USAID Adaptation Community Meeting: The Role of Decentralized Governance in Climate Change Adaptation

Does local-level adaptation to climate change benefit from the devolution of decision-making and resource control to the local level? This question is of increasing relevance as the pressures of global climate change challenge livelihood outcomes. On January 12, 2017, the USAID Adaptation Community Meeting hosted Dr. Tim Finan and Dr. Mamadou Baro of the University of Arizona to share the results of a research case study from rural Mali, where a system of decentralized governance was introduced almost three decades ago. The study draws upon evidence from villages, communes and regions of south-central Mali to examine the effectiveness of local governance institutions in building community-level resilience to climate change stresses. This research was conducted for USAID’s ATLAS project.

Speakers
 

Dr. Timothy J. Finan is a professor of anthropology and a research anthropologist in the School of Anthropology and Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona. He has taught and conducted research at Arizona for 37 years, 15 of which were in the capacity of Director of BARA. His academic interests and practitioner experience are focused primarily on themes of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience and on related topics such as food security, governance and participatory development. He has published across academic and practitioner development journals and recently co-edited a book on cooperativism and smallholder development in Latin America.
 
Dr. Mamadou Baro was born in Boghe, Mauritania and grew up in the rural communities of the Sahel. He has a wealth of international development experience, working mostly in Africa for various organizations, NGOs and universities. Dr. Baro managed important Africa regional projects in the areas of climate change, livelihood security, rural credit, land tenure and household resilience. Dr. Baro holds a Ph.D. degree in Cultural & Applied Anthropology with a minor in Arid Land Studies. Since the 1990s, Dr. Baro, currently a Research Professor in BARA, has been one of the leading African advocates for putting poor and marginalized people at the center of the processes of development policy. For the last twenty-five years, he has provided technical assistance on climate change adaption, land governance and poverty, monitoring and evaluation for development and recovery programs in twenty African countries. 

Read the event blog here. 

Download the event presentation here.

This event was organized by the USAID Climate Change Adaptation, Thought Leadership, and Assessments (ATLAS) project. All Adaptation Community Meeting webinars can be found here

Country
Mali
Sectors
Adaptation
Strategic Objective
Adaptation
Topics
Adaptation, Conflict and Governance, Resilience
Region
Africa

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