Climate change in Kenya: narratives and dilemmas
Kenya has been ahead of many other countries in developing a national climate change
strategy, and agriculture is one of the key critical sectors of interest. The National
Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) dates from 2010, and the National
Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAP) was launched in March this year, stressing low
carbon development and resilience in the face of climate change.
However, there are concerns about whether policy goals may be achieved amidst the
actors’ many and diverging interests. A new working paper on climate change policy in
Kenya sets out to map how these debates are starting to take place in practice, and
poses the following questions: what are the arguments, who is promoting them, and
what are the implications for Kenya’s agricultural sector?
Narratives in Kenya
Two major narratives straddle the debate in Kenya:
1. Climate change as a threat to food security, and
2. Climate change as an opportunity to address energy and forest degradation
problems.
For the first of these narratives, concerns over food security are driving climate
change adaptation actions, albeit still in an emergency response mode. Experience of
drought has strengthened this concern. Some of the responses to immediate climate
change impacts include increasing vegetation cover, expanding carbon sinks and
bridging the gap between the dry spells. The wider adoption of drought-tolerant and
pest/disease-resistant crops is attractive for some, though it risks overlooking small
farmers and informal networks.
The key argument on mitigation is that carbon funding holds great promise for the
agricultural sector in that it can give major potential contributions to energy security as
well as lower degradation.
Development of geothermal power and increasing the country’s tree cover and other
forest resources, including agroforestry practices and improved natural resources
management systems, are some of the mechanisms already embraced.
Biofuels are another area for debate, both over the appropriateness of land use and
accusations of land grabbing, and the risks to farmers of switching to these mono-crops,
thus exposing themselves to price fluctuations in international markets. Effort is also
being made to implement Reducing Emissions through avoided deforestation and
Degradation (REDD+) projects, which resonate with a narrative which places a
significant responsibility for environmental degradation on African agricultural practices.
A criticism of this narrative is that it can misattribute blame to delegitimise small-scale
farming practices which may actually contribute to sustainability.
The working paper also details arguments around Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA); and
international carbon finance, where concerns around the influence of external donors
are voiced by several actors.
How coherent is the landscape?
Overall, despite the existence of the NCCRS and more recently the NCCAP, much of
the climate change and agriculture ‘landscape’ remains largely undefined. For
responses to climate change at the local level, the lack of a coherent climate change
policy effort leaves significant spaces for powerful actors to shape the agenda and
activities.
‘Technical fix’-style interventions are often posited without tackling the underlying
reasons which explain why farmers in Kenya are vulnerable in the first place. New
actors have taken on board the climate change issues or reinvigorated their advocacy
around this issue – some, perhaps, ‘recasting’ themselves as climate change
champions. Linked to this, there is significant space for some actors to present existing
activities as ‘climate solutions’, even when these may have adverse impacts on the
resilience and adaptive capacity of poor farmers.
Climate change and agriculture efforts in Kenya will remain varied and widely spread
over many actors, regions and priority areas, at least in the foreseeable future. This
calls for a cohesive, adaptive policy which can respond to surprise and allow for
ongoing debate and adjustment to new circumstances.
