Presentation held by Mark Purdon, PhD, during the Governance & Institutions Across Scales in Climate Resilient Food Systems Brussels Workshop 9-11 Sept 2014. Workshop held by CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Flagship 4.

1. Climate change governance and institutions research
contributing towards development outcomes
Governance & Institutions Across Scales in Climate Resilient Food Systems
Brussels Workshop – September 9, 2014
Mark Purdon, PhD
Department of International Development & GRI
London School of Economics
m.purdon@lse.ac.uk

2. Outline
• Research Challenges Ahead
• The Importance of Comparative Politics
• Domestic Governance Factors
– Institutions
– Interests
– Ideas
• Integrating International and Domestic Politics
• Example of Climate Finance Governance in East Africa
• Catalyzing Research on Climate Governance at the CCAFS
• Conclusion

3. Research Challenges Ahead
• Near exclusive focus on institutions
– Tendency in the existing literature towards normative analysis of
governance that privileges institutions over other political factors
• Preponderance of case-study research
– Too much of the existing research into climate change adaptation
and food security has been comprised of unstructured, single case-studies
• Dependent Variable Problem
– Little consensus about what the outcome of adaptation policy
should be nor how to measure it

4. The Importance
of Comparative Politics
• Comparative politics is emerging as an exciting new
approach for the study of global environmental issues
– Should be seen as a compliment to recent research into climate
change politics that has focused on transnational, non-state actors
and multi-scalar climate governance
• Positivist Epistemology
– Comparativists explicitly seek to tie observations “to more general
ideas about politics”
– Seeks to predict political behaviour and produce tractable policy
recommendations
• Comparative Methods
– Comparison is one of the basic scientific methods of discovering
empirical relationships among variables in the effort to establish
general propositions

5. 3 Groups of Political Factors
Important in Comparative Politics
• Institutions
– Institutions produce a distinctive combination of sanctions and
incentives that shape patterns of political influence and
organization and lead political and economic actors toward some
kinds of behavior and away from others
• Interests
– Interests refer to the “real, material interests of the principal actors,
whether conceived as individuals or groups”
• Ideas
– “Ideas-oriented approaches to political economy have real value in
that they capture dimensions of human interaction normally lost in
other perspectives”

6. Institutions
• Formal versus Informal Institutions
– The role of formal institutions in developing world may diverge
quite significantly and systematically from an Weberian ideal type
(Sangmpam, 2007)
– We also know that in the developing world, informal institutions
are much more important
• Collective Property Institutions versus Individualized
Institutions
– Community-based adaptation is seen as one appropriate response
to anticipated climate change (Ayers and Forsyth, 2009; Forsyth,
2013)
– But collective property institutions are not only type of institution
with bearing on climate change adaptation and food security
• Activities such as agriculture and tree-crop farming are often better governed as
individual private goods because the costs of the enforcement of property
rights is low relative to the benefits of private ownership (Otsuka and Place,
2001: 18).

7. Interests
• The relationship between groups of actors is complex, often
involving competing political factions rooted in societal
interests
– Political Settlements (Khan 2010)
– State Power for Development (Kholi 2004)
• Climate change is but one of many factors that affect the
aggregate interests of any state, societal or market actor
• The interests at play in climate change adaptation and food security
are only beginning to be addressed
– Government interest and ethno-regional patronage drive resource
allocations in food aid, natural disaster response and public school funding
– Subnational distribution of adaptation funds in Malawi (Barrett 2014):
• Driven primarily by donor utility, district absorptive capacity, and physical
vulnerability
• Inversely related to socioeconomic vulnerability
• Patronage is less important
• “Good Enough” Governance?
– What is the likelihood of climate change leading to radical transformation
of existing power structures and material resources for climate justice.

8. Ideas
• Climate science has not been sufficiently effective in
driving change because of the different ways that
scientific ideas become politicized as well as the
material interests at play in climate policy
• How do ideas interact with other factors?
– “…in order for new ideas to progress they must ‘work on’
interests to realign the policy goals of collective actors, and
they must ‘work through’ organizations to transform policy-making
routines and state capacities” (Bradford, 1999: 18)
• Competing Ideas
– Economic Ideas
– Legitimacy
– Moral Politics

9. Integrating International and
Domestic Politics
• Issues of international political economy also play a
role
• Relevant examples
– Debate about how best to leverage the funds necessary for
international adaptation
– Historical and on-going food insecurity in LDCs is arguably linked to
unequal power relations in international political economy
– Current shift in the global balance of power occurring with the rise
of emerging economies, particularly China.

10. Example of Climate Finance
Governance in East Africa
• Tanzania and Uganda
– Very similar in terms of level of economic development, population
and history
– Very different in terms of political economy  economic ideas
• Differences in economic ideas lead to different policy
outcomes
– Tanzania  “developmentalist”
• Tanzanian state was less inclined to engage with the CDM despite
retaining the capacity to do so.
• A more donor-friendly country, Tanzania has provided more fertile
terrain for RED+ and Adaptation initiatives than Uganda
– Uganda  “Liberal developmentalist”
• State was poised to engage with the CDM in the extension of existing
state development initiatives
• But less donor interest in the promotion of REDD+ and Adaptation

11. Catalyzing Research on Climate
Governance at the CCAFS
1) New Dimensions in Institutional Research
– Community-Based Adaptation versus more Individualized Approaches
– Formal versus Informal Institutions
– Institutions linking SubnationNationalRegionalInternational
2) Research Beyond Institutions
3) The Importance of Comparative Methods
4) Addressing the Dependent Variable Problem
5) “Good Enough Governance”

12. Conclusions
• Methods and conceptual tools of comparative politics
can shine light on political and economic factors
important for climate change adaptation and food
security
– Identifying causal factors important in different contexts
– Emphasizes the need for conceptual clarity of the dependent
variable
• While institutions remain important, greater
incorporation of ideas and interests to render
research findings more effective
• Global political context matters and should calibrate
donor expectations of when governance is good
enough

13. Asante sana!
Questions?
Mark Purdon, PhD
Department of International Development & GRI
London School of Economics
m.purdon@lse.ac.uk