Praying for Drought: Persistent Vulnerability and the Politics of Patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil

Abstract

The phrase persistent vulnerability reflects the enduring relationship of the rural population in Ceará with a highly variable climate. Persistence underscores the historical and unyielding nature of this vulnerability. Yet contrary to once-catastrophic rates of mortality etched in a public consciousness, no one dies from severe droughts and few people flee them as in the past. Government relief and social transfers have become the institutionalized form of adaptation, giving way to the counterintuitive reality that drought stabilizes the food and income supply for poor people. We analyze how maladaptive risk reduction, which is embedded in clientilistic social relations, undermines resilience, and we examine pathways toward a more sustainable adaptive relationship. [ABSTRACT Aplicamos o termo vulnerabilidade persistente para representar a relação duradoura entre a população rural do estado do Ceará e a quadra chuvosa altamente variável e incerto. Esta persistência se destaca na inevitabilidade histórica desta vulnerabilidade.Ao contrário dasépocas de seca catastróficas bem cravadas na consciência pública do sertanejo cearense, o cenário da seca marcada de morte e fuga não existe mais. Os programas de emergência e de proteção social já se transformaram em formas institucionalizadas de adaptação, deixando transparecer a realidade irônica que a seca acarreta um período de estabilidade de alimentos e renda para a população mais necessitada. Aqui avanç amos a tese que esta estratégia pública de adaptaçãoà seca, sendo baseado num clientelismo enraizado, enfraquece a resiliência fundamental da sociedade faceà mudanç a climática. Findamos por examinar os caminhos de adaptação mais promissores e sustentáveis.

Coping and the biosocial consequences of food insecurity in the 21st century

“…In another case of coping as a variable process, this time in the case of climatic variability, Finan and Nelson (2009) show how emergency food relief, as a short-term coping mechanism utilized by many in Ceará , Brazil, has shifted to an element in a long-term adaptive strategy for households and communities who are most vulnerable. While short-term institutional aid may allow some success in negotiating periodic drought, especially for those higher on the socioeconomic scale and/or those with access to irrigation, government aid as an adaptive strategy for the resource-poor may increase vulnerability as households have fewer productive options with respect to livelihoods in all years.…”

“…This is neither a smooth, nor a linear process, and often tradeoffs must be made. ''Coping'' is a related concept, one that is often used to describe how people negotiate food insecurity to mitigate its consequences in the short term, and is one element in a broader conceptual framework that links various kinds of insecurities with vulnerability, risk, and resilience as negotiated processes (Nelson and Finan, 2009;Vásquez-León, 2009). Susanna Davies (Davies, 1996: 55) defines coping in relation to food insecurity as ''a short-term response to an immediate and inhabitual decline in access to food.''…”

Improving U.S. Army Civil Affairs assessment : a consideration of social power

“…Dowding (2008, 27) acknowledges that actions by agents intended to reproduce a certain balance of power can have unintended consequences. Empirical studies show that the exercise of power, although adaptive for some social actors, can result in the reproduction of the overall system (Bourdieu 1984;Nelson and Finan 2009;Willis 1981). For example, in the case described in Nelson and Finan (2009), human adaptation in the form of a reliance on patron-client relations during recurring droughts results in reproduction of the structure of power.…”

Governança ambiental urbana em face das mudanças climáticas

“…Em outras palavras, a combinação sinérgica entre elementos genéricos e específicos estabeleceria um círculo virtuoso para uma capacidade adaptativa sustentada de longo prazo (Lemos, 2007;Lemos & Tompkins, 2008), enquanto a tensão nessa relação poderia resultar em cenários negativos, como a promoção da pobreza, agravando e/ou perpetuando a má adaptação (Lemos, 2007;Nelson & Finan, 2009;Maru et al, 2012) e sufocando esforços endógenos na gestão de riscos específicos (Eakin et al, 2011;Murtinho, 2011).…”