Sheffield/EPSRC - Bridging National Scale Policy

Progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires addressing many interlinked challenges related to water, energy and food systems. There are inevitable trade-offs in addressing the SDGs and climate change mitigation and adaptation targets, but also synergies if policy is well designed in a cross-sectoral manner. However, nations typically do not have the tools to identify and implement interventions, including evaluating the trade-offs and synergies, and monitor their effectiveness. Furthermore, land use decisions on water-energy-food (WEF) policy need to take into account sub-national and local scale needs and priorities, both human and environmental. Despite being the intended targets of policy, rural people with limited resources and education are often marginalized in decision making and therefore do not benefit when trade-offs in policy implementation are made to take account of the variety of actors. This project focuses on enhancing equity of rural people's key participatory roles in shaping and making policy work in order to bridge the gap between national scale priorities/strategies and gender-sensitive local scale needs, including environmental sustainability. Our focus will be on Malawi, which is high on the DAC list, has low population density and is largely rural. It also varies culturally and environmentally, which allows us to examine gaps around a range of policies and subsistence strategies. Bridging the scales is vital because homogenous policy formulation and implementation at the national or even sub-national scale is problematic for communities because rural people are not homogenous, with fundamentally varying kinds of and access to resources. These systems need to account for landscape diversity and gendered differences in their uptake and impacts, and therefore policies need to be tailored or disaggregated to ensure that they are relevant and are successful without unintended consequences. Many things that happen in the hidden middle that bridge the national and local scales are often ignored in policy and implementation. The hidden middle includes local to sub-national organizations; informal and formal supply chains that connect smallholders to domestic markets; kin, political, religious and other social networks. These meso-scale actors play essential roles in filling policy gaps, making up for shortcomings in infrastructure and connecting rural communities to a more diverse set of livelihood opportunities. We have identified gaps in the functioning of cross-scale interactions that affect Malawi's aggregate water-energy-food security, and its distributional access and benefits. By understanding the nature of these gaps, our objective is to identify solutions/policies that increase local livelihood opportunities and their sustainability. This will be done by better understanding: - how rural farmers of all genders and their local environments are connected to policy processes via the complex hierarchy of institutional arrangements - how rural farmers are connected via social and other networks, and how this helps to sustain livelihoods and increase resilience to change/shocks - how biophysical heterogeneity intersects with human activity, national policy and its effectiveness. - how competing interests, for example among and between rural farmers and commercial agriculture, give rise to trade-offs in benefits from policies - how policy is implemented on the ground at the local scale as a function of these local scale connections and heterogeneities, and how the effectiveness of policy is monitored Ultimately this will lead to deeper understanding of cross-scale interactions, while also allowing for the development of tools for better WEF policies that take into account local priorities and needs. Our aim is thus to understand how to disaggregate policy to better fit the local diversity of contexts and interests of various actors.