Valentina Nyame
- Governance
- Environmental and climate change
- Institutions
- Growth, inequality and poverty
- Agriculture, land use, climate change
- Ghana
- Benin
Dr. Till Stellmacher
ongoing doctoral theses
Prof. Dr. Lisa Schipper
DAAD
Reimagining Locally Led Adaptation for Climate Justice in Coastal Regions of Ghana and Benin
Valentina’s research project examines the practice of Locally-led adaptation by local governments and NGOs through a comparative study of two West African countries, Ghana and Benin. Both countries are located on the low-lying coastline of the Gulf of Guinea, making them particularly vulnerable to the sea-level rise with catastrophic impacts on low-income coastal communities, who suffer from the loss of their livelihoods, economic assets, social networks and cultural/ historical artefacts. These impacts are triggered by the recurrence of coastal erosion, flooding and saltwater intrusion into freshwater bodies. Locally-led adaptation (LLA) has received growing interest in policy and academia as a new dawn for adaptation that recognizes the limitations of fragmented, incremental, and top-down approaches to adaptation. As NGOs and local governments join efforts to accelerate locally led adaptation, how do they determine who is “local” and has legitimacy to “lead”? Even at the local level, communities are not homogeneous entities with aligned interests. The study aims to provide insights into any perverse inequalities in adaptation processes, that may reproduce structural inequalities for local groups through three research questions: 1) What is the extent to which practices by local governments and NGOs in LLA projects align with established principles for LLA; 2) How do excluded individual and groups navigate power spaces to influence LLA projects and 3) What change do donors seek to support through LLA projects? The study argues that examining the exercise of power from a climate justice perspective allows the inequalities that are perpetuated, reproduced and contested in locally led adaptation to be brought into full view. The research design for this study is a Comparative Case study with a nested mixed method that employs data collection through interviews (unstructured and semi-structured), focused group discussions (FGDs) and document review.
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Junior Researcher
Division/Group:
Cultural and Political Change
E-Mail:
nyame.valentina(at)uni-bonn.de
