The Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI)

1. The Southern Africa Vulnerability Initiative (SAVI) A project led by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project Karen O’Brien, CICERO, Norway

2. SAVI aims to incorporate multiple stressors into a framework that can be used to assess how and why different regions and sectors of society in southern Africa are vulnerable to global environmental change.

3. Stressors • Global environmental change • HIV/AIDS • Conflicts • Globalization • Urbanization • Water access/distribution • …

4. SAVI Funding • ICSU • IHDP • (Norway-South Africa Research Councils)

5. Objectives • To consolidate different facets of vulnerability research and developing an integrated framework for understanding vulnerability within the context of southern Africa; • To develop a proposal for a self-sustaining, longer-term project which integrates vulnerability research with policy formulation; • To build a coalition among scientists and practitioners in the region to implement a comprehensive vulnerability research program.

6. Progress • SAVI-1 workshop, Maputo, June 2003 • Oslo meeting, February 2004 • Norway-South Africa meeting, April 2004 • SAVI-2 meeting, Cape Town, Oct. 11-12, 2004

8. Conclusions from Maputo: • It was emphasized repeatedly that vulnerability is a highly contextualized concept that must be framed within political, social, economic, and historical realities of specific locations. Depoliticizing vulnerability risks ignoring the social relations and political structures that support and feed it. • It was also recognized that both societal and environmental transformations are ongoing processes, and that vulnerability is therefore inherently dynamic and related to unequal distribution of both power and entitlements within communities, nations, regions, and the global system. • A key challenge for SAVI is thus to integrate vulnerability research with policy formulation, and to build and reinforce a partnership between the science and practitioner communities.

9. Norway-South Africa Meeting • Presentation of case study research in southern Africa, highlighting the role of multiple stressors in shaping vulnerability and resilience. • Cases from Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa.

10. SAVI Framework… • Needs to be driven by a theoretical model of change (disequilibrium as the norm). • Should focus on how different stressors interact and manifest at the local level. • Should incorporate how current responses to stressors can influence vulnerability to future changes and shocks. • Needs to enable interaction between scientists and ”practitioners” (organisations responsible for practical interventions) to produce scientific and strategic knowledge. • Needs to resolve the methodological challenge of producing comparable results from detailed empirical research (case studies).

11. SAVI-2 Meeting • Present and discuss the framework; • Discuss and develop larger project, network and initiative.

12. Links to GECAFS • Multiple stressors clearly important to both food systems and food security; • Food security is at the heart of vulnerability in southern Africa (urban, rural);