Community-led stakeholder-engaged adaptation processes for Southern Pakistan

Climate change vulnerability in Pakistan is intensifying and multifaceted in its impacts and socio-environmental drivers. Building on the work of three previous ACIAR-funded projects, this SRA will further refine an approach for community-led stakeholder engagement to foster climate adaptive livelihoods and resilient development, focusing on women and disadvantaged households in Southern Pakistan facing many challenges associated with climate change. Pakistan has been impacted in recent years by intense flooding, significant changes in rainfall patterns, increasing glacial melting and rising sea levels, increasing frequency and severity of climate-related natural disasters, and rising rates of vector-borne diseases. In the Sindh province of Pakistan, water scarcity, increasing salinity, waterlogging, and heat stress combine with social inequity, governance challenges, and other social drivers to produce vulnerability.
As a result of increasing climate risks and social vulnerability conditions, local people in rural Sindh are struggling to adapt their lives and livelihoods. Adaptation is a sociopolitical process taking place through multiple decisions and actions by diverse stakeholders to adjust to interacting climatic and socio-environmental challenges. Both climate change and adaptation are “wicked problems " that require contestation and negotiation between diverse interests and actors. Efforts to strengthen adaptation and risk-resilient livelihoods require putting the local community at the centre of planning, decision making and action.
Equitable and enduring adaptation to climate change depend on locally led and coordinated responses across several sectors, highlighting the importance of how multiple stakeholders with different roles and interests engage in decision-making around climate action. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of locally-led adaptation, methodological guidance and insights for development practitioners and action researchers remain limited, however. Facilitating equitable and empowering arenas where social actors engage in action is key to shaping a process of adaptation that is authentically community-led.
Lessons can be learned from past and current efforts within development. The Stakeholder Engagement for Research and Learning (SERL) has been trialled in Sindh, and women and men farmers are now utilising it to work with neighbouring farmers to change agricultural practices. With input from community members, research institutions, government and non-government and civil society organisations, this approach will co-develop a new iteration of Community-led Stakeholder Engagement for Adaptive Livelihoods (CoSEAL). Thus, a livelihood focus creates synergy with the CALS project and enhances upscaling.