Studies such as Eriksen & Lind (2009) and Dolsak & Prasak (2018) have conceptualised adaptation as politics. According to Dolsak and Prasak (2018, p.319), politics has to do with who gets power to decide how resources are shared among citizens. The Macmillan International Higher Education conceptualises politics as the “exercise of power, the science [and art] of government [and governance] the making of collective decisions, and the allocation of scarce resources”40. The above conceptualisation of politics implies that it is associated with
39 Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30744203
40 Available at: https://www macmillanihe.com/resources/sample-chapters/9780230363373_sample.pdf
an arena or ‘location’, in which case people’s behaviours regarding decision-making become political. ‘Politics’ is also viewed as a “process or mechanism, in which case ‘political’
behaviour is behaviour that exhibits distinctive characteristics or qualities, and so can take place in any, and perhaps all, social contexts”.41 Politics is closely linked with policy in that both influence each other regarding the making of formal or authoritative decisions on issues affecting a community, a group of people or an individual. To understand why a municipality would not prioritise issues of equity and justice of the most marginalised population in its adaptation intervention, it is important to explore how conflicting the interests of actors influence an adaptation policy or intervention.
According to Dolsak & Prasak (2018, p.319), adaptation is conceptualised as politics because
“it concerns issues of power, conflicting policy preferences, resource allocation, and administration tensions”. Furthermore, Dolsak & Prasak (2018) also note that politics is not a
“negation of rationality” or a “roadblock in achieving policy optimums”, rather; collective action challenges in politics occur because decision makers are “boundedly rational actors playing games with specific structures”. When ‘adaptation as politics’ intersects with gender and class, one can see how policy preference or implementation can either be enhanced or inhibit the adaptive capacity of local women to climate-related natural disasters. Eriksen and Lind (2009) note that in adapting to drought in Kenyan drylands, political office holders were more likely to assent to policies that promoted their interests, and that the kind of policies that promoted their interests did not maximise net benefits for the masses, specifically, the people whom the adaptation policies were meant to benefit. At times, policies that maximise net benefits for the masses might be difficult to achieve because of intervening socio-economic and socio-political factors too. To understand what shapes an optimal policy preference that respond to the adaptation needs of Black women in eThekwini, it is necessary to understand the incentives and interests that characterise the choice of development or interventions stipulated within South African policies in general and policy articulation within the eThekwini municipality in particular.
When Eriksen & Lind (2008, p.817) regarded adaptation as a political process, their explanation was that during adaptation to climate-related disaster, “individuals and groups interact and compete to promote their own discrete interests”. However, adaptation as a political process can also manifest in how beneficiaries of adaptation interventions organise
41 Ibid
themselves to influence decisions that directly affect them. This is part of the reason why climate change adaptation can also, just like mitigation, be regarded as a collective problem.
Politics is about collective bargaining where the governed also have a stake in influencing the decisions of those who govern. This kind of collective bargaining is a significant element of a democratic governance, which is characterised by accountability, equality, and equity.
During the fieldwork of this study, it was discovered that there were few or no interest groups in the study areas that specifically aim at advocating the adaptation needs of Black women within the study sites. Lack of such important interest group(s) can diminish the bargaining power of the women to influence governance decisions to secure their desired adaptation needs.
The participants of the study also alluded to the fact that lack of interest group or powerful voices in the communities contributed to why the municipality disaster management was usually slow or negligent to respond to flood emergencies or to address their adaptation needs.
When asked about the presence of interest groups, such as farmers’ cooperatives or activist groups, one participant in KwaMashu responded, “we do not seem to cooperate here. Everyone likes doing things on their own”. The few women cooperatives that were reported to exist in the study areas were dealing with stokvel42. However, since the interest of the stokvel group was not directly affected by floods, it was difficult for such groups to organise themselves and influence the municipal governance to improve its governance of issues pertaining to flood events in the area. A farmer’s cooperative (since farming is directly affected by climate change disasters), might perhaps have been a more influential interest group when it comes to intervening for climate adaptation governance. As opined by Eriksen and Lind (2008, p.817),
“Climate change adaptation policies are unlikely to be successful or to minimise inequity unless the political dimensions of local adaptation are considered”. According to Eriksen and Lund, existing power structures and conflicts of interests represent some of the political obstacles to developing equitable adaptation policies (Ibid).
Challenging existing power structures that daunt favourable gender-sensitive or gender equity adaptation programme is enhanced through forming of interest groups. Tummers & MacGregor (2019, p.62) show how feminist political ecology perspective is used to support ‘commoning’43 projects and research in European cities to move “beyond wishful thinking”. Their study found
42 A stokvel is a savings pool where a group of individuals contribute an agreed-upon amount of money either on a monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly basis. The group decides how they would like to use the money.
43 According to Merriam Webster dictionary, the word, ‘Commoning’ is used to describe the social practices used by ‘commoners’ in the course of managing shared resources and reclaiming their rights to land use.
that even though co-housing projects had changed the social reproduction spaces where people shared time and resources, they were still likely to fail in achieving social justice unless patriarchal-capitalist structures were challenged through radical cultural change. In a neoliberal society where people’s rights seem to have been commodified, collective action groups have been formed to seek social justice. For instance, environmental justice movements began in 1970s in the US when the poorer population organised themselves to protest the unequal distribution of environmental pollution. Studies, for example, McAfee & Shapiro (2010) and Kirwan et al (2015) have also shown how environmental activism against commodification, enclosure and overexploitation of natural resources emerged in the Global South. Such collective groups form a significant avenue where marginalised groups voice their concerns and demand justice and equity.
Furthermore, the influential role of collective bargaining has also been illustrated in a case study by Eriksen and Lund. In their study of adaptation to drought and conflict in Kenyan drylands, Eriksen and Lind (2008, p.817) found that in the face of drought, individuals, politicians, customary institutions and government administration formed relations to strengthen their power bases in addition to securing material means of survival. The authors also discovered that national economic and political structures and processes had affected the local adaptive capacity in a quite fundamental manner, for instance, through unequal allocation of resources across regions. It is also possible that adaptation policies made at the national, regional, or local level can be biased against a particular group, individuals, or communities.
A situation where adaptation policies disadvantage the most vulnerable group to environmental disaster is of course likely to compound or widen existing inequalities in a society or community. According to Eriksen and Lind (2008, p.817), whether development policy widens existing wealth gap depends on power relations existing at multiple scales which shape how conflicting interest are negotiated.
Arguably, since climate change adaptation has multiple dimensions, actors involved in adaptation interventions may also have varying perceptions about what adaptation entails and the multiple ways of addressing it. In one aspect, adaptation can seek to address biophysical vulnerability through investment in physical infrastructures such as dams, thunder-resistant houses, strengthening bridges, or it can seek to address the socio-economic and socio-political aspect of vulnerability through strengthening the social, economic or political capacity of people. Yet, in most cases, actors involved in local adaptation seem to understand adaptation
intervention solely as addressing the physical aspect of vulnerability. As Nightingale (2017, p.1) notes, most adaptations plan in the developing countries usually follow the adaptation framework/template charted out by the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, UNFCC. This influence of the UNFCCC on national adaptation plans of developing countries is due to the heavy funding supplied by the body to aid adaptation in developing countries.
Therefore, the international body, due to their interest, pose enormous influence on domestic climate change planning. Whether this has anything to do with the influence of an external agent or donor is an issue of a separate study. But as Nightingale (2017) points out, the UNFCCC’s framework (UNFCCC and other donors sponsors several adaptation in the developing countries) begins with vulnerability assessments to chart existing biophysical hazards, and then evaluate who is most at risk from the hazards in order to then intervene accordingly.
In the UNFCCC framework, as pointed out by Eakin & Patt (2011), once vulnerabilities are ascertained what follows is a shift of focus to technical measures, that is, to infrastructural and institutional building, involving national, regional and local level coordination, including local- based adaptation management groups. As noted by Nightingale (2017), what this implies is that such internationally mediated local adaptation plans basically assumes that one, adaptation is biophysical and two, the best way to address the vulnerability of the local population is through infrastructural and institutional improvement measures. However, in most cases, this assumption may conflict with the actual adaptation experiences of the local people. In the case of this study, the vulnerability of local Black women goes beyond just biophysical vulnerability to incorporate other aspects of vulnerability that are influenced by socio-economic, cultural, and political processes. In this regard, and in most cases also, gender intersects with class to shape local women’s vulnerability to climate disaster. Therefore, it is important to consider the multiple dimensions to building people’s resilience to environmental disaster while taking the social context of the people into cognisance.
Building people’s adaptive capacity to cope with climate disaster entails strengthening their resilience, and the process can be complex. It can involve building people’s emotional strength or improving social capital among people. However, in a situation where adaptation intervention is one-dimensional, where policy makers are imposing their thoughts and decisions on the local people, it is likely that those policy makers would readily choose the techno-spatial aspect of adaptation intervention that seeks to improve infrastructure. Such
intervention is likely to ignore other dimensions of vulnerability experienced by the affected individual or community.
As already noted, vulnerability also involves other stressors resulting from the context of political, institutional, economic, and social structures and processes that put pressures on people, affecting their ability to cope with flood and other climate-related disasters. As mentioned by O’Brien et al (2004b), the choice of responses to a climate change disaster can affect the context for responding to other societal or environmental changes, and vice versa. In the context of this study, the vulnerability of local women was found to involve other complex issues besides the stress caused by the degraded physical environment and flood events. The socio-cultural determinants of gender roles and responsibilities contributed significantly to the vulnerability experienced by the women. In other cases, gender-based violence and negligence of family responsibilities by men was found to have put extra pressure on the women. In the case of male negligence of family duties, mothers now had to bear the sole responsibility of the family’s welfare. The implications of this is that, in addressing the women’s adaptation to floods in the areas, it is critical to take cognisance of intervening and apparent contextual factors of vulnerability rather than rely only on an interventionist approach (which only reiterates the economic development at the affected areas as a way of helping the residents adapt to climate disasters).