Photograph: © SAF — Coastal Care
Excerpts;
Most rural communities facing recurrent climate shocks learn to adapt, using their own resources and knowledge. Yet many international aid programmes have outside “experts” craft interventions without the involvement of those they seek to help.
And many development projects do not actually promote adaptability, said Simon Levine of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), in a 2012 Oxfam blog post. “The vast majority of these interventions, and the people designing and running them, never talked about ‘change’ or ‘the future’ at all… If you want to help people be able to deal with change, then you have to start by thinking about them as people who have their own minds and preferences and plans, and the right to choose, and the right to be able to make an informed choice. They don’t need skills that are right for today half as much as they need to know where they can find the skills they may need tomorrow…”
