Socially just triple-wins? An evaluation of projects that pursue climate compatible development goals in Malawi

Climate compatible development (CCD) is gaining traction as a conceptual framework for mainstreaming climate change mitigation and adaptation within development efforts. So far, the social justice implications of pursuing CCD goals in different settings have not been comprehensively considered. Social justice research can facilitate understanding of whether and how development, mitigation and adaptation are prioritised, balanced and experienced through CCD. It can also uncover CCD ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ across governance levels and (spatial and temporal) scales. This thesis develops a conceptual model to guide social justice evaluations that considers both issues of procedure (participation and recognition) and distribution. It is used to guide analysis of two projects in Malawi that pursue CCD triple-wins across development, mitigation and adaptation. A mixed methods research design enabled exploration of the social justice implications of project design, implementation and project outcome distributions.

Overlap existed between stakeholders’ ‘revealed’ priorities for CCD, but donor power over project design processes encouraged some stakeholders to suppress their preferences. Donor recognition patterns were assimilated within design processes, with other stakeholders’ participation constrained. Poor alignment with contextual power meant implementation processes had only limited success in facilitating procedural justice for local people, especially the most vulnerable households. Findings show that CCD must understand, manage and challenge visible, hidden and invisible forms of power in order to facilitate widespread procedural justice opportunities during design and implementation. Projects achieve CCD triple-wins, but auxiliary benefits and negative side-effects have also been experienced by professional stakeholders and local people, respectively. Outcomes have been experienced unevenly within and between stakeholder groups and serve to worsen inequalities in target villages. Depending on its design and implementation, CCD can create multi-level, cross-scalar patterns of interrelated social justices and injustices. Recommendations are presented to encourage the former and avoid the latter.