Forum theatre to enhance joint agency in Kenya and Mozambique: towards relational understandings of climate change

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Coastal communities in East Africa face multiple challenges that threaten their wellbeing, perpetuate inequalities and lead to unsustainable management of natural resources. This project will explore which relationships and daily practices, among the many that actors are embedded in, can be conceived of as tools to enhance joint agency for climate change adaptation. The project examines climate change as embedded in a multiplicity of existing challenges. Current environmental governance approaches are frequently based on the hypothesis that humans, perceived as rational and independent individual decision-makers, are the managers of ecosystems exterior to them. The contrast between the current research frontier on social-ecological systems – which presents processes and relations as key to understand those systems – and the tools we have to manage them, might explain why such tools fail to tackle the sustainability challenge. This project seeks to better understand how obstacles to climate change adaptation are deeply ingrained in social-ecological networks. Indeed, the project will investigate the factors perpetuating inequalities and unsustainable exploitation of coastal resources and in which ways climate change is intertwined with those. Additionally, as an action-research project, it seeks to enhance a relational conception of social-ecological agency through community forum theatre in selected communities in Kenya and Mozambique.

This work is funded through the research project grant “Sustainability and resilience – Tackling consequences of climate and environmental changes” funded jointly by the Swedish Research Council and Sida through the Swedish Government’s development aid funds, and by Formas’ and Forte’s research appropriations. With additional support from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, WCS Kenya, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, and the University of Pwani. Grant period 2019-2023.