Scenarios for building resilience in the ASALs
Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) are a particularly unique and challenging context in which to achieve resilience outcomes. ASALs face multiple stressors that increase the vulnerability of communities. Over the past century, these areas have been undergoing an accelerating process of change. Rapidly shifting landuse is leading to fragmentation of rangelands, driven by socio-economic factors including population growth, globalisation, competition for land, intensification of production and political pressures.
Ecosystem service flows are also being affected as these systems undergo social and ecological change, with implications for the resilience of those whose livelihoods depend on them. Increased climate variability and frequency of extreme weather events adds a further layer of complexity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides evidence that climate change will interact with non-climate related drivers and stressors to increase the vulnerability of Africa’s ASALs, with high confidence. In Kenya, where less predictable rainfall and environmental stress are already acting on vulnerabilities, the increased extent, duration and frequency of drought are having negative impacts on the resilience of livelihoods and food security.
However, there are also significant opportunities to work with Kenya’s ASAL communities to build resilience to extreme events and climate variability. There is inherent adaptive capacity held at community level that can be harnessed for improved resilience. Further, the current process of devolution to counties in Kenya offers a timely window of opportunity to strengthen governance for climate resilience and sustainable development at community level.
Policies and programming aimed at building resilience in Kenya’s ASALs must recognise the multiple stressors at play and the adaptive capacities that can be harnessed. The challenges are to increase integration of interventions across sectors and to foster strong governance and institutional arrangements for resilience across scales, from community to county to national and regional institutions. A sound policy framework is essential to achieve this, but overcoming these challenges in practice is very difficult. At county level, decentralised planning and implementation is hampered when the mandate for major decisions is retained at national level, when agency or ownership of development is limited, when awareness is low or when incentives are not sufficient to prompt action.
The purpose of this review is to highlight some of the political economy factors that affect the implementation of Kenya’s Ending Drought Emergencies (EDE) Common Programme Framework (CPF). First, the six pillars of the CPF are analysed using the Knowledge, Policy and Power (KPP) methodology to identify the ways in which institutions, actors’ interests and knowledge management may enable or impede policy outcomes. Second, selected cases that are closely aligned to the investments made under the EDE have been identified through the KPP review and key informant interviews. The extent to which identified political economy factors interact with these investments to impede or enable sustainable economic development is explored. While these examples are drawn from the context of the Kenya EDE, this review is intended to inform the implementation of the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Drought Disaster Sustainability Initiative (IDDRSI) in other member states. Ultimately, the aim of this work is to begin to provide policymakers and planners with a convincing evidence base in the form of specific investment cases to illustrate how well-formulated policies can play a significant role in ensuring sustained economic development.