Resilience of what and for whom? Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the global, Ethiopian, and Tanzanian coffee sectors

Abstract

• Climate resilience has different goals across scales, from coffee supply stability to farmer livelihood improvement. • Most climate interventions prioritize coffee supply stability rather than farmer livelihoods or community resilience. • Most interventions help farmers build adaptive, rather than broader transformative capacities. • Farmer adaptation practices address a range of shocks ranging from climate change to market and supply chain changes. • Resilience efforts prop up production, but miss the mark on systemic shocks tied to inequality and power. Rapid climate change is making climate resilience a key concern in the agricultural sector. Yet, in practice, efforts to support resilience are often vague about ultimate goals, as well as which systems and perturbations need to be considered to achieve key objectives. This article presents a multi-scalar climate resilience framework that distinguishes between resilience at the sectoral, country, community, and household scale involved in coffee production. We then apply the framework by comparing the ambitions of climate resilience approaches pursued by companies and global development agencies with strategies driven by producing country institutions and coffee farming communities. We triangulate evidence from a novel dataset documenting climate-resilience interventions in the global coffee sector with original survey, interview, and focus group discussion data from fieldwork in Tanzania and Ethiopia. We find that interventions originating in importing countries primarily focus on ensuring continued coffee production in service of sectoral resilience, and rarely foreground alternative livelihood strategies that would benefit household-level resilience. Activities led by origin countries focus on productivity and quality improvements, but rarely center on climate resilience. Farmers themselves, while strongly valuing coffee as a livelihood strategy, highlight the need for diversification and pragmatic adjustments in the face of growing climate threats. We conclude that there is a need for more farmer-centric climate change interventions that strengthen not only absorptive and adaptive, but also transformative capacities.