstract:
- This dissertation contributes to scholarship in geographical political ecology concerning the intensification and commercialization of agriculture amidst global climatic change. With a case study based on fieldwork in four villages in southwest Rwanda, I investigate agricultural commercialization as a social-ecological process, including the ramifications of related development programs and policies on the vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity of smallholder agriculturalists to climatic uncertainty and acute weather events. This dissertation is the result of long-term fieldwork that relied on quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and spatial methods of data collection and analysis. It documents spatial-temporal patterns of climate risk, the uneven distribution of costs and benefits of climatic shocks, and the impact of development interventions on vulnerability. More precisely, this dissertation details how households come to differ (e.g. by class and gender) in their abilities to adaptively manage multiple environmental and social uncertainties. By illustrating how institutions and social-environmental variability interact to shape vulnerability and adaptive capacity, this work contributes to scholarly and policy debates at the interface of food systems, development, and climate change. One key contribution of this dissertation is the evidence that adaptive capacity can be productively considered as a social-ecological process rather than as a static, asset-based, quantifiable variable. I show that adaptive capacity to climatic change is produced through the intersection of household agency (including land use and livelihood decisions) and structural constraints (including agricultural policy as it intersects with subjectivities such as class and gender). I provide a framework for visualizing how adaptive capacity is dynamic and relational. In doing so, this research also presents valuable empirical understanding as to the viability of agricultural intensification policies that are now common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where development planning now widely seeks to emulate the successes of the Green Revolution in Asia. It demonstrates that large-scale, state-led agricultural intensification may be limited in its success as a pro-poor development strategy—as it is in Rwanda—by high degrees of social and ecological variation. I therefore make the case that development policies must be carefully attuned to risk management processes and must be flexible enough to adapt to changing social-ecological conditions of risk.