Author
Listed:
- Katherine Elizabeth Browne
- Claudien Razafiarimanana
Abstract
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.
Suggested Citation
Katherine Elizabeth Browne & Claudien Razafiarimanana, 2022.
"Adaptation finance failing to reach the most vulnerable: A multi-level model of household political power in Madagascar,"
PLOS Climate, Public Library of Science, vol. 1(12), pages 1-23, December.
Handle:
RePEc:plo:pclm00:0000050
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000050
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pclm00:0000050. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: climate (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/climate .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.