Ingredients for Social-Ecological Resilience, Poverty Traps, and Adaptive Social Protection in Semi-Arid Africa

Abstract

Resilience is much more than bouncing back after a shock. It also involves the ability of individuals, communities, and entire regions to self-organize and increase their capacity for learning, experimentation, and adaptation. In the context of climate change, a resilience perspective emphasizes learning from the past (memory), monitoring the present, and the ability to anticipate and prepare for the worst. It includes learning to live with change and uncertainty by combining different types of knowledge, envisioning possible futures, and enhancing flexibility in decision-making and planning. Rather than learning by shock, a resilience lens offers a potentially empowering arena for nurturing innovation and the capacity to transform in order to navigate both slow and incremental environmental changes and rapid-onset crises. This chapter explores the role and potential limits of iterative learning processes for climate change adaptation in rural African communities characterized by high and chronic poverty, coupled with lowawareness for complex drivers of change. It stresses learning, memory, creativity, and the need to move forward in spite of imperfect knowledge and vast uncertainties. At the same time, the chapter identifies critical institutional, policy, and power barriers, and potential limits at multiple scales that inhibit just and timely adaptation among vulnerable and marginalized populations, especially those dependent on rainfed agriculture. We identify poverty traps as complex thresholds typified by shifts and losses of key household assets, increasing failure of livelihood response strategies to social and ecological stresses and shocks, ineffective social networks, and limited nanticipatory capacity to embrace change, uncertainty, and surprises. We conclude by proposing adaptive social protection as a prospective yet potentially insufficient means for bypassing or escaping poverty traps in the semi-arid tropics of Africa, and facilitating transitions towards livelihood resilience.