Vulnerability interventions in the context of multiple stressors: lessons from the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI)

environmental science & policy 12 (2009) 23–32

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Vulnerability interventions in the context of multiple stressors: lessons from the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI) K. O’Brien a,*, T. Quinlan b, G. Ziervogel c a

University of Oslo, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, P.O. Box 1096 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway University of KwaZulu-Natal, HEARD, Westville Campus, Private Bag X54001, Durban 4000, South Africa c University of Cape Town, Environmental and Geographical Science Department, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa b

article info

abstract

Published on line 11 December 2008

This paper describes an initiative to develop a model for understanding the multi-faceted nature and effects of vulnerability. The model is designed to enable analysis and assessment

Keywords:

of interventions that address vulnerability, a concept that is widely used across disciplines

Vulnerability

and in development planning in Africa, particularly in southern Africa. The model is being

Multiple stresssors

developed to accommodate analyses of ‘multiple stressors’ and to identify the intersection

HIV/AIDS

and interaction of stressors in different contexts. Using three case studies related to

Development planning

vulnerability reduction and HIV/AIDS, we show how multiple processes interact and can influence the outcomes of vulnerability interventions in ways that may not be readily apparent when focusing on one stressor alone. # 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1.

Introduction

Vulnerability is a concept that captures the changing nature of risks, and variable capacity to cope with both risk and change (Kirby, 2006). The concept is often used to draw attention to the specific contextual factors that influence exposure and the capacity to respond to change, in order to explain how and why some groups and individuals experience negative outcomes from shocks and stressors (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). It is also closely linked to the notion of human security, which describes a condition when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate, or adapt to risks to their human, environmental, and social rights (GECHS, 1999). Vulnerability assessments have been widely used in many sectors, including in assessments of climate change impacts and in the field of disaster risk reduction (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). Within both research and

practitioner communities, vulnerability reduction is increasingly recognised as necessary for improving human wellbeing and human security in the face of multiple shocks and stressors. This has been the case in southern Africa, where the concept is widely used in research and as the basis for development planning. Concerns have been voiced in many quarters over the ways that livelihoods and food security for much of the region’s population are threatened by changes linked to increasing climatic variability, political conflicts, trade liberalisation, and the burden of infectious disease (African Development Bank et al., 2002; Devereux and Maxwell, 2001; Francis, 2002; Holloway, 2003; Mano, 2003; Ziervogel and Calder, 2003; Drimie, 2004; FFSSA, 2004). Chambers (1989, p. 1) defined vulnerability as ‘‘the exposure to contingencies and stress and difficulty in coping with them’’, and noted it has both an external side that includes the

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (K. O’Brien). 1462-9011/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2008.10.008

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risks, shocks and stress to which an individual or household is subject, and an internal side, which is defencelessness, meaning a lack of means to cope without damaging loss. Lee and Quinlan (2008) affirmed the tenor of previous definitions of vulnerability by concluding on the basis of a set of experiential studies (Lee, 2004; Chazan, 2005; Chazan, 2007; Casale et al., 2007) that vulnerability represents powerlessness for those whose welfare and livelihoods are threatened by environmental change. The concept of vulnerability is often used to describe people and organisations that are negatively affected, directly or indirectly, by a single process or event. In the case of the AIDS pandemic, vulnerability can be considered as a counterpoint to the term susceptibility, which is commonly used to describe the probability of infection (in particular contexts). The point of departure for many vulnerability assessments and interventions lies in the question ‘‘Vulnerable to what?’’. This question is typically followed by analysis directed towards identifying the specific outcomes of a singular or primary stressor. Yet, as de Waal (2006) points out, the key to understanding vulnerability is to identify where and how different stressors interact; thereby indicating that vulnerability can be used to draw attention to the effects of multiple stressors on people’s well-being and livelihoods. This premise recognises that processes such as epidemics or environmental changes are not occurring in isolation of one another, or in isolation of other stressors, including those linked to economic globalisation (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2002). Nonetheless, there remains a gap between the scientific literature on vulnerability to multiple stressors and the practical application of that knowledge in reducing vulnerability to multiple stressors in southern Africa. Put differently, interventions that address the outcomes of single stressors may provide measurable results, but if they do not consider the dynamic context in which a stressor is occurring, they are unlikely to enhance human security over the longer term. This paper presents lessons learned from an ongoing initiative to develop a framework for assessing vulnerability in the context of multiple stressors. This has been the agenda of the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI).1 The SAVI framework has three objectives: First, to identify and address how multiple stressors interact to create differential vulnerability; second, to understand how responses to one stressor may increase or reduce vulnerability to other stressors; and third, to identify the ways that interventions influence both current and future outcomes. The rationale for this framework was a concern that project-based development efforts to reduce vulnerability tend to focus on the overt factors that contribute to negative outcomes for populations, while ignoring many of the underlying factors that influence people’s exposure and capacity to respond to shocks and stressors. Consequently, projects and interventions can

1 SAVI began in 2003 as an interdisciplinary project to explore how ‘multiple stressors’ are affecting the security of individuals and communities in southern Africa. SAVI addresses a need for scientists and practitioners to find ways to distinguish the interactions and intersections of these stressors, to extract the key factors that generate vulnerability, and to identify practical and effective interventions.

inadvertently contribute to increased vulnerability, rather than to enhanced human security. We first present a framework for analysing the interactions among multiple stressors. We then examine three projects that address vulnerability from different perspectives, and consider the lessons for project-based interventions that can be drawn from these examples. Our examples cover a range of different contexts: rural conditions in Zambia and South Africa; informal trade in Durban; and a parastatal conservation agency in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. This is in accord with the purpose of developing an analytical framework that is applicable across geographical regions and scales; hence, a contribution that underlies the focus on savanna regions in this volume. Addressing vulnerability is critical to enhancing sustainability of southern African savannas, as explained in Eriksen and Watson (2009).

2.

The SAVI framework

Empirical research in southern Africa has documented how local vulnerability is often the product of multiple stressors (Andrews and Keegan, 2004; Ganadure, 2005; Reid and Vogel, 2006; Eriksen and Silva, 2009). Many vulnerability frameworks, such as Wisner et al. (2004) and Turner et al. (2003), have recognised the importance of multiple stressors. Nevertheless, a challenge exists in conceptualising exactly how different stressors interact. Leichenko and O’Brien (2008) address this challenge by identifying pathways of interaction between environmental change and globalisation processes. Their ‘‘double exposure’’ framework identifies three potential pathways of interaction between global environmental change and globalisation, and shows how these interactions affect processes, responses, and outcomes. The pathways, referred to as outcome double exposure, feedback double exposure, and context double exposure, illustrate how interacting processes can contribute to growing inequality and increasing vulnerability, and how they may amplify the processes themselves (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). The framework also shows that by recognising the interactions, new synergies can be created that increase human security and well-being. The framework presented here – which is referred to as the SAVI framework because it emerged from the Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI) – draws on the double exposure framework, as well as other research on vulnerability to multiple stressors. The framework emphasises the importance of understanding the context in which vulnerability is experienced. This focus on ‘contextual vulnerability’ draws attention to the factors that make some people or groups disproportionately vulnerable to shocks and stressors (O’Brien et al., 2007). The SAVI framework can be used to assess vulnerability interventions in the context of multiple stressors, and to identify efforts that increase resilience to multiple processes of change. The framework recognises that many areas and populations may be simultaneously exposed to large-scale, macro-level changes, such as the spread of infectious diseases, climate change, trade liberalisation, and water management reforms, which are likely to be manifested or experienced by many individuals, households, or commu-

environmental science & policy 12 (2009) 23–32

nities as stressors (e.g., as exposure to HIV, drought, import competition, or water privatisation) or shocks (e.g., floods, currency devaluations, or violent conflict). Vulnerability to these stressors is closely linked to the social, economic, political, institutional, environmental, technological and cultural context in which they are experienced (Leichenko and O’Brien, 2008). Although it is important to confront the processes that create stressors in the first place, interventions that positively influence the context in which stressors occur – either by reducing exposure or by increasing the capacity to respond – may represent key factors in vulnerability reduction. At the same time, some interventions may negatively affect this context, thereby increasing vulnerability to multiple stressors. The SAVI framework recognises that interventions aimed at one particular stressor can create new outcomes, which may then change the ‘‘vulnerability context’’ and thereby influence both exposure and responses to other stressors or shocks. In other words, the framework focuses attention on the ways that interventions may influence current and future vulnerability by changing the context in which stressors are experienced. If, for example, a state or province has the institutional and economic capacity, it may respond to increased morbidity associated with HIV and AIDS via an aggressive anti-retroviral treatment programme. Consequently, the outcome of exposure may not be negative, from the perspective of beneficiary individuals, households, and communities (de Waal, 2006). The cost of the response may, however, change the state or province’s economic context, hence influence other state interventions (e.g. less emphasis on malaria prevention, decreased spending for education programmes or agricultural extension), which may affect responses to other stressors, such as trade liberalisation or drought. At the individual and household levels, responses by citizens to these stressors may include rural-urban migration, sale of assets, or other actions that deplete economic, social, or natural capital and thereby influence the context in which they experience future shocks and stressors (e.g. increased rural poverty beyond projections and foci of poverty alleviation programmes). The capacity of an individual, household, community, or state to respond to any shock or stressor thus depends on this dynamic context. The SAVI framework emphasises human agency, specifically interventions in response to shocks and stressors, including those that, in the longer term, minimise the risks associated with shocks in the future. Currently the framework focuses on two types of external interventions by diverse government and non-government agencies to reduce vulnerability. The first type includes interventions that change the context and facilitate the ability of individuals, households, communities, or social groups to respond to changing conditions (e.g., home-based care programmes, skills training). The second type of interventions includes those that directly influence outcomes, without changing the underlying context (e.g., food aid). The different types of interventions are reflected, for example in policy and strategy-level discussions on how to reduce poverty. Bass et al. (2005, p. 2), for instance, argue that there has been a move ‘‘away from the focus on changing outcomes (hunger, disease, inadequate income, etc.) to changing the underlying causes of these outcomes in each

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locality (inadequate asset bases, including access to land and other resources; poor people’s lack of political voice, . . . etc.).’’ This is an important feature of the SAVI framework in view of the growing interest in understanding how multiple stressors interact, and in developing a coherent basis for use of the concept of vulnerability as a means to enhance human wellbeing and security. A logical step beyond the ‘pure’ scientific interest is application of the framework. The success of project-based interventions to reduce vulnerability over time depends on whether and how they address the underlying causes of vulnerability, as well as the capacity to respond to current and future change. Below, we present three case studies that illustrate the significance of addressing vulnerability from the perspective of multiple stressors. The cases represent research in which the authors have been involved and they represent processes of change that are widely thought to reinforce each other and are considered important in southern Africa. We refer here inter alia to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, rising food insecurity, trade liberalisation, the marginalisation of women, and contemporary conservation efforts. We use these case studies to illustrate some characteristics of vulnerability in the context of multiple stressors. We emphasise how multiple stressors interact, how they may hide vulnerability, and how vulnerability contexts can be interconnected. These characteristics, we contend, are useful premises for any assessment of the design, operation and effectiveness of projects that seek to reduce the vulnerability of populations to shocks arising from environmental change.

3.

Interacting stressors

HIV/AIDS has become one of the largest health care and social challenges for southern Africa, as well as for the global community. Over 20% of the population is estimated to be affected by HIV, and life expectancy in the region has plummeted (Figs. 1 and 2) (WHO, 2005)2. The effects of HIV/ AIDS are far-reaching; they are not limited to the individuals who become infected but extend to families, co-workers, businesses, communities, and health care systems (Booysen et al., 2002; Casale et al., 2007; Floyd et al., 2003; Harpham and Grant, 2002; Mushati et al., 2003). HIV/AIDS and food insecurity disproportionately affect the poor, and in particular, rural populations in southern Africa. Variable and changing climate conditions and the transformation of rural livelihoods, brought about by trade liberalisation, privatisation, urbanisation, and conflicts, have influenced prices, access and entitlements to food (Clark and Qizilbash, 2002; Dilley, 2000; Ellis, 2003; Francis, 2002; Ogunseitan, 2003). The exacerbating effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on drought and the subsequent distribution of food aid in 2001/2002 led de Waal and Whiteside (2003) to pose the hypothesis of a ‘new variant famine’. Their argument stemmed from an increasingly large body of research indicating growing levels of impoverishment amongst 2 Estimates and projections generally use data derived from testing at anti-natal clinics as a foundation for modelling epidemiological trends.

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Fig. 1 – Trends in median HIV prevalence among women aged 15–49 years attending ANCs in southern Africa by country, 1997–2004 (WHO, 2005).

Fig. 2 – Comparison of HIV prevalence between adults aged 15–49 years and young people aged 5–24 years in the general population in selected countries in southern Africa (WHO, 2005).

HIV/AIDS affected households (Booysen et al., 2002; Floyd et al., 2003; Mushati et al., 2003). There is now more research in the region on the actual effects of HIV/AIDS on food security (Alumira et al., 2006; Casale et al., 2007; Twine and Hunter, 2008).3 A substantive challenge that remains, however, is to clearly differentiate the role of HIV/AIDS among the many factors contributing to food insecurity, and thereby provide a sound evidence base for the modification of existing interventions to alleviate food insecurity and poverty in southern Africa. Empirical evidence underscores the importance of considering multiple stressors. However, large-scale success has yet to be achieved in terms of interventions, despite ongoing improvement in the design of projects aimed at generating resilience and capacity to manage environmental shocks. For example, a home-based care programme may start by focusing on the provision of care and support to an HIV/AIDS infected adult in a household but, in due course, it invariably faces new demands to provide additional services linked to related or unrelated stressors, such as enabling access to grants, provision of food supplements and, ultimately, to provide orphan care services (Akintola, 2004). Home-based care programmes that rely on volunteers may not be sustainable, unless they are integrated into a broader network of mutually supportive medical, government and NGO inter-

ventions to provide treatment, care and support for HIV positive individuals (HEARD, 2008). It is thus essential not only to overcome the limited resources and capacities of individual organisations, but also to accommodate changing demands for and upon health services. Understanding who is vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in any given circumstance depends on careful investigation of the context in which the burden of disease is occurring. The SAVI framework considers HIV/AIDS to reflect both processes and outcomes that change the social context for responding to many other stressors. For example, home-based care programmes not only change the demand for services in a community, as well as the demand for food and nutrition, but also, over time they can disrupt social networks and so generate new service demands. Multiple, interacting processes of change lead to people being negatively affected by the epidemic, and also influence the capacity of individuals, families, communities and countries to respond to HIV/AIDS. As mentioned above, in southern Africa these processes include the spread, and changing patterns of infectious diseases, changes in water access and availability, climate and bio-physical environmental changes, economic globalisation, urbanisation, and political conflict. These dynamics are illustrated in a recently completed study, known as the UNRAVEL project (Ziervogel et al., 2006). UNRAVEL included comparative, micro-level research on vulnerability in rural settlements in Malawi, Zambia and South Africa. In all cases people relied on a range of livelihood activities. Findings show that residents viewed climatic factors such as cycles of drought and limited water supply to be important constraints on food production. However, lack of labour was identified as a significant problem, and poor health was perceived to be the cause. Informants in Zambia identified massive loss of livestock due to disease in the 1980s and lack of revival of herds, coupled with lack of other inputs (notably seeds) as compounding factors. In South Africa, the high and increasing cost of transport was identified as a 3

The RENEWAL programme of the International Food Policy Research Institute has funded a number of food security-focused studies since the early 2000s. cf: http://www.ifpri.org/renewal/ renewalnew.asp.

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critical factor. The general explanation was that higher rates of illness and death due to HIV/AIDS have put a strain on the extended family and community relations as the ‘traditional’ means to mitigate shocks to individual families, but the increasing cost of travelling to care for sick relatives and friends and to attend funerals was an underlying threat to their ability to meet social obligations. The significance of these findings is that a combination of factors interacts and may disrupt the social fabric and influence vulnerability. In Zambia, the substantive loss of a key medium of social exchange and interaction, livestock, is a deep-seated driving force for local-level impoverishment. In South Africa, the capacity of people to sustain their social networks was affected directly by an external factor: rising public transport costs. An outcome in all cases was diminished food security, in the sense of individuals and families cutting their food consumption by eating fewer meals and/or less preferred but cheaper food items. This brief illustration indicates that two known and frequently emphasised causes of food insecurity – climatic variability and HIV/AIDS – are substantive threats to the welfare of rural populations in southern Africa. However, analysed alone they cannot explain the threats to the welfare of these populations. By exploring how vulnerability becomes manifest, the UNRAVEL project showed that research must identify where and how different stressors interact and intersect in order to reveal the nature of threats to the welfare of populations in the region. The underlying issue here is that such research must also begin from the premise that rural populations have a long history of facing and managing variable and changing threats to their existence. Climate change and HIV/AIDS are unprecedented threats, but if science is to influence the design of effective interventions, it needs to acknowledge capacity for regeneration and, in turn, identify exactly where and how that capacity is being threatened or eroded. In sum, interventions that do not focus on the loci of threats to human security are unlikely to be particularly effective. Indeed, such interventions can exacerbate rather than alleviate the vulnerability of their target populations. This is not a novel point but necessary to repeat in view of the history of southern Africa. There is a vast body of historical literature on the region that has highlighted the deleterious effects of ‘development’ interventions (see Bundy (1997) and Ferguson (1990) for the tenor and content of this literature). Current exploratory research continues this theme, testing whether the concept of vulnerability can be used as a tool to sharpen the foci of development interventions and, notably, contribute to efforts to reduce vulnerability to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

4.

Hidden vulnerability

The underlying factors that contribute to vulnerability are often ignored in projects and policy interventions. In particular, the differential effects of shocks and stressors on some populations and individuals are often disregarded. Interventions that do not focus on the underlying drivers of the vulnerability of particular groups can produce outcomes that

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create or perpetuate inequalities by improving conditions for some and not others. The ways that multiple stressors may influence some individuals more than others within a social group are illustrated through an urban renewal project in Durban. The Durban project focused on the promotion of informal trading in Warwick Junction, Durban’s city transport terminus and a long standing location of regulated meat and fresh produce markets and, until the mid-1990s, a host of illegal and informal street trading activities. The project, which began in the late 1990s, applied the principles of sustainable development in the form of ‘area-based management’ to promote and consolidate the development of the informal market sector at Warwick Junction. It deliberately fostered street trading and promoted a pro-poor and gender sensitive policy in terms of assisting women traders to establish themselves in the market. For traders generally, the project streamlined procedures for gaining permits and access to sites; offered training and practical support in a consultative manner and developed community policing. A wide range of street trading activities has been accommodated in ways that meet health, security, engineering and market bylaws of the city. It was undeniably a successful development project. However, a critical question is whether the Durban project actually succeeded in assisting women traders via its pro-poor and gender-sensitive policies and hence, reduced their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and other stressors. In this case, vulnerability is linked to the financial burden of care for the orphaned children of their own children and/or own siblings and associated social, physical and psychological stresses of that burden. The lack of research on how and why street traders are vulnerable to the adverse impacts of HIV/AIDS means there is a lack of information to improve the design and implementation of policies and projects that seek to promote the informal economy and reduce gender inequalities. This is not to deny the large body of literature that has documented the difficulties of women informal traders, including lack of social protection, inequality in access to goods to sell, work sites and management of them, and constraints on access to training and credit (Chen et al., 2001; Lund, 1998; Skinner, 2000a,b). This literature has suggested intrinsic links between social inequality, poverty and behaviour patterns that contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, findings of recent studies conducted between 2003 and late 2006 (Casale et al., 2007; Chazan, 2005; Lee, 2004) indicate that many women traders were still marginalised despite the good intentions of the project. Briefly put, the limitations of the project were that it categorised women traders as a homogenous entity and ignored particular contextual constraints of the working environment on women traders. The vulnerability of some women remained hidden within the context in which they work. The project viewed men and women as equal stakeholders, and assumed that equal access to resources and services would benefit all equally. However, for many illiterate traders (men and women), the access and permit procedures were difficult to navigate successfully. For instance, regulations require registered stall owners to physically occupy their stands; hence, single person enterprises, largely women, could not easily attend training courses and local health services.

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Training was reportedly ad hoc and focused predominantly on health/hygiene standards (because the courses are usually run by city health department), rather than on business management, laws, rights and the project management system. Indeed, the city department officials responsible for promoting the informal enterprises viewed support to the very poor and women traders as a short-term welfare solution; their principal focus being on promoting the successful incorporation of small enterprises into the formal sector. Although there have been opportunities to develop appropriate micro-finance schemes for the very poor, few officials knew of them, and the department had not developed a strategy to generate this business support mechanism. More generally, efforts to entrench the democratic ethos led to the institutionalisation of a traders’ representative body that has daily management functions, but it became male-dominated amidst indications of a ‘mafia’ management style of protection and law enforcement. These problems were in part a function of the growth and development of the project itself, in particular institutional and organisational reforms. The imperative for project and city officials was to provide a secure environment for ‘legal’ traders by endorsing police sweeps to oust the ‘illegal’ traders. Yet one consequence of the seemingly complex registration process for trading was the presence of a large number of women traders who worked illegally in the area (as well as others, including male and female refugee foreign nationals). The result was that the police tended to target women and foreign nationals as common categories of ‘illegal’ traders. Women traders who had rights to sites were prone to police harassment and getting caught up in raids where goods were confiscated, and work time lost.4 In addition, bylaws that prevent traders from sleeping on the streets impact particularly negatively on some of the very poor street traders who, in the absence of affordable accommodation, did have to sleep on the streets (Skinner, 2000b). This led to an increase in crime and harassment of traders at night, but there was not an adequate police presence and, when present, it directed its attention to trader’s ‘illegal’ sleeping. For women, irrespective of their status as traders at the market, the ambivalence of the security system simply heightened their risk to crime, including personal assault. Furthermore, such regulation of market activities ensured that they were also subject to unpredictable, major business shocks such as confiscation or theft of goods; hence, the persistent and evident relative poverty of many women traders affirmed officials’ perceptions of the limited potential of their enterprises. There was a general lack of consideration for the reasons for the presence of many women, notably illegal traders, and why women constitute a category that was and remains marginal in the operation of the project. Consequently, the

4 Foreign nationals such as Senegalese and Somali traders in Durban shared a similar, if not greater burden, with reports of having their trading licenses summarily revoked on grounds that they were obtained fraudulently or being constantly relocated away from lucrative trading sites and suffering ‘‘constant harassment pursued with particular vigour and brutality’’ by enforcement officers (Vawda, 1999).

project was capable of only limited application of its ‘gender sensitive’ policy. The research-to-date has drawn out the underlying context of women traders’ vulnerabilities in their working environment, but it has yet to assess in detail the links to traders’ susceptibility to HIV infection. This is workin-progress; there are some women who define their ‘homes’ as being rural settlements in KwaZulu-Natal and who remit incomes to relatives there; there are also some women who support financially sick relatives and/or children of siblings who they reckon are infected by HIV/AIDS. Nonetheless, the research has drawn attention to how even progressive development interventions struggle to meet their own standards of empowerment and enfranchisement of vulnerable populations. In this case, a ‘gender-sensitive’ ethos in the development project provides opportunities for women, but only those who manage to operate businesses within an institutional context that favors small yet formal enterprises. For the women traders who run economically marginal operations, conditions in the working environment threaten continually and in different ways to marginalise their efforts.

5.

Linked contexts

The two case studies described above show how multiple stressors interact, and how these dynamic interactions may hide vulnerability within and among some households or social groups. However, the effects of multiple stressors on vulnerability are also linked across sectors and activities, and across spatial boundaries. These linked contexts present some challenges to addressing vulnerability through specific development interventions. Below, we examine interventions aimed at reducing vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in conservation areas. We draw attention to the limitations of the research methods behind the case study, and argue that the ‘science of vulnerability’ can be used to increase the effectiveness of interventions. In other words, if the linked contexts for vulnerability had been taken into account, the research that informs this case study may have been done very differently. The organisation referred to in this case study is a parastatal conservation body that manages a large number of nature reserves in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The study was in the form of an applied research project to assist that organisation’s efforts to refine its well-established and, by current standards, sound HIV/ AIDS care, support and treatment programme for staff (Erskine, 2004). Generally speaking, conservation agencies in southern Africa have promoted a role for nature reserves as a basis for improving rural livelihoods and the welfare of people who live adjacent to reserves; hence they can contribute to reductions in poverty and food insecurity in those populations. This is not a trivial issue, as nature reserves cover 25% of the region (see Fig. 3 and Clover and Eriksen, 2009). Common interventions include community-oriented ventures to generate incomes; for example, craft markets in reserves and ‘medicinal plant gardens’ (for biodiversity management and tourism purposes), and business partnerships with residents neighbouring the reserves (e.g. eco-tourism ventures). The participatory

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Fig. 3 – Map of protected areas in southern Africa.

approach is generally well established, be it as ‘eco-tourism’, ‘wilderness’ management or ‘integrated community-based natural resource management’. However, few conservation bodies have accommodated HIV/AIDS into their operations. HIV/AIDS was formally acknowledged as a significant environmental factor for the first time at the decennial World Parks Congress in 2004.5 Equally problematic, those that have included HIV/AIDS into their operations struggle to respond effectively to the internal effects of HIV/AIDS on their organisations, let alone the threats of HIV/AIDS to their ‘external’ conservationist and business agendas. In other words, HIV/AIDS-related concerns are still on the fringes of debate and action in the field of natural resource management. The conservation organisation was considered a leader in the field, in that by 2004 it had a well-established organisation HIV/AIDS programme. The project aimed to review and refine this programme, and in doing so revealed general areas of organisational vulnerability. For instance, there were operational conditions that heightened risk of HIV infection amongst staff, such as employees being well paid in relation to surrounding communities where unemployment and poverty is rife (a factor that contributes to high incidence of transactional sex); numerous staff working away from home for extended periods (e.g. rangers; poaching unit; trainee managers, for whom postings to distant nature reserves is a

norm); and location of reserves distant from health and educational facilities. The study also identified how the multi-business nature of the organisation contributed to its vulnerability. On the one hand, the organisation is responsible for natural resource research and management, tourism, and policing (antipoaching) and, on the other hand, for the daily integration of those operations. Work activities often overlap; for instance, rangers work with scientists, but also as tourist guides, and road maintenance labour crews work according to the demands of wildlife (and tourist) management demands. This integration means that operations depend largely on acquired experience. Consequently, the absence or loss of staff, skilled or unskilled, from any section, has significant negative effects on operations but they may be imperceptible at any given moment.6 However, these findings also revealed the limitations of the study itself; in particular, the difficulty of using orthodox audit (‘impact assessment’) tools to assess where and how the organisation was vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in terms of the possible effects on operations and on the productivity and welfare of staff. These tools (e.g. Human Resource record audit; Knowledge, Attitude and Practice [KAP] surveys amongst staff; critical post assessment) allowed for general description of the organisation’s vulnerability to the effects of HIV/AIDS. However, they were inadequate for the task of distinguishing precisely where and how the organisation was vulnerable; hence, the study could not provide substantive answers to the question of how to improve the organisation’s HIV/AIDS programme. Nonetheless, the study could show partly by default that the organisation’s HIV/AIDS programme would be of limited effectiveness in the long term by virtue of being designed according to ‘best practices’ that refer to organisations and businesses that have clear boundaries around various operational components and individuals’ jobs. This was on the basis of both the general findings and recognition that the project’s assessment methods were appropriate for conventional businesses and organisations (e.g. those that operate from and within single locations—offices or factories, and have very delineated job hierarchies and functions). In turn, the study suggested that efforts to extend assessment of the threat of HIV/AIDS to, and develop interventions for, the communitybased ventures would be even more problematic. Subsequent discussions with the human resources department and occupational health staff of the organisation revealed the practical problems of linked contexts for vulnerability to multiple stressors. For instance, there were difficulties in sustaining treatment and care regimes for staff scattered across different reserves and homes (during bouts of illness), primarily because of the logistical difficulties of coordinating health care between the organisation’s own health care staff as well as public and private health care services in

6

5

This acknowledgment stemmed from a collaborative intervention at the congress by the African Biodiversity Collaborative Group, the World Wildlife Fund, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

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This finding emerged from interviews with reserve managers who, generally, struggled with the ‘critical post’ assessment; frequently highlighting the integration of different work activities; in their terms, asserting that semi-skilled staff (e.g. road-grader driver), for example, even labourers with ‘experience’, were as ‘critical’ as skilled and professional staff.

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the affected staff members’ home areas.7 Linked contexts for vulnerability that cut across sectors and activities and transcend spatial boundaries suggest that vulnerability interventions must be carefully thought through if they are to be effective.

6. Conclusion: Vulnerability interventions in a dynamic context The SAVI framework emphasises the importance of understanding ‘contextual vulnerability’, and particularly how multiple, interacting stressors influence this context. It highlights how intersections and interactions among different stressors may influence the effectiveness of different types of interventions aimed at reducing vulnerability. The case studies illustrate three characteristics of vulnerability to multiple stressors that affect interventions: the dynamic interactions among stressors, the hidden vulnerability of some individuals or groups, and linked contexts for vulnerability. This paper has also highlighted some challenges for development planning. External interventions can potentially reduce vulnerability by changing the context in which stressors occur, or they can directly address outcomes, without influencing the underlying contextual vulnerability. In either case, the SAVI framework draws attention to the ways that multiple processes interact to change the context for exposure and for responding to stressors, which ultimately have implications for human security. The cases described above revealed three lessons for vulnerability interventions. First, interventions that ignore the dynamic interactions among stressors – such as drought and HIV/AIDS – are likely to have a minimal effect on vulnerability over a longer period. Second, the underlying sources of vulnerability are often hidden, and interventions that generically address vulnerability to one stressor (e.g. focus on the economic vulnerability of women traders) may miss sub-groups who are vulnerable to multiple stressors. Third, interventions that are spatially constrained (e.g., limited to a particular community) may be ineffective if they do not consider how vulnerability contexts are linked across space through migration and remittances, business transactions, and transport. These three lessons suggest that interventions aimed at reducing the vulnerability of savannas

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An experimental rethinking of how to resolve these problems emerged in a pilot study in Namibia, in 2005. That study proposed to base public (as well as government and non-government conservation organisations) HIV/AIDS programmes in rural areas at nature reserves (IECN, 2005). That approach takes into account the spatial dimensions of the challenge; in a country as large as Namibia with dispersed settlements and with tourism a significant economic sector, nature reserves are de facto economic centres. The approach also acknowledges the socio-economic relationships between nature reserves and the surrounding populations. Elaboration of this approach, however, requires development of tools which not only define clearly the intersection and interaction of a range of environmental factors that make HIV/ AIDS a significant threat, but also tools which can show where and how to change the management and functioning of nature reserves.

should consider a much broader context that is shaped by multiple stressors, rather than focus on single processes, such as environmental change. With regard to HIV/AIDS, which is a major stressor in southern Africa, key considerations for the design and operation of interventions include the following:

 HIV/AIDS is one, but not the only, significant threat to human security in the region;  HIV/AIDS is an outcome of the intersection and interaction of a range of other processes of change;  Orthodox tools for assessment of human (and environmental) vulnerability are inadequate for defining the concept rigorously, let alone for distinguishing one cause from another;  Tools for understanding vulnerability, and for making it a useful concept in applications of research, need to be able to predict consequences of changes to different and dynamic contexts. These considerations have clear ramifications for development policy-making in and beyond southern Africa, and they affirm the relevance of an adaptive management approach to vulnerability reduction. This is in the light of both the complex and changing conditions of existence in the region. Our discussion of the SAVI framework represents an effort to move beyond the widespread use of the concept of vulnerability to describe these conditions, towards creating a model for use during the design of development plans and in policy reviews. In sum, the SAVI framework directs attention beyond obvious linear relationships between processes and outcomes to help understand why people are negatively affected by stressors, how they are or are not ‘coping’, and why they are ‘powerless’. In southern Africa, there is clear evidence of interaction between HIV/AIDS and the changing environment for food production and access, which threatens people’s welfare and livelihoods (Ziervogel and Drimie, 2008). There is also a growing recognition of the limitations of standard assessment tools and the interventions that result. For example, HIV/AIDS interventions that focus on education and awareness do not necessarily address the actual health threats to women traders, which lie in the economic, social and psychological stresses arising from taking responsibility for orphaned children of other family members. These and many other examples affirm the need for a multi-stressor analytical framework, and for new approaches to reducing vulnerability through development planning in savanna regions.

Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Siri Eriksen and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions for revisions to the manuscript; also Helen Watson for producing Fig. 1. They would also like to thank the Research Council of Norway and the National Research Foundation of South Africa for funding the ‘‘Development of an integrated research pro-

environmental science & policy 12 (2009) 23–32

gramme on vulnerability to global environmental change in southern Africa’’ (project number 158182/V10).

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