Tag: Nature

On livelihoods and global environmental change

In a comment on my earlier post critiquing the recent ENSO and conflict piece that appeared in nature Nature , Joe pointed out that my argument that the authors of the piece did not understand livelihoods was not necessarily clear to the reader.  I think this is completely fair – I am buried in livelihoods . . . it is a concept at the core of what I have researched for the past 14 years, and therefore what may seem obvious to me is not so obvious to everyone else.
First, to clarify: I think the top-line issue I was shorthanding in my response to Solomon was the causal framework: it is totally unclear to me how they think environmental change is translated into conflict.  It is possible that they had no explicit notion of how this connection is made, but I think that would create an enormous set of problems for the study as it would make it impossible to know what variables to control for in the study (to some extent, I think this is a problem with the study anyway).  However, the study, and Solomon’s response, led me to believe that they did have a very basic framing of this connection, where weather impacts livelihoods which impacts behavior.  In this apparent framing, it seems to me that they treated livelihoods as a straightforward set of activities – and the impact of weather on those activities could be easily and generally understood, and the human outcomes of those impacts could also be easily and generally understood.  If this is true, it is a serious misunderstanding of livelihoods.
There is a lot of stuff I could say about livelihoods – my current intellectual project involves rethinking how we understand livelihoods, because I think current analytical frameworks cannot really engage with actual livelihoods decision-making on the ground.  As a result, a lot of our understandings of what people do, and why they do it, are wide of the mark, and the interventions we design to improve/augment/replace existing means of making a living in particular places are often misguided and prone to “surprise” outcomes.
First, a quick definition of livelihoods as they are treated in the contemporary literature: “the capabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of living” (Chambers and Conway, 1992:7).  As Brent McCusker and I have argued:

this definition of livelihoods moves past income toward a more holistic consideration of the manner in which a person obtains a living. In practice, this definition has resulted in a number of approaches to livelihoods that focus closely on access to various types of assets drawn upon by individuals to make a living. These approaches tend to categorize these assets as one of five types of capital: natural, physical, human, financial and social. Land comes under natural capital, “the natural resource base (land, water, trees) that yields products utilized by human populations for their survival,” though an improved field might come under the heading of physical capital, which generally includes “assets brought into existence by economic production processes.”

My problem with the livelihoods approach that dominates the literature, and subtly undergirds the Nature piece I was critiquing, is not the broad definition of livelihoods.  Instead, the problem lies in the subtle assumption of this approach that, in its focus on the requirements for a means of living, concentrates on material circumstances and outcomes as a metric for the success and viability of particular livelihoods.  As I have demonstrated repeatedly (for example here, and in my book Delivering Development), livelihoods are double-edged: they are aimed at both meeting certain material requirements of life and maintaining the privileges of the powerful.  Above certain very, very low thresholds, the social goals of livelihoods actually trump the material goals.  Therefore, if we want to understand livelihoods decisions and outcomes, we must understand the social context at least as well as we do the material conditions in a particular place.  Using generalized assumptions about human motivations to explain responses to livelihoods shifts will smooth over really significant differences in decision-making, and therefore obscure any possible causal connection between things like environmental change and the incidence of conflict – material maximization/deprivation is only part of the story of human motivations, and a relatively small part at that.
How does this all relate to the Nature piece and my criticism? While the authors never specified the means by which this would happen in the piece, only offering general speculation in their response to my criticism, I found Solomon’s response to my blog post really telling:

The study is trying to understand whether choosing to engage in conflict is a “livelihood decision” that individuals in modern societies select more often when El Nino events occur. Our findings tells us that for some reason, people’s willingness to engage in organized violence changes when the global climate changes. One hypothesis is that perhaps “predation” (i.e. the forceful extraction of property from others) is a form of “adaptation” to climate changes.

It is possible that Solomon’s reference to conflict as a livelihoods decision was simply echoing the terms of my criticism.  However, both the article and his response seems to reflect an implicit framing of the environment-to-conflict connection as somehow passing through livelihoods in a straightforward manner.  Because the authors never actually unpack how the environment impacts livelihoods, and in turn how those impacts are translated into human impacts, they become guilty of the same issue that plagues nearly everyone using the livelihoods framework these days: they implicitly embrace an over-generalized framing of livelihoods decisions that relies too heavily on a relatively minor driver of decision-making (material conditions), and completely ignores the dominant factors that shape the character of particular activities and therefore result in particular outcomes for the well-being of those living under that strategy.  I am sure that predation does occur.  I am also absolutely certain that this is not a general response – it does not happen very often (plenty of empirical studies show other behaviors).  It is not interesting to know that it occurs – we already know that.  What is interesting and important is why it occurs.  Going for “story time” explanations of complex behavior does not contribute to our understanding of human behavior, or the impact of climate change on human well-being.
I am working on a reframing of livelihoods that elevates the social component to its proper place in livelihoods decision-making (in review at the Journal of Development Studies).  The thinking behind this reframing is intensely theoretical and really, really academic (for a taste of what I mean, see this piece I wrote with Brent).  My goal in the forthcoming piece is to take this really esoteric theory and turn it into an approach that can be understood and employed widely.  With any luck it will be accepted and published relatively soon . . . I will put up a pre-print as soon as I am able.  But even with this reframing, we are going to have to work really hard at understanding when large-scale studies such as the one I have been critiquing are appropriate for furthering our understanding of things we really need to know, when they merely illustrate what we already know, and when they present really problematic findings with a misleading level of certainty.



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Conflict and El Nino: How did this get through peer review?

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I opened my email this morning to a message from a colleague that linked to a new study in Nature: “Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate.” (the actual article is paywalled).  Well, that is assertive . . . especially because despite similar claims in the past, I have yet to see any study make such a definitive, general connection successfully.  Look, the problem here is simple: the connection between conflict and the environment is shaky, at best. For all of the attention that Thomas Homer-Dixon gets for his work, the simple fact is that for interstate conflict, there are more negative cases than positive case . . . that is, where a particular environmental stressor exists, conflict DOES NOT happen far more often than it does.  Intrastate conflict is much, much more complex, though there are some indications that the environment does play a triggering/exacerbating role in conflict at this scale.
Sadly, this article does not live up to its claims.  It is horrifically flawed, to the point that I cannot see how its conclusions actually tell us anything about the relationship between El Nino and conflict, let alone climate and conflict.  Even a cursory reading reveals myriad problems with the framing of the research design, the regression design, and the interpretation of the regression outputs (though, to be honest, the interpretation really didn’t matter, as whatever was coming out of the regressions was beyond salvation anyway) that lead me to question how it even got through peer review.  My quick take:
Let’s start with the experimental design:

… We define annual conflict risk (ACR) in a collection of countries to be the probability that a randomly selected country in the set experiences conflict onset in a given year. Importantly, this ACR measure removes trends due to the growing number of countries.

In an impossible but ideal experiment, we would observe two identical Earths, change the global climate of one and observe whether ACR in the two Earths diverged. In practice, we can approximate this experiment if the one Earth that we do observe randomly shifts back and forth between two different climate states. Such a quasi-experiment is ongoing and is characterized by rapid shifts in the global climate between La Niña and El Niño.

This design makes sense only if you assume that the random back-and-forth shifting did not trigger adaptive livelihoods decisions that, over time, would have served to mitigate the impact of these state shifts (I am being generous here and assuming the authors do not think that changes in rainfall directly cause people to start attacking one another, though they never really make clear the mechanisms linking climate states and human behavior).  The only way to assume non-adaptive livelihoods is to know next to nothing about how people make livelihoods decisions.  Assuming that these livelihoods are somehow optimized for one state or the other such that a state change would create surprising new conditions that introduced new stresses is more or less to assume that the populations affected by these changes were somehow perpetually surprised by the state change (even though it happened fairly frequently).  After 14 years of studying rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa, I find that absolutely impossible to believe.  Flipping back and forth between states does not give you two Earths, it gives you one Earth that presented certain known challenges to people’s livelihoods.

To identify a relation between the global climate and ACR, we compare societies with themselves when they are exposed to different states of the global climate. Heuristically, a society observed during a La Niña is the ‘control’ for that same society observed during an El Niño ‘treatment’.

No, it is not.  This is a false parsing of the world, and as a result they are regressing junk.
This is not the only problem with the research design. Another huge problem with this study is its treatment of the impact of ENSO-related state changes on people.  These state changes in the climate do not have the same impact everywhere, even in strongly teleconnected places.  The ecology and broader environment of the tropics is hardly monolithic (though it is mostly treated this way), and a strong teleconnection can mean either drought or flooding . . . in other words, the el Nino teleconnection creates a variety of climatological phenomena that play out in a wide range of environments that are exploited by an even larger number of livelihoods strategies, creating myriad environmental and human impacts.  These impacts cannot be aggregated into a broad driver of conflict – basically, their entire regression (which, mind you, is framed around a junk “counterfactual”) is populated with massively over-aggregated data such that any causal signal is completely lost in the noise.
Most reasonable approaches to the environment-conflict connection now treat environmental stresses as an exacerbating factor, or even a trigger, for other underlying factors.  Such an approach seems loosely borne out in the Nature article.  The authors note that in the “teleconnected group, low-income countries are the most responsive to ENSO, whereas similarly low income countries in the weakly affected group do not respond significantly to ENSO.”  This certainly sounds like a broad stressor (state change in the climate) is influencing other, more directly pertinent drivers of conflict.  But then we get to their statement of limitations:

Although we observe that the ACR of low-income countries is most strongly associated with ENSO, we cannot determine if (1) they respond strongly because they are low-income, (2) they are low income because they are sensitive to ENSO, or (3) they are sensitive to ENSO and low income for some third unobservable reason. Hypothesis (1) is supported by evidence that poor countries lack the resources to mitigate the effects of environmental changes. However, hypothesis (2) is plausible because ENSO existed before the invention of agriculture and conflict induces economic underperformance.

Even here, they have really oversimplified things: the way this is framed, either the environment causes the conflict (pretty much established by the literature that this is not the case), the environment causes economic problems that cause the conflict, or it is something else entirely.  Every other possible factor in the world is in that third category, and most current work on this subject concentrate on other drivers of conflict (only some of which are economic) and how they intersect with environmental stresses.
This paper is a mess.  But it got into print and made waves in a lot of popular outlets (for example, here and here).  Why?  Because it is reviving the long-dead corpse of environmental determinism…people really want the environment to in some way determine human behavior (we like simple explanations for complex events), even if that determination takes place via influences nuanced by local environmental variation, etc.  Environmental determinism fell apart in the face of empirical evidence in the 1930s.  But it makes for a good, simple narrative of explanation where we can just blame conflict on climate cycles that are beyond our control, and look past the things like colonialism that created the foundation for modern political economies of conflict.  This absolves the Global North of responsibility for these conflicts, and obscures the many ways in which these conflicts could be addressed productively.



Posted on by Ed 15