Bridging national strategy on sustainable development of water-energy-food systems to local scale needs in Malawi

实现联合国可持续发展目标（SDG）需要解决与水、能源和粮食系统相关的许多相互关联的挑战。在实现可持续发展目标和气候变化减缓与适应目标方面，不可避免地会有权衡，但如果以跨部门的方式妥善设计政策，也会产生协同效应。然而，各国通常没有工具来确定和实施干预措施，包括评估权衡和协同作用，并监测其有效性。此外，关于水-能源-粮食政策的土地使用决定需要考虑到国家以下一级和地方一级的人类和环境需求和优先事项。尽管农村人口是政策的预定目标，但资源和教育有限的农村人口在决策中往往被边缘化，因此，在考虑到各种行为者的情况下权衡政策执行时，他们并没有受益。该项目的重点是加强农村人口在制定和制定政策方面的关键参与作用的公平性，以弥合国家优先事项/战略与对性别问题敏感的地方需求（包括环境可持续性）之间的差距。我们的重点将放在马拉维，它在发援会名单上名列前茅，人口密度低，大部分是农村。它也因文化和环境而异，这使我们能够检查围绕一系列政策和生存战略的差距。缩小范围至关重要，因为在国家甚至国家以下一级制定和执行同质的政策对社区来说是有问题的，因为农村人口并不同质，他们拥有的资源种类和获得资源的机会都有根本的不同。这些系统需要考虑到景观多样性和在其吸收和影响方面的性别差异，因此需要对政策进行调整或分类，以确保政策具有相关性，并在不产生意外后果的情况下取得成功。许多发生在连接国家和地方规模的“隐藏中间”的事情在政策和执行中往往被忽视。隐藏的中间层包括地方到国家以下各级组织;连接小农和国内市场的非正式和正式供应链;亲属、政治、宗教和其他社交网络。这些中尺度行为体在填补政策空白、弥补基础设施不足和将农村社区与更多样化的生计机会联系起来方面发挥着至关重要的作用。我们已经确定了影响马拉维总体水-能源-粮食安全及其分配获取和惠益的跨尺度互动功能方面的差距。通过了解这些差距的性质，我们的目标是确定增加当地生计机会及其可持续性的解决方案/政策。这将通过更好地理解：-所有性别的农村农民及其当地环境如何通过复杂的制度安排层次与政策进程联系在一起-农村农民如何通过社交及其他网络联系在一起，以及这如何有助于维持生计和提高对变化/冲击的适应力-生物物理异质性如何与人类活动，国家政策及其有效性交叉。竞争利益如何，例如在农村农民和商业农业之间，引起政策利益的权衡-如何在地方规模上实施政策，作为这些地方规模联系和异质性的函数，以及如何监测政策的有效性最终这将导致对跨规模相互作用的更深入理解，同时也允许开发工具，以便更好地制定考虑到当地优先事项和需求的世界经济论坛政策。因此，我们的目标是了解如何分解政策，以更好地适应不同行为体的地方背景和利益的多样性。

Progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires addressing many interlinked challenges related to water, energy and food systems. There are inevitable trade-offs in addressing the SDGs and climate change mitigation and adaptation targets, but also synergies if policy is well designed in a cross-sectoral manner. However, nations typically do not have the tools to identify and implement interventions, including evaluating the trade-offs and synergies, and monitor their effectiveness. Furthermore, land use decisions on water-energy-food (WEF) policy need to take into account sub-national and local scale needs and priorities, both human and environmental. Despite being the intended targets of policy, rural people with limited resources and education are often marginalized in decision making and therefore do not benefit when trade-offs in policy implementation are made to take account of the variety of actors. This project focuses on enhancing equity of rural people's key participatory roles in shaping and making policy work in order to bridge the gap between national scale priorities/strategies and gender-sensitive local scale needs, including environmental sustainability. Our focus will be on Malawi, which is high on the DAC list, has low population density and is largely rural. It also varies culturally and environmentally, which allows us to examine gaps around a range of policies and subsistence strategies. Bridging the scales is vital because homogenous policy formulation and implementation at the national or even sub-national scale is problematic for communities because rural people are not homogenous, with fundamentally varying kinds of and access to resources. These systems need to account for landscape diversity and gendered differences in their uptake and impacts, and therefore policies need to be tailored or disaggregated to ensure that they are relevant and are successful without unintended consequences. Many things that happen in the "hidden middle" that bridge the national and local scales are often ignored in policy and implementation. The hidden middle includes local to sub-national organizations; informal and formal supply chains that connect smallholders to domestic markets; kin, political, religious and other social networks. These meso-scale actors play essential roles in filling policy gaps, making up for shortcomings in infrastructure and connecting rural communities to a more diverse set of livelihood opportunities.We have identified gaps in the functioning of cross-scale interactions that affect Malawi's aggregate water-energy-food security, and its distributional access and benefits. By understanding the nature of these gaps, our objective is to identify solutions/policies that increase local livelihood opportunities and their sustainability. This will be done by better understanding:- how rural farmers of all genders and their local environments are connected to policy processes via the complex hierarchy of institutional arrangements - how rural farmers are connected via social and other networks, and how this helps to sustain livelihoods and increase resilience to change/shocks- how biophysical heterogeneity intersects with human activity, national policy and its effectiveness.- how competing interests, for example among and between rural farmers and commercial agriculture, give rise to trade-offs in benefits from policies- how policy is implemented on the ground at the local scale as a function of these local scale connections and heterogeneities, and how the effectiveness of policy is monitored Ultimately this will lead to deeper understanding of cross-scale interactions, while also allowing for the development of tools for better WEF policies that take into account local priorities and needs. Our aim is thus to understand how to disaggregate policy to better fit the local diversity of contexts and interests of various actors.