The role of local institutions in shaping household responses to climate change and variability: A case study along the slopes of Mt. Kenya

Rural households in Kenya are, and will continue to be challenged by climate variability and change. The ways in which diverse institutions shape local responses to climate change and variability, however, have not been sufficiently explored. In order to help remedy this situation, this work examines the role of local institutions in shaping household responses to climate change and variability on Mt. Kenya. In both conducting the field research and composing the current dissertation, I have posed and responded to the two following research questions: (1) How do local informal institutions, broadly defined as sets of rules and norms, shape individuals’ responses to climate change and variability in rural Kenya? (2) How can classic and innovative research methods be combined to study and understand intricate institutional arrangements? Through an examination of data on rural Kenya during both the colonial period and the past two and a half decades of governmental disengagement from rural areas, this research demonstrates that informal local institutions shape individuals’ responses to climate variability and are likely to frame future adaptations to climate change. In the colonial period, local clans promoted informal institutions such as mutual help groups and seasonal migration in response to climatic extreme events. Since the mid-1980’s, local organizations commonly classified as Local Rural Institutions (LRIs) have promoted new informal rules and norms such as institutional innovativeness and the development of non-climate-dependent sources of income. A significantly large number of households on three study sites in the Mt. Kenya area have adopted these livelihood strategies and, as this dissertation argues, these rules and norms have played an important role in reducing their overall vulnerability to climate variability. Examining another informal local institution upon which the people of Mt. Kenya have relied to cope with climate variability and develop adaptive capacity, this dissertation also analyzes the use of local social capital in one specific village in the semi-arid area of the mountain. Complementary social networks diffusing information related to farming and other income generating activities have continued to shape local adaptive capacity in Kambita. Looking towards the future, this work provides evidence that LRIs and social networks will shape future adaptation to climate change on Mt. Kenya by fostering increased institutional innovativeness and further disconnecting income from climate conditions. In order to understand the influence of intricate informal institutional arrangements on the shape of coping and adaptation strategies in the Mt. Kenya area, this research has demonstrated the value of combining relatively classic methods and relatively innovative methods. First, after conducting and gathering information from a role-playing game on land-use decision-making, I built a qualitative decision-making matrix, a neural network model, and a multi-criteria evaluation model and then compared their relative explanatory power. In fact, this research found that due to the specific complementarities, tradeoffs, and synergistic dynamics that exist between them, these separate methods can be used together to better analyze local institutional frameworks in contexts where informal institutions are dominant. Second, through a qualitative analysis of life-stories interviews, I studied the evolution of informal institutional arrangements over several decades and obtained in-depth knowledge of coping strategies for climate variability, including mutual help groups and seasonal migration. Third, I performed a statistical analysis and a social network analysis on data collected in three village-wide, household surveys and then contextualized and increased the validity of those quantitatively meaningful results with key informant interviews. Finally, I conducted a number of role-playing games in which players made livelihood decisions in simulated conditions of climatic change. By collecting and analyzing the players’ simulated adaptation strategies, this research improves upon works that base predictions for future adaptation to climate change solely on past coping strategies and provides new insight into the dynamic processes of adaptation