Abstract Countries in East and Southern Africa face intensifying climate change impacts and high poverty rates. Meanwhile, climate resilience and poverty reduction system-strengthening efforts have often fallen short. This article is a literature review and synthesises evidence on the political economy of distributional regimes – the institutionalised arrangements shaping resource allocation – that shapes the uptake, design, and implementation of climate resilience and poverty reduction (specifically social protection) reforms in the region. Three dynamics emerge as central: enduring historical legacies; political agendas from above and below; and narratives of deservingness and social norms. Technocratic reforms have tended not to engage effectively with these dynamics, risking limited traction and amplified inequalities. At the same time, the review identifies approaches that have tried to respond to local political economies, including through aligning interventions with political interests; supporting locally led development; and incorporating a focus on gender and social inclusion.
Keywords political economy, systems, climate resilience, social protection, East and Southern Africa, locally led, gender and social inclusion.
Countries in East and Southern Africa are among the globally ‘most vulnerable to and impacted by climate change’ (Fonjong, Matose and Sonnenfeld 2024: 1; IPCC 2023), while just over half of the population across the region live in extreme poverty (World Bank 2025). The last 20 years or so have seen increasing recognition of the role of political economy, and how, in some contexts, systemic reforms (aimed at advancing development policy objectives, building climate resilience, and driving poverty reduction) succeed but in other contexts fail (McCulloch et al. 2017). For example, in a past IDS Bulletin, Tanner and Allouche (2011: 2) argued that ‘in determining a balance between effectiveness, efficiency and equity, climate change initiatives must explicitly recognise the political economy of their inputs, processes and outcomes’.
This review starts from an appreciation of political economy analysis as the endeavour to understand how political, economic, and social institutions, ideas, and incentives – the formal and less formal ‘rules of the game’ (North 1991: 98) – interact to shape systems of production, distribution, and cooperation (Hall 1997; Ostrom 1990; Shearer et al. 2016). The review approach is informed by Hudson and Leftwich’s (2014) work on appreciating the agency of actors (individuals, organisations, collectives); the competition and negotiation of ideas, interests, and values; and the interaction of these with structures and institutions in enabling and constraining change. It also draws on Keeley and Scoones’ (1999: 6) exploration of how viewing environmental policy processes through ‘a bottom-up, more implementation-oriented perspective problematises the multiple, incremental and complex processes of policy formation and implementation’, drawing out competing interests and actors, whose knowledge matters, as well as possibilities for more participatory approaches.
This article undertakes a narrative analytical literature review (Grant and Booth 2009) of how the political economy of countries in East and Southern Africa has affected climate resilience and poverty reduction reform. It focuses on the dynamics of a nation’s ‘distributional regime’, understood as the institutionalised arrangements determining how resources, benefits, and opportunities are shared in society through public policy decisions and less formal allocations (Seekings and Nattrass 2005; Hickey et al. 2020b). This lens enables a focus on ‘who gets what’ in societies, the power relations behind which groups are winners and which are losers, from ‘both the “market” distribution and the pattern of redistribution effected (directly and indirectly) through public policy’ (Hickey et al. 2020b: 6).
The review first examines the evidence on the political economy of distributional regimes conditioning efforts to strengthen systems for climate resilience and for poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa. It then examines how these system-strengthening efforts have engaged with these underlying dynamics. In exploring these issues, the review considered evidence from both the climate resilience and the poverty reduction domains, including the relationship between the two – given that climate resilience and poverty reduction are not automatically synergistic (Béné et al. 2014).
The review findings complement Tanner and Allouche’s conclusion that interventions informed by political economy, rather than technocratic practice, will address climate resilience and poverty. Three key interactions shaping distributional regimes in countries in East and Southern Africa that affect the uptake, design, and implementation of climate and poverty (specifically social protection) reforms are (1) structural legacies and vulnerabilities; (2) political agendas from above and below; and (3) narratives of deservingness and unequal social norms. The literature provides substantial evidence of the ineffectiveness of technocratic reforms that fail to consider these dynamics. Moreover, a key risk is that without a political economy lens, system-strengthening efforts do not take into account that climate resilience and poverty reduction agendas are not necessarily aligned and might create implementation gaps. As noted by Béné et al. (2014), the already marginalised are at risk of becoming new losers when resilience interventions are applied apolitically without appreciation of potential interactions with social vulnerabilities and the underpinning exclusive (political, economic, and social) institutions.
The literature also provides examples of interventions aiming to strengthen systems for climate resilience and poverty reduction that have attempted to engage with the underlying dynamics of distributional regimes. Key approaches include efforts to align with political interests; support locally led development; and integrate a gender and social inclusion lens in intervention design and implementation.
The remainder of the article sets out the methods (Section 2), findings (Section 3), and conclusion (Section 4) of this analysis.
This review has sought to identify key themes in the existing evidence base on how the underpinning dynamics of resource distribution has conditioned efforts to strengthen systems for climate and poverty actions in East and Southern Africa. A non-systematic exploratory exercise, this review identified peer‑reviewed literature in English primarily since 2015 though some older seminal literature is also referenced. It carried out the review through online searches4 and expert recommendations. It looked first for systematic or rigorous reviews at the regional level that covered a selection of East African countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda) and a selection of Southern African countries (Malawi, Zambia,5 Zimbabwe). Then it conducted strategic deep dives into country cases and sectoral analysis.
This exercise intentionally begins with the local, with a focus on East and Southern African countries’ domestic political economies. At the same time, across this region, international actors have considerable interest and influence on climate and social policy objectives, providing financial and technical assistance for system-strengthening interventions (Devereux 2020; Naess et al. 2015). The review has accordingly included insights from the evidence on how the nature of distributional regimes influences national actors’ engagement with and adoption of internationally supported climate and poverty-related interventions. It also includes findings in the literature on whether and how externally funded reform endeavours are informed by an understanding of countries’ distributional regimes.
The review has taken a broad view of ‘systems’, considering evidence on climate resilience and poverty reduction systems by function (systems for policy, financing, management, workforce, information, monitoring, and learning) and by level (national, government, subnational authorities, and communities). This ambitious remit was tightened in several ways. First, through looking for evidence that specifically investigated the political economy of system-strengthening efforts. Second, while for climate resilience, the review included research on climate change mitigation and adaptation and disaster risk management, for poverty reduction, the review focused solely on the literature on social protection interventions (instead of the full range of possible poverty reduction endeavours).
The main limitations of this exercise stem from the broad scope of the review and the rapid methodology, which led to a strategically selective approach to identifying the relevant evidence, with the risk that key references may have been missed. This should therefore be regarded as an exploratory exercise, drawing out conclusions that could inform the potential focus of, and be tested through, more systematic review.
This section organises the findings of the review into three parts. Following a summary of the evidence base identified by the review, it provides thematic syntheses of the evidence on the underlying dynamics of distributional regimes in East and Southern Africa that have shaped climate resilience and poverty reduction system-strengthening efforts. It then examines the evidence on how these system-strengthening approaches have responded effectively (or not) to the nature of the distributional regime found in the countries in this region.
3.1 Overview of the evidence base found
Within the poverty reduction literature, this review found a relatively coherent and well-established body of research on the political economy of social protection in East and Southern Africa, developed in the 2000s following critiques of earlier apolitical research agendas. Seminal research has been led by the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre (Hickey et al. 2020a). There has been more attention to the politics of policymaking, and less to the politics of implementation of social protection (Seekings et al. 2023). A 2023 Social Policy and Administration Special Issue on ‘States, Citizens and Social Protection in Africa’ offers a focus on the transformative potential of social protection on the relationship between citizens and states, and what can impede or support this (ibid.).
Turning to climate resilience, there is an emerging literature on the political economy of efforts to strengthen climate resilience for the countries covered by this review, albeit somewhat dispersed across different sectors. There are some analyses that take a more comprehensive approach, such as the 2023 analysis by Kweyu et al. of climate governance in eastern Africa, to give one example. See also the Review of African Political Economy’s Special Issue on ‘The Climate Emergency in Africa: Crisis, Solutions, Resistance’, which offers radical and critical political economy analyses of approaches to climate change, including case studies from Mozambique and Tanzania (Wengraf et al. 2023). Sectorally, this review found a growing literature on the political economy of agriculture and climate change in the region (including earlier research by the Future Agricultures Consortium and the successor Agricultural Policy Research in Africa programme) and on the political economy of energy transitions (e.g. Pedersen and Poncian 2024). Nevertheless, while studies looking at climate resilience identify various political, economic, and social challenges as barriers to reform, there appear to be fewer in-depth analyses of the underpinning drivers of these dynamics. Other reviewers have identified the need for greater political economy analysis on disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation and mitigation (Islam et al. 2020; Pedersen and Poncian 2024; Shackleton et al. 2015).
Also, this review found few political economy analyses of the relationship between climate resilience and social protection. Exceptions include Tenzing and Conway’s (2022) study of climate discourses and social protection in Ethiopia. Ulrichs, Slater and Costella’s (2019) study on building resilience to climate risks through social protection drawing on evidence from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda also provides some political economy insights.
3.2 Evidence on the underlying dynamics of distributional regimes shaping climate resilience and poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa
In the literature analysing the underlying dynamics of distributional regimes that affect climate-resilient and poverty reduction system strengthening in the East and Southern African countries of focus, three key themes emerge. Critical dynamics include the enduring relevance of historical legacies and debates around economic constraints; the influence of political elites and social movements; and the role of narratives of deservingness and the persistence of unequal social norms.
3.2.1 Structural factors
There are large literatures on the legacies of colonial rule and neoliberal policy reforms on political, social, and economic conditions and impacts today in East and Southern Africa. Some of this evidence explicitly examines the link between these historical factors and current conditions for building climate resilience and reducing poverty. For example, one study looks at how a legacy of colonial and neoliberal land development and resettlement policies in Zimbabwe is the remote, underdeveloped, and marginalised communal farming communities of today, and the challenges this legacy causes for climate adaptation endeavours (Maganga and Suso 2022). The analysis by Kweyu et al. (2023) finds that the policy conditions attached to the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and early 1990s arguably resulted in the collapse of agricultural extension services in East Africa, with long-lasting impacts that affect government policies today. As well as common patterns in how the past shapes the present climate resilience and poverty reduction reform possibilities, the literature reveals how countries in the region also face individual challenges from their histories. For some, this may reflect war and conflict legacies (such as Mozambique (Maviza et al. 2024)); others struggle with the impacts of apartheid, radical land reform, and continuing debates over land tenure (such as Zimbabwe (Helliker, Chiweshe and Bhatasara 2018)).
These historically rooted constraints intersect with contemporary economic pressures. Countries in this region face serious fiscal constraints. Factors include structural marginalisation within global investment flows including climate finance (Mariotti and Meacci 2026: 115) and record levels of public debt, a growing proportion of which is commercial debt and debt service (Oxfam 2025). There are also massive illicit financial flows across borders from these resource-rich countries through commercial practices, criminal activity, and corruption, straining governance and rule of law (AFRODAD 2022; McLaggan 2023). Grey literature in particular links these issues with strained public purses for climate and social protection expenditures: for example, Mwencha and Atta‑Mensah (2025) highlight governments ‘keeping up with repayment schedules while falling behind on funding for essential services and climate action’. Seekings (2017: 23), in contrast, finds that the limited uptake of social protection reforms ‘does not appear to be affordability in simple economic or fiscal terms’. He concludes that ‘(t)he political ceiling on reforms is far lower than the ceiling suggested in technical studies of fiscal space. In practice, ‘affordability’ in Africa is not about fiscal space, but is a matter of priorities’ (ibid.).
3.2.2 Political agendas from above and below
Other literature explores the ‘negotiated politics’ of social protection in sub-Saharan Africa, explaining the variation in social assistance expansion as due to the political contestation and negotiation between elites, voters, bureaucrats, and transnational actors (Hickey et al. 2020b). Political settlement6 analysis uncovers how domestic political elites have used social assistance reform as a political survival strategy to build legitimacy, secure allegiance, or win electoral support (ibid.). Hickey et al. (2020b: 16) found that ‘a clear divergence exists between those countries where political power is concentrated among a handful of political elites within a dominant ruling party (Ethiopia and Rwanda) and those in which power is more dispersed among elite groups (Uganda and Zambia)’. In the latter, some degree of dispersal of political power means that politicians have sought to build broader political coalitions, using the distribution of rents to win elections (ibid.). Meanwhile, in Ethiopia and Rwanda, past social assistance expansion was driven by minority-led governments’ desire to build regime legitimacy and political stability via rapid development (ibid.). In another study, Morse (2023) identifies the salient role of political competition for the expansion of pensions in Ghana and Malawi, finding that such expansion was ‘more likely under stable two-party political systems, where pension reforms might be used to mobilise swing voters’ (Seekings et al. 2023: 836).
Extending this political economy lens beyond social protection, similar dynamics of contestation and coalition-building are observed in the climate resilience literature. Analysis often points out the role of political contestation and negotiation in contributing to the notable intra-state disparity found in investment in climate adaptation. For example, Kweyu et al. (2023) highlights the linkages between underinvestment in more remote marginalised areas vulnerable to extreme climate events (e.g. the Arid and Semi-Arid Lands in Kenya), and the extent to which local structures/actors are aligned with the ruling party.
The literature is clear that these dynamics are influenced by entrenched patterns of elite capture of policy processes and resource distribution at various levels and scales for climate and social protection interventions. For example, Hickey et al. (2020b: 11) discuss the uneven quality of democracy in sub‑Saharan Africa, noting that political parties ‘tend to be vehicles for patronage politics rather than programmatic reform’. Looking at the political economy of resilience and adaptation in Malawi, Chinsinga (2021: 10) finds negative effects of political and bureaucratic elites implementing ‘reforms in the sector to create opportunities for rent extraction for personal gain and not for the greater common good’ or committing to reforms when their positions were under threat or to avert economic collapse, but this would not lead to permanent, deeper changes. Turning to research at a more local level, looking at climate change adaptation, Mosberg, Nyukuri and Naess (2017: 87) found evidence of community elites capitalising on their links with powerful actors to channel resources to their own families and ethnic kin in Kenya, with many local informants reporting feeling bypassed by both development and humanitarian assistance.
It is worth noting that these political dynamics are shaped not just by elites but also through pressures ‘from below’. There are pertinent academic debates on the relationships between the material and the cultural, the formal and the informal, and elite and public domains in shaping institutional reforms. An article by Cummings (2025) responds to perceived (overly) materialist foundations of the political settlements approach, bringing into focus the role of social identity and moral beliefs in institutional change.
There is literature in the climate domain that explores the role of environmental and climate social movements and climate justice agendas shaping distributional regimes in the region. For example, Ronoh (2026: 45) explores the deep cultural roots of climate activists in Kenya and Uganda, drawing on philosophies of the interconnected nature of humans, communities, and environment. Luwedde et al. (2026) discuss the crucial role of climate activism in exposing gaps in decision makers’ commitment and rhetoric, noting that less than 10 per cent of global climate finance has been estimated to reach local levels (Soanes et al. 2017). They highlight the inspiring legacy of individual climate activists such as Wangarï Maathai in Kenya, who illustrate that climate justice is a fight against colonialism, corruption, and the patriarchy, and Ugandan youth-led initiatives such as the Rise Up Movement and Fridays for Future Uganda which ‘have become significant actors in global environmental politics as well as in Uganda’s national context’ (Luwedde et al. 2026: 3). Their discussion also foregrounds the growing conflict in Uganda, and other countries in the region (and globally), ‘over the aspiration for an ecologically and socially just future’, noting that the top-down response to this struggle is often ‘threats, intimidation and arrests’ (ibid.: 3).
3.2.3 Narratives of deservingness and unequal social norms
The literature also sets out the powerful influence of narratives, underpinned by social norms, and particularly the importance of local perceptions of deservingness on support for social policy reforms. For example, in a multi-country study that includes Zambia, Seetharaman et al. (2025) identify that securing public support, especially from non-direct beneficiaries, has been crucial for the sustainability and scalability of social assistance measures, while this public support is informed by local conceptions of what is fair and who deserves support.
The ESID research explores how local views of welfare and who is deserving of support shape socially and politically acceptable eligibility criteria. For example, in Uganda, donors’ social assistance advocacy efforts were identified as only being successful when ‘they were re-framed within a politically acceptable discourse regarding the need to preserve the dignity of vulnerable and deserving groups such as the elderly, rather than “the poor” in general’ (Hickey et al. 2020b: 21). This speaks to the ‘widespread anxiety over “dependency” in countries in the region, i.e. of citizens (especially poor citizens) becoming dependent on government “handouts” undermining their self‑reliance and work ethic’ (ibid.). Seekings et al. (2023: 833) note that there are cases (Ghana and Kenya) which suggest that ‘the expansion of social protection has strengthened understandings of rights-based social citizenship and the claims that citizens can make of the state’. However, other studies find deeply entrenched conservative attitudes and paternalistic practices, suggesting limits to ‘the transformative hopes’ of social protection (ibid.).
Who is deemed deserving is also influenced by unequal social norms which persist across the region. These norms entrench gender and other social inequities (such as race, ethnicity, age, income, geographic location) which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds with high confidence compound vulnerability to climate change impacts (Schipper et al. 2022). Advocates of feminist political economy set out how traditionally political economy analysis has tended towards gender-blindness, arguing for the need to focus on how gender is embedded in all economic and social relations (Cantillon, Mackett and Stevano 2023).
3.3 Challenges of system-strengthening approaches in engaging with these dynamics
On the one hand, academics and aid practitioners recognise that the adoption and success of systemic governance and programme reforms in the climate and poverty domains is predicated in large part on the nature of the distributional regime that shapes resource and benefit allocation across societies. On the other hand, the evidence also indicates that initiatives to strengthen climate resilience and poverty reduction, often propagated and funded by international actors, have repeatedly failed to account for these dynamics or have struggled to adapt effectively to them.
3.3.1 The limitations of technocratic reforms
Domestic political economies can lead to a prioritisation of technocratic approaches to climate and poverty action. Tenzing and Conway (2022: 1) argue that domestic political agendas driving Ethiopia’s modernisation and growth-oriented policies rationalise ‘the presence of a strong central State and its control over natural resources and rural livelihoods’ and condition the country’s flagship social protection programme to ‘favour technocratic, productivist approaches to adapting to climate change that may help reproduce, rather than challenge the entrenched politics at the root of vulnerability’.
Turning to externally supported interventions, numerous studies find that international actors’ failure to engage with the political economy of desired reforms have led to ineffective technocratic interventions. Narrowly technical climate resilience interventions risk amplifying existing inequalities and the marginalisation of certain groups in societies, through multiple pathways (Eriksen et al. 2021), while ‘time-bound, donor-driven’ climate adaptation reforms flounder when powerful actors benefit from maintaining the status quo (Tenzing 2019). This challenge is compounded by bureaucratic inertia and a culture of working in ‘silos’ sustaining the resistance to change (Islam et al. 2020). For example, researching disaster risk governance across sectors and scales in Kenya and four other African countries, Okunola (2025: 321) links the critical legal and institutional gaps in the implementation of the vision of the Sendai Framework 2015–2030 to its ‘emphasis on technocratic coordination and universal governance models’ which ‘often overlooks power dynamics, historical inequalities, and informal institutional realities, limiting its transformative potential’.
As a specific example, in a study of Rwanda’s state-led Green Revolution agricultural reform, funded by international donors, Clay and Zimmerer (2020) find that the shift towards commercial, market, and export-oriented agriculture has constrained Rwandan smallholders’ ability to adapt by limiting their control over land use, reducing livelihood flexibility, and restricting access to key resources. Moreover, they find that climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions in Rwanda ‘enforce a specific set of expert knowledge as legitimate’, while ‘their focus on household‑level compliance disregards the need for both individual and community sovereignty and how resilience is a cross-scalar, relational process’ (ibid.: 2). In another example, a study on climate adaptation in Kenya finds that without taking into account unequal gender norms and structural inequalities which mean women have ‘relatively low access to skills, information, labour, capital, and decision-making’, climate‑smart technical interventions ‘will generally serve to entrench gendered power disparities’ (Brisebois, Eriksen and Crane 2022: 13–14).
There is also discussion in the literature on a tendency to focus on improving technical capacities to support climate and social protection reforms. Lavers (2022) points out that this risks de-politicising the drivers of geographical variation in state investment and the distribution of social transfers. He argues for an understanding which takes into consideration a combination of the capacity and reach of the state with the nature of national and local political contestation. His key insight is that state capacity alone will not lead to impartial, effective outcomes; rather, political dynamics at all levels of governance will shape the way in which this political capacity is deployed (ibid.: 21).
3.4 System-strengthening efforts working with the political economy of distributional regimes
While there are certainly challenges of system-strengthening approaches in engaging with distributional dynamics, this is not to say it cannot be done. Some literature promisingly finds system-strengthening efforts that work with the political economy of distributional regimes in the region, including through an explicit focus on political support, locally led development, and a gender and social inclusion lens.
3.4.1 Political support
As discussed previously, there are country studies focusing on social protection that explore how political support is shaped by a country’s political settlement. Chinsinga et al. (2022) contrast the concentrated power and relatively broad social foundation of the political settlement in Rwanda leading to the adoption of (top-down) poverty reduction reforms with Tanzania’s competitive elections that motivated elites ‘to promote poverty reduction programmes, but where policy implementation has been undermined by factionalism and short-term political imperative’ (ibid.: 10).
Turning to the ‘bottom up’, Ronoh (2026: 45) sets out how environmental and climate activists use ‘local coalitions as networks of resistance to advocate for climate justice through various means, such as media campaigns, protests and litigation, and how these strategies have been adapted to suit their unique political contexts’.
Other studies highlight how donor efforts to propagate reforms are successful when they align with domestic interests. For example, in the climate domain, the analysis by Naess et al. (2015) points out the role of consensus construction in determining energy policy choices, tracing the growing political support for some renewable energy technologies in Kenya to shared interests between government ministries and donors. They note that this is ‘due in part to the extent to which they serve the existing development priorities of government agencies, the climate change concerns of donors, and the commercial interests of the international companies that are positioned to develop the resources’ (ibid.: 538).
Turning to the social protection domain, Hickey et al. (2020b: 17) conclude that the ‘moderate levels of political support’ secured for social assistance expansion in Uganda and Zambia ‘only materialized as a result of domestic political shifts and attempts by donors to align their advocacy efforts with the interests and ideas of ruling elites’. In the same vein, Pruce and Hickey (2019: 189) describe how 15 years ago, Zambian government support for the expansion of social cash transfers was strengthened by ‘the interplay of a transnational effort to form a policy coalition in favour of the agenda, political settlement dynamics, and the cross-cutting role of ideas’. Strategies deployed by the UK government’s former Department for International Development (DFID) (now the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)) to strengthen this coalition’s support for social protection included investing in randomised controlled trials to build an evidence base respected by Zambian ministers, along with the strategic positioning of a senior Zambian ‘broker’ who would ‘deploy his long-established elite-level networks’ to communicate the findings (ibid.: 187).
At the same time, a cautionary note is struck by Hickey and Bukenya (2021). They find that when ‘working with the grain’ incurs trade-offs with pro-poor, progressive approaches, ‘(a)ligning policy agendas with dominant interests and ideas may render interventions politically acceptable in contexts such as Uganda, but at the cost of further embedding clientelist logics and doing little to address distributional problems’ (ibid.: 017).
3.4.2 Locally led development
The broader literature on supporting locally led development has pertinent findings for fostering sustainable systems to achieve inclusive climate and poverty objectives. Locally led development refers to ‘a process where local stakeholders, including individuals, communities, networks, organisations, private sectors, and governments, take the initiative to set their own priorities, devise solutions, and mobilise the necessary capacity, leadership, and resources to implement these solutions’ (Singh 2024: 3). Within the climate resilience literature, there is recurrent emphasis on the importance of governmental reforms valuing and engaging with indigenous knowledge (integrated with scientific knowledge) (Silici et al. 2021); enabling smallholder farmer ownership of adaptation measures (Silici et al. 2021; Lenhardt, Kopper and Saha 20247); empowering local change agents (Mapfumo et al. 2017); and supporting participatory groups such as cooperatives for sharing information, building social capital, and linkages to market (Thottadi and Singh 2024; Gebremedhin et al. 2025; Finizola e Silva et al. 2024; Lenhardt et al. 2024). Such support needs to be cognisant of the impacts (intended and unintended) of engaging with local initiatives: for example, critical political economy analysis has a long history of highlighting the perils of professional ‘NGO-isation’ of organic social movements (Mwangi and Maghanga 2023).
The literature also documents evidence of where decentralised governance has resulted in investment in subnational and local development initiatives including for building climate resilience and social protection. For example, in Kenya, there have been improvements in devolved disaster risk management governance with county-level governments having legally mandated disaster risk reduction responsibilities, and several counties integrating risk reduction into their development planning and institutionalising coordination through Emergency Operations Centres and local flood dashboards (Kambon and Duran Vargas 2019; Gooding et al. 2022). This experience has not been without challenges, with the literature highlighting insufficient county budgets, weak integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, and tensions between national and local levels over roles and responsibilities (Gooding et al. 2022; Nyandiko 2020).
3.4.3 Gender and social inclusion lens
Cross-cutting the social protection and the climate resilience domains, research foregrounds the importance of intersectional approaches to strengthen systems for equitable, just outcomes. However, the literature on climate resilience reforms in East and Southern Africa provides more evidence on the gaps in engaging with gender and social inclusion than on achievements. This mirrors the IPCC’s global finding of ‘very few examples’ of gender and intersecting inequalities being successfully integrated into climate policies (Schipper et al. 2022: 2700). The introduction to Climate Justice in Action in eastern Africa calls for ‘a relational, situated, political and historical approach to – and enaction of – climate justice that celebrates feminist and intersectional perspectives and begins from lived and collective experience’ (Luwedde et al. 2026: 9).
Turning to social protection literature, taking a gendered political economy approach, Holmes, Jones and Domingo (2019: 1) find that progress in gender-responsive social protection is more likely where pro-poor institutions and supportive political elites align; advocates influence informal and subnational decisionmaking; broad and well-resourced coalitions are mobilised; and social protection is framed to recognise women as recipients in their own right rather than primarily as carers. Looking for examples from East and Southern Africa, Holmes et al. (2019: 23) find that in Rwanda the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion participated in the active cross-governmental social protection coordinating body, working ‘with ministerial allies and international agencies to secure gender-responsive features in the national social protection programme’.
This rapid review set out to identify and synthesise evidence on the political economy of strengthening systems for climate resilience and poverty reduction in East and Southern Africa. A clear message emerges: strengthening climate resilience and poverty reduction systems in East and Southern Africa depends less on technical solutions and more on understanding and engaging with the underpinning historical legacies, political agendas from above and below, and narratives of deservingness and social norms. These critical political economy dynamics shape a country’s distributional regime, influencing policy choices and how interventions are negotiated and delivered in the real world. System-strengthening efforts that overlook these dynamics struggle to gain traction, and risk reproducing or amplifying existing inequalities.
At the same time, the literature provides examples of how interventions can engage with the underlying dynamics of distributional regimes. Reforms have been adopted when agendas resonate with shared interests among domestic actors, and between national and international actors. Supporting locally led development – through decentralising governance, appreciating the value of indigenous knowledge, and supporting community initiatives – can contribute to strengthening climate‑resilient and poverty-reducing systems. These approaches require both adequate resourcing and careful attention to local power relations. Lastly, integrating a focus on gender and social inclusion in system-strengthening reforms is crucial but underdeveloped.
1 This issue of the IDS Bulletin was supported by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. The opinions expressed are the authors’ own and do not reflect the views of the funder.
2 An initial broader write-up of the evidence benefited from the review and inputs of a reference group constituted by the Chronic Poverty and Advisory Network (CPAN) Zambia programme. The author would like to thank Vidya Diwakar, Kate Pruce, and Andrew Shepherd (IDS), Marja Hinfelaar (Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR)), and Cleopas Sambo (University of Zambia) for their contributions on the initial write-up. The analysis was then considerably strengthened by the helpful feedback of anonymous reviewers.
3 Becky Carter, researcher, Institute of Development Studies, UK.
4 The main search engines used were Google Scholar and Google. Various key terms were used in different combinations to identify references. For example, as well as ‘political economy’ and ‘distributional regime’, terms such as ‘politics’, ‘power’, and ‘incentives’ were used, among others.
5 The review of evidence on Zambia was conducted by Carolina Holland-Szyp.
6 Kelsall and Hickey (2020) provide this definition of a country’s political settlement: ‘a tacit agreement among powerful groups about the rules of the political and economic game, that keeps the peace by providing opportunities for those groups to secure a distribution of benefits (such as resources, rights, and status) they find acceptable’.
7 For further information on this and the other unpublished references cited in this article, please contact Andrew Shepherd: A.Shepherd@associate.ids.ac.uk.
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© 2026 The Authors. IDS Bulletin © Institute of Development Studies | DOI: 10.19088/1968-2026.175
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The IDS Bulletin is published by Institute of Development Studies, Library Road, Brighton, BN1 9RE, UK. This article is part of IDS Bulletin Vol. 57 No. 2 July 2026 ‘Climate Resilience and Poverty Reduction’.