Climate Adaptation Policy and Its Relation to Practice in North-East Tanzania

This research will provide an ethnographic casestudy of a climate change adaptation project in
North-East Tanzania. It will follow in the academic tradition of the actor-oriented approach within the anthropology of development, placing the adaptation project itself as the locus of in-depth study. The approach will prioritise the often overlooked angle of 'how' development works, rather than seeking to form a judgement over 'whether' it works (de Sardan, 2005). Utilising Mosse's (2005) conceptualisation of the actororiented approach, it will delve into the hidden complexity of project practice, with the adaptation project being explored as a socially constructed arena involving interactions between the different lifeworlds and discourses of the actors involved. It will seek to understand the logic through which such interactions come to produce necessarily unpredictable effects and examine the role of 'brokers' in generating coherent interpretations of practice and thus sustain the legitimacy of the project. In following this approach, the research will provide a relevant contribution towards filling the gap in knowledge regarding the relationship between the climate change adaptation policy model and how this becomes expressed as project practice and events they come to generate and legitimise. This will be examined in the context of the Integrated Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Programme set in the East Usambara Mountains of Tanzania.