Introduction

In Chapter 1, I outlined how my research experience started almost two years after the beginning of my assignment at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Lilongwe. Whilst conducting my PhD research as a part-time and self-funded student, I faced several financial and time constraints. Most notably, my full-time job prevented me from spending extended periods in close contact with informants. My life history and personal biography created structural research ‘dilemmas’ (Sherif 2001; Venkateswar 2001; Robert and Sanders 2005) and affected my possibilities within the ethnography, influencing the data collection process before (finding time and resources), during (multiple identities, see section 2.3.1) and after the fieldwork, since I have not had the opportunity to return to Malawi to discuss and share my research findings (section 2.5). In particular, I could not undertake the ‘standard’ ethnographic research experience, characterised by long periods in the field with local communities, participatory observation, and the construction of close relations with informants (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Springwood and King 2001; Venkateswar 2001; Roberts and Sanders 2005; Simpson 2011).

The three-year life experience in Malawi, however, allowed me to get acquainted with many life situations. Although not in a structured way, I gathered a rich understanding of the country and culture. My idea of Malawi was initially influenced by standard prejudices that define cultures through all-encompassing categories such as ethnicity or nationality and do not take into account gender or socially differentiated subcultures. My daily interactions with people challenged my initial beliefs. For example, I expected that poverty would be especially concentrated in ‘rural’ areas – an understanding of social relations that reflected post-World War II economic development theories, which

assume countries whose national economy mainly relies on agricultural production as cut off from world markets (Escobar 1995). However, when I arrived in Malawi, I learned that logistical challenges such as lack of facilities and shortages of water, electricity, fuel and medicines, were a daily occurrence also in Lilongwe, the capital city. By observing these aspects of daily life, I readjusted many of my pre-constructed ideas. I learned that the African reality (homogeneous as it was initially in my mind) is much more layered and variegated than it is perceived by European imaginaries, and it is not possible to talk about one African reality. Similarly, my research suggests that climate change is far from being the purely natural event – independent of human actions – which can be isolated, dissected and managed by human rationality as envisioned in the international framework for negotiating climate policies. Rather, climate change emerged in my research as a travelling and hybrid construct that transcends the dualisms of Western positivist thinking (global-local; nature-culture), signalling the full entanglement of nature and culture (Chapter 8). I later realised that my early perceptions of Malawi were influenced by hierarchical categorisations of its geography (rural vs. urban), culture (West vs. non-West) and economy (formal vs. informal), which my rather ‘distant’ experience (exclusively based on readings and lectures) as a university student first, and later as a UN officer, had hitherto failed to dismantle.

My research experience greatly benefitted from my professional activity, which allowed me to fully immerse myself in a specific institutional setting, taking advantage of easy access to decision makers and climate-exposed communities. The international development agency in Lilongwe (UNDP) represented one of my actual fields, a place where I could establish close relationships and observe processes from an insider perspective (see section 2.2.1 for critical reflections on this concept), capitalising on daily ‘experiential learnings’ (Moore 2008). My multi-sited positionality allowed me to disengage from an exclusively global or local standpoint to embrace a broader set of connections and follow climate change discourses in multiple settings: local communities, national decision makers and global narratives. This perspective will

particularly enrich the understanding of climate change as reconfigured in the public policy context of Malawi, which, as I will explore in Chapter 4, has been heavily linked to the ideal of development as modernisation and to hierarchical categorisations of geographical, cultural and socio-economic spaces.

The construction of my identity as a research student went hand in hand with my experience of living and working in Malawi. The ultimate goal of my research was to critique the deep-seated beliefs about climate change that I encountered in my professional experience. In Chapter 1, for example, I described how national to local adaptation interventions in Malawi have been linked to the availability of scientific evidence and technical capacities, overlooking the causality between historical socio-political and cultural processes and the underlying vulnerability to climate change of specific groups. My research was thus shaped by critical feminist methodologies that propose using research as a means of constructive critique of society and suggest forms of direct and personal engagement of researchers in research sites such as private or public organisations (Harding 1998; Forsythe 1999; Hackett et al. 2008). In this chapter, I will discuss how this represented both an opportunity and a challenge for my work, influencing my research both at a theoretical level (through critical approaches to development and climate change science and policy) and from a more practical perspective, such as in the selection of methods for exploring climate change discourses in multiple contexts.