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Adaptation finance failing to reach the most vulnerable: A multi-level model of household political power in Madagascar [1]

['Katherine Elizabeth Browne', 'Stockholm Environment Institute', 'Stockholm', 'School For Environment', 'Sustainability', 'University Of Michigan', 'Ann Arbor', 'Mi', 'United States Of America', 'Claudien Razafiarimanana']

Date: 2022-12 

International financial support for climate adaptation is expected to double by 2025. As adaptation finance expands, however, concern is growing that it is failing to benefit those most vulnerable to negative climate impacts. Qualitative studies have demonstrated how entrenched forms of inequality, such as patronage, can enable elite capture of international resources and prevent benefits from reaching relatively vulnerable households within communities. This study contributes to the literature on power in adaptation and climate finance by quantitatively analyzing the distributional outcomes of a UN Adaptation Fund project in the Aloatra-Mangoro region of Madagascar. We employ mixed-methods to examine how informal mechanisms of patronage influenced the distribution of project benefits. Using a multi-level model to analyze 599 household surveys, we compare the political connectivity of beneficiary and non-beneficiary households. We find that households that participated had higher levels of political connectivity than those that did not. This finding is robust across three different measures of participation and is reinforced by qualitative findings from formal and informal interviews. We conclude that rather than targeting the most vulnerable, the project likely disproportionately benefited households already better positioned to adapt and exacerbated inequality within targeted communities. By unpacking how household-level political power shaped access to benefits, this study advances discussion on rethinking approaches to power and inequality in internationally financed adaptation.

Funding: This research was supported by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellowship (PO22A180037 to KB). https://www2.ed.gov/programs/iegpsddrap/index.html The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Copyright: © 2022 Browne, Razafiarimanana. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction

International financial support for climate adaptation is growing rapidly. Under the UN Climate Convention, high-income countries pledged US$100 billion in annual support for climate action in low-income countries, beginning in 2020 and with a balance between mitigation and adaptation [1, 2]. According to a recent estimate, international adaptation finance–the mobilization of public and private resources to enable deliberate change in response to or anticipation of climate impacts–has grown to US$46 billion (2019–2020) from US$30 billion (2017–2018) [3]. Nevertheless, wealthy countries have acknowledged falling short of the overall climate finance goal, and particularly short of financing adaptation in low-income countries [4]. They subsequently committed in the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact to double financial support for adaptation by 2025 [5].

In principle, adaptation finance is intended to benefit those most vulnerable to negative climate impacts. The Paris Agreement states that the provision of climate finance should account for the “needs and priorities of developing country parties, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change” [2]. The 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact further encourages multilateral organizations, which deliver a significant proportion of funding for adaptation, to “consider how climate vulnerabilities should be reflected in the provision of scaled-up financial resources” (5). Vulnerability is thus a key principle in the allocation of funding, as well as a primary way in which adaptation finance differs from development finance [6, 7].

As adaptation finance continues to scale up, however, concern is growing that the benefits of international projects and programs are failing to reach the most vulnerable [8–10]. Mounting evidence indicates that the most vulnerable countries receive less funding than moderately vulnerable counterparts [11–13]. Studies at the national-level have shown that vulnerability may play little role in government decision-making and that few international resources trickle down to local levels [14–16]. In a recent review of international adaptation interventions, Eriksen et al. [17] concluded that rather than benefiting the most vulnerable, many interventions actually reinforce and even exacerbate existing inequalities within targeted communities. This has led to calls to “put the needs of the vulnerable first” in internationally financed adaptation [9].

Funders face significant conceptual and practical obstacles, however, in their efforts to ensure that funding reaches the most vulnerable, especially at a community level. Conceptually, there is no agreed definition of vulnerability under the UN Climate Convention [18]. In this paper, we draw on the definition widely accepted within the academic community of vulnerability as a “state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the absence of capacity to adapt” [19]. This conceptualization recognizes that vulnerability differs across scales: country by country, community by community, and between individuals and households (20). Even if exposure is common at the community level, sensitivity to that exposure and adaptive capacity will differ between individuals and households within communities [19, 20].

Relative vulnerability within communities is shaped by a range of interdependent factors: social and political relationships, which are themselves shaped by differences of gender, ethnicity, age, and class; often unequal control of productive assets, such as land, water, labor, and credit in agrarian communities; and differentiated access to information, including climate information that can enable effective adaptation [21–23]. Taylor [23] refers to this as a “disaggregated conceptualization” of vulnerability, in which the “relative security of some and the vulnerability of others are reproduced over time.” This conceptualization contrasts with that of most funders in international adaptation finance who are hesitant to acknowledge social differentiation within populations and therefore tend to aggregate vulnerability at the country and community level [23].

This hesitancy leads to a more practical challenge: how to influence the allocation of funding within countries and within communities. “Who gets what” is strongly influenced by context-specific sociocultural and political dynamics [24–27]. Of particular concern for adaptation finance is the influence of entrenched forms of inequality, such as patronage, when government workers are recruited for partisan reasons and use public office for private gain [28]. Such informal political arrangements have been shown to enable elite capture–the expropriation of funds by powerful actors–inhibiting benefits from reaching the most vulnerable and politically marginalized [25, 29–32].

Sovacool [29], for example, found that a neo-feudal patronage system in Bangladesh enabled elites to “enclose” land they expected would become valuable under internationally financed adaptation programs. Artur & Hillhorst [30] similarly demonstrated how well-connected elites captured the largest plots of land and best locations for housing under a flooding relocation plan in Mozambique. Nelson & Finan [31] illustrated how long-standing patron-client relations limit the agency of rural farmers in northeast Brazil, trapping them in a state of persistent vulnerability. Eriksen et al. [17] call these forms of capture “accumulation by adaptation” and point to them as a major way that international interventions reinforce and exacerbate inequality. For multilateral and bilateral funders, reaching the most vulnerable thus requires recognizing these informal political dynamics and working within local contexts.

This study quantitatively investigates how patronage influences the distribution of adaptation finance, specifically whether it inhibits benefits from reaching relatively vulnerable households in targeted communities. It examines the distributional outcomes of a UN Adaptation Fund (AF) project in Madagascar. The US$5 million project–“Promoting Climate Resilience of the Rice Sector through Pilot Investments in the Aloatra-Mangoro Region,” known locally as “AFRice”–was implemented from 2012–2019 by the Malagasy Ministry of the Environment, with support and oversight from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) [33, 34].

We choose to focus on the AF because it has the clearest mandate among multilateral and bilateral funders to reach those most vulnerable to climate change. The AF was established under the Kyoto Protocol to “assist developing country parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change to meet the costs of adaptation” [35]. Countries preparing project proposals must demonstrate how the project will provide benefits to the “most vulnerable communities, and vulnerable groups within those communities” [36]. Information on expected beneficiaries should reference the “equitable distribution of benefits to vulnerable communities, households, and individuals” [37]. Despite its targeted mandate, The Adaptation Fund Board has repeatedly declined to define “vulnerability,” illustrating the challenges of operationalizing the principle in adaptation finance overall [38].

We choose to focus on Madagascar for two reasons. First, because it is among the world’s most climate vulnerable countries by many measures [39, 40]. Rising temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns threaten agriculture, especially rice, the staple crop and primary food source for most Malagasy households [41, 42]. A large percentage of the population is chronically food insecure, especially during the annual rainy season [43–45].

Second, we focus on Madagascar because of the well-documented role of informal political patronage in influencing the distribution of public goods in the country [46, 47]. In political terms, the government is often characterized as neopatrimonial, functioning primarily as a patronage system, with employment, government contracts, and other goods distributed largely through affective networks and to political supporters [47, 48]. It is common for government officials to use public office for personal gain [48]. Political and economic power at the national level is held among competing factions of elites, mostly from a single ethnic group, the Merina [46, 49]. Historically, the distribution of public goods has been highly concentrated in and around the capital city of Antananarivo, and among ethnic groups that are geographically and culturally close to the Merina [50].

Outside the capital and its environs, the Malagasy government exhibits little capacity to provide social services or enforce rule of law [47]. In the absence of the state, a corpus of customary law and informal institutions structure social and political life at the local level [51]. These include: fokonolona (local community), dina (customary codes), fady (taboos), fomban-drazana (culture or the way of the ancestors), fomba (broader cultural norms), and fihavanana (social harmony and mutual reliance) [52]. In many areas, these informal institutions interface awkwardly with the formal administrative structure of the Malagasy state. Fokontany (the smallest administrative unit of the state) roughly correspond to fokonolona, and the appointed heads, Chiefs fokontany, often share power with village elders, tangalamena [53, 54]. Dina, decided collectively by fokonolona, sometimes contradict and prevail over official law [55, 56].

Informal patronage is also common at this interface. Official positions at lower levels of the state hierarchy (e.g., in district, commune, and fokontany offices, as well as in regional Ministry offices) are often obtained through patronage [62]. Resources that reach local levels are often distributed through informal networks of patronage connected to actors with both formal and informal authority: elected and appointed state officials like Mayors and Chiefs fokontany, village elders, and other positions of local prominence, like priests. Teachers, doctors, and local security forces often use their positions to pursue personal political and economic incentives [57, 58]. State goods can also be distributed reciprocally through extended family networks (havana). Given these dynamics, it is unsurprising that elite capture has been observed in the distribution of international resources at local levels [59, 60].

This study asks whether and if so how informal patronage shaped the distribution of benefits associated with the AFRice project in Alaotra-Mangoro, Madagascar. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative methods, we examine whether politically connected households were more likely to participate in and derive valuable benefits from the project, and therefore whether AFRice reached relatively vulnerable households within targeted communities. By systematically investigating the on-the-ground outcomes of internationally financed adaptation, findings advance research on questions of power in climate finance, especially how entrenched forms of inequality inhibit funders’ efforts to enable adaptation among those most vulnerable to climate change.

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[1] Url: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000050

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