Building bonds and breaking bridges: Community based adaptation (CBA) as a source of conflict in a Northern Ghanaian landscape

Abstract

Community-based adaptation (CBA) is considered a key strategy in today’s adaptation and rural development landscapes. There is, as Terry Cannon notes, a ‘rush by climate change practitioners to be involved in CBA’. The chapter finds that CBAs implemented in rural communities generate new and/or intensified conflict as land and water resources come to be used differently, more intensively and/or redistributed in the context of competing claims to natural resources (communities, social groups, livelihoods etc.). Despite this, conflict receives very little attention in the apolitical framings of the policy and practice of planned adaptations, including CBA. The chapter takes as its case study a CBA (with a strong dry-season farming component) implemented in Ghana’s Upper East Region (UER). It employs social capital—especially the distinction between bridging and bonding social capital—as a construct to explain the impact that adaptation interventions have on relations within a community (bonding social capital) in terms of collective action in the management of natural resources, and how this might affect relations between communities, including migrant pastoralist communities (bridging social capital).