Projects

Bottom-up planning for social equity in climate smart livestock interventions

Current
CCAFS climate-smart farms, farmers in Western Kenya, and markets. Photo: C.Schubert

Project description

Ethiopia has outlined key priorities for achieving NDCs through climate-smart livestock development and is now starting to pursue implementation strategies. Most external interventions to support mitigation actions in livestock systems – including ILRI’s Programme for Climate-Smart Livestock (PCSL) – focus on national policymakers and planning processes, or promote farm-level technology adoption. However, the rapid commercialization of the livestock sector risks concentrating power and land-holding in agrarian settings. These social equity outcomes for mitigation interventions are rarely addressed in policy processes and this project aims to address this.

The research focuses on households’ abilities to intensify and commercialize livestock-based production, exploring the gendered implications for access to resources and benefits as well as inter-household variability. Results of this research inform facilitation of participatory planning and assessment of sectoral strategies in terms of social outcomes of intensification and commercialization. The research and interventions in this project are designed to build the capacity of civil society organizations to engage in national livestock mitigation dialogues (a focus of the larger PCSL project), especially in terms of social equity safeguards.

By highlighting social equity considerations in local sectoral dialogues, this project gives the selected civil society organizations a more prominent and informed voice in NDC implementation in the livestock sector at the local scale, as well as add an important – and an often ignored – aspect of the pursuit of NDCs. This project builds on the efforts of the "Mitigation in livestock and low emissions development pathways in East Africa" project, which ended in 2018.

Activities

  • Advocate for greater consideration of social equity outcomes in low-emission development planning.
  • Field research and analysis
  • Literature review

Expected outcomes

  • Using science driven findings to advocate for greater consideration of social equity outcomes in the Government of Ethiopia’s planning for low emissions development interventions.
  • Inserting social equity considerations and social safeguards into low emissions development policy planning and implementation.

More information

For more information, please contact project leader Todd Crane, ILRI (T.Crane@cgiar.org).

Project Activities

Project partners (tbd) will lead engagement with national policy makers and other relevant organizations to advocate for greater consideration of social equity outcomes in low-emission development planning.

Mixed method data collection on social differentiation

Desk-based background study on social equity in agricultural intensification, with special attention to East African livestock systems as possible.

Project partners (tbd) will engage with national policy makers and other relevant organizations to advocate for greater consideration of social equity outcomes in low-emission development planning.

This research identifies and analyses institutional conditions for scaling low-emission development dairy interventions in an inclusive manner. The formulation and implementation of inclusive low-emission intervention strategies is complicated by asymmetric power relations between actors, conflicting interests, misalignment of incentive structures, discrepancies between short-term achievements and long-term strategies, and disconnected formal and informal sectors. Moreover, the urgency to respond to climate change may induce a search for simple and transferable solutions with high emission reduction potential. This may hinder investment in the development of context-sensitive strategies that simultaneously maximize societal co-benefits. By systematically valorising multiple pathways and capturing diverse priorities, interests and management styles, this project adopts a socially responsive approach to scenario development. Facilitating interactions among representatives from private and public sectors in research-driven dialogues stimulates and catalyses intervention strategies that can be inclusive of a wider range of actors and therefore enhance the scalability potential of low-emission intervention strategies.

Project Deliverables

2019
2020