Climate Governance and Resilience Action: The Southern African Context

Climate change is changing rural livelihoods worldwide, and in Southern Africa, these changes are transforming livelihoods and infrastructure. While there are often governance responses to disasters, shifts in governance do not evolve rapidly enough to respond to the rapidly changing needs of new climate challenges. In March 2019, Cyclone Idai affected Chimanimani, parts of Mozambique and Malawi. However, there are still grey areas on the subject of post-disaster governance and resilience in Southern Africa, especially on the nature of challenges affecting post-disaster governance and resilience. This chapter considers the progress and challenges that affect governance and resilience-building efforts in rural Zimbabwe, using comparative case studies by Chimanimani and Matopos using multi-method qualitative research design involving interviews and focus group discussions with members of the Chimanimani community and interviews with participant-coded narratives in Matopos. Challenges undermining post-disaster governance and resilience were firstly, a disassociation between the scope, mandate and capacity of the critical role players. The second challenge is a mismatch between the scale of the problem and the scope of mandates of the response. The third is poor incentives for either collective individual action or integrated planning to improve systems of governance.