Supporting climate-resilient planning at national and district levels: A pathway to multi-stakeholder decision-making in Uganda

Abstract

If rural adaptation is to be effective, then it cannot take the form of prescriptive actions determined by outsiders and subsequently imposed upon rural communities. Our focus in this chapter is to reflect on the effectiveness of rural adaptation in the context of food security and agriculture in Uganda and provide insight into a way forward using learning from the HyCRISTAL project rural pilot. We critically explore the boundaries of 'adaptation' and 'resilience' as policy responses to climate change in poor rural communities through the interdisciplinary use of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including innovative visual methods and action research. We identify some of the limits to building adaptive communities and explore potential solutions for enabling informed decision-making for rural adaptation that are linked to investment in sustainable development. We highlight the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches and the generation of a 'knowledge ecosystem' that combines physical and social science methods and data to generate context-specific information to inform decision-making.