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

在实现联合国可持续发展目标(SDGs)方面取得进展，需要应对与水、能源和粮食系统相关的许多相互关联的挑战。在处理可持续发展目标和气候变化缓解和适应目标方面，不可避免地要权衡取舍，但如果政策以跨部门的方式设计得很好，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效应，并监测其有效性。此外，关于水-能源-食品(WEF)政策的土地使用决定需要考虑到次国家和地方规模的需求和优先事项，包括人类和环境。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往往在决策中被边缘化，因此在考虑到各种行为者的情况下，在政策执行中进行权衡时，他们得不到好处。该项目的重点是加强农村人民在制定和制定政策工作中的关键参与性作用的公平性，以便弥合国家层面的优先事项/战略与对性别问题有敏感认识的地方层面需求之间的差距，包括环境的可持续性。我们将把重点放在马拉维，该国在发援会名单上名列前茅，人口密度低，大部分是农村地区。它在文化和环境上也各不相同，这使我们能够检查一系列政策和生存战略的差距。弥合规模至关重要，因为在国家甚至国家以下一级制定和执行同质政策对社区来说是有问题的，因为农村人不是同质的，他们的资源种类和获得途径从根本上不同。这些系统需要考虑到景观多样性及其吸收和影响方面的性别差异，因此需要对政策进行量身定制或分类，以确保它们具有相关性并取得成功，而不会产生意想不到的后果。许多发生在连接国家和地方规模的“隐藏中间”中的事情，在政策和执行中往往被忽视。隐藏的中间层包括地方到地方以下的组织；将小农与国内市场联系起来的非正式和正式供应链；亲属、政治、宗教和其他社会网络。这些中尺度行为者在填补政策缺口、弥补基础设施方面的不足以及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。我们查明了影响马拉维水、能源、粮食总体安全及其分配机会和惠益的跨规模互动的运作方面的差距。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。要做到这一点，需要更好地理解：--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起来--农村农民如何通过社会和其他网络联系起来，以及这如何有助于维持生计和提高对变化/冲击的适应能力--生物物理异质性如何与人类活动、国家政策及其有效性相交。--相互竞争的利益--例如农村农民与商业农业之间的利益--如何产生政策利益的权衡--政策如何作为这些当地规模联系和异质性的函数在当地实施，以及最终如何监测政策的有效性这将导致对跨规模互动的更深入了解，同时也允许开发工具，以制定更好的世界经济论坛政策，考虑到当地的优先事项和需求。因此，我们的目的是了解如何分解政策，以便更好地适应当地不同情况和不同行为者的利益。

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.