Dynamic Adaptive Development Pathways

Abstract

Rural communities in drylands of low-income countries represent highly vulnerable societies that are
often strongly affected by the increased climate variability (UNDP, 2007/2008). Additionally to climatic
uncertainty, local households have also to cope with strongly fluctuating political and economic
conditions, which are difficult to predict and impede regional development. Current planning practices
that aim to address these uncertainties are often model based top-down focused approaches that lack an
appropriate inclusion of local stakeholders. Crucial next steps are the downscaling of models to increase
their local applicability and the incorporation of the knowledge and preferences of practitioners to
achieve a sustainable landscape management plan. In this thesis, I developed a participatory planning
approach to support sustainable development under uncertain future conditions and applied it to a case
study in the southern drylands of Zimbabwe.
The newly developed planning approach is based on a synthesis of current good practices in development
aid and recent advancements of research in predictive planning and management. Specifically, the
dynamic adaptive policy pathways (Haasnoot et al., 2013) are merged with the landscape approach (Sayer
et al., 2013), which accounts for sustainable development in a participatory manner, and transformed into
a new dynamic adaptive development pathways approach.
The dynamic adaptive development pathways approach was applied to plan the upscaling of irrigation
practices using an alluvial aquifer in Zimbabwe. A critical step was the use of visualisation sessions and
focus group discussions to define the landscape area and local values, as well as to assemble a set of
promising development actions. I then assessed the collected information using value matrixes and a
hydrological model, to design different pathways for sustainable development.
The creation of naturally, socially and ecologically sustainable pathways in a participatory manner for this
case study proved possible and may function as a seed for sustainable development in the area. While
uptake and application of the approach by local stakeholders still needs to be assessed, the adaptive
capacity seems a valuable addition for development planning under uncertain future conditions.