ID Artigo: 970
Titulo: Building resilience through water system innovations in dryland smallholder agriculture: example from Makanya catchment, Tanzania
Resumo: In this paper I discuss how a resilience framework potentially can improve development strategies in smallholder agricultural systems by drawing on a case study in Tanzania. While adaptation policies reduces vulnerability to specific changes, it has been suggested that they often focus on a too limited set of processes, which might reduce overall social-ecological resilience. Applying a resilience framework has been suggested as an alternative approach to improve this situation through its focus on developing systems resilience and sustainable development trajectories. Here, I particularly focus on what the “tools†are in a resilience analysis that has the potential of giving a broader systems view of vulnerability and change. Some of the “tools†that will be discussed is; analyzing dynamics of development and disturbances over time; analyzing linkages between ecosystem services and livelihoods; and scenario development to explore alternative futures. I will focus primarily on a project on investments in small-scale technologies (such as run-off water harvesting, conservation tillage with ripping, etc.) to improve water availability in smallholder agriculture in Tanzania. These investments can be seen as adaptations to reduce vulnerability towards the increasing droughts and dryspells that takes place in this region, and which seem to keep people in persistent poverty. Results from the resilience analysis of these investments showed that the technologies worked best in medium to good rainfall years, which meant that farmers had large yields in years with already ok food supply and low market prices. Since storage is a problem it shows the importance of synchronizing these investments with strategies at other scales. The work also illustrated that ecosystem services other than crop production was very important for livelihoods when there was drought/dryspell-induced impacts on crop production. People particularly used ecosystem services from both private and common land to improve income to buy food in those years. Since there often are trade-offs between food and other ecosystem services, adaptation policies only focusing on crop production might be on the expense of the ecosystem services that currently reduces their vulnerability. We also conducted a scenario exercise in order to understand how the overarching direction of development in the region might change the preconditions for investments in small-scale technologies for improved water availability. The analysis showed that a way to increase the robustness of this type of investments is to build capacity among farmers for innovation and learning through experimentation, rather than promoting specific technologies. I conclude with a discussion about whether investments in small-scale technologies can be a measure to break climate driven “poverty traps†in the region.
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