ABOUT
Vulnerability assessments are critical tools when exploring the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Global South. However, much of the assessment methodology fails to address the coupled structural processes underlying vulnerability and the experience of climate change.
First, most attempts do not operationalize mixed-methods research using plural epistemologies. Second, they fail to incorporate the communally produced knowledge of marginalized regional populations. Ultimately, power inequalities and their impact on vulnerability, within complex adaptive systems, are overwhelmingly ignored.
Our method attempts to bring top-down spatial analysis tools, mathematical models, grounded ethnographic fieldwork and participatory feminist epistemologies into productive tension to reveal the sources of vulnerability in rural Himalayan households
PROJECT COMPONENTS
CNHS MODELLING
We incorporate deterministic process-based biophysical models which include - climate models, agro-ecosystem model (AEM), hydro-geological model (HGM) as well as, agent-based social and cellular ecological models (ABM). While the first three interact with each other in various couplings, with very little structural fluidity, the ABM is constructed ground-up with empirical ethnographic data from the field, census data, outputs from the other model interactions and literature review.
POLITICAL ECOLOGY
Political ecology diverges from the coupled systems theories that concern themselves with locating and evaluating tipping points, using interchangeably the ecological and social vulnerability that trigger such events. Instead, political ecologists are driven by a much more ‘value-laden’ process that argues “what can be known is prefigured in part by social, political and historical conditions” (Turner and Robbins, 2008, p.301). This impetus not just on what the knowledge is, but on how it is produced, makes PE a valuable tool in tempering the goals of conventional ‘resilience’ driven modeling approaches.
DEMOCRATIC SCIENCE
The politics of knowledge production, validation and reproduction in the Himalayan region has been documented by various scholars (Guneratne, 2010; Ahlborg and Nightingale, 2012; Hewitt and Mehta, 2012). The issues of scalar mismatch, over-reliance on top-down data and a marginalization of knowledge produced by both regional communities and scholars is ubiquitous with most regional vulnerability assessment attempts.
We are attempting to address this issue by creating an analytical equity between different stakeholders, resisting compartmentalizing the information into binaries of local/scientific and simultaneously investing in collaboratively controlled place based assessment systems. In doing so our goal is to create both an open-source, public data set of ground truthing that can help situate the top-down visualization and to support regional scholars and communities to construct reflexive narratives about systems that they are directly embedded within.
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