How are global discourses on climate change negotiated in national policy contexts,
and how do they materialise ‘on the ground’, shaping adaptation at a local level? This
is the overarching question that this dissertation addresses, as it traces the evolution
of climate policy in Malawi since the establishment of an international framework for
climate-resilient development in the late 1990s. Drawing on a theoretical framework
that combines approaches from Science and Technology, Postcolonial, and Feminist
Science Studies, this work spans across international, national and local spaces
of knowledge and policy production, revealing the material and often unintended
consequences of global scientific constructions of climate change. Fieldwork in
Malawi, including interviews with policymakers in Lilongwe and climate-affected
communities in Kasache, has revealed tensions at various stages and scales, examined
here through a multi-sited ethnographic approach that situates local weather and
climate practices in the lineage of colonial and postcolonial narratives and relations.
The findings indicate that the discourse on climate change is a mobile, power-laden
and socio-cultural practice transversally connecting spatial (international, national,
local), historical (colonialism, neoliberalism) and epistemological (élite/subaltern,
gender) localities. The exclusion of locally produced knowledge and meanings (by
decision makers, farmers, women and elders) from national mainstream adaptation
programmes obscures how vulnerability is locally produced, foreclosing opportunities
for context-relevant decision-making. While formally increasing women’s participation
in local decisional structures, gender and climate change interventions disregard the
presence of biophysical and socio-economic factors, including ‘global’ essentialising
narratives, which can exacerbate unequal power relations. At the same time, women in
Kasache have engaged in collective responses outside international frames of gender
empowerment through informal networks that build on historical matrilineal solidarity
and democratic participatory practices. Several ‘policy recommendations’ on how to
decolonise and democratise climate adaptation interventions can be drawn from the
findings of this work. In a nutshell, interventions should be based on the identification of underlying causes of vulnerability and adaptation strategies across societal groups
(rather than on homogenous conceptualisations of climate risk exposure) and should
acknowledge and address the forms of marginalisation and human agency produced by
the discourse of climate-resilient development