Living with uncertainty in South Asia Mountains

This application will build understanding of the uncertainties that poor rural households face in South Asian Mountains and how they respond to them.

The collaboration aims to shift thinking away from a risk to an uncertainty framing of the hazards of mountain lives, paying attention to the time preference behavior of poor people and generate new research capacities, proposals and deliberative policy approaches to respond to this. Mountains are centers of social marginality and are deeply affected by climate change.

Uncertainties cannot be given probabilities in contrast to risks and can be a threat or an opportunity.

The challenge is to understand how households navigate hazards and the conditions that might allow them to build transformational resilience capacities.

The collaboration with partners in Nepal, India and Bhutan will foster debate, learning and develop new methods of understanding of uncertainty and its sources in different mountain contexts. Key collaboration activities will include meetings in each country research site.

These will involve joint field visits, analytical workshops for sharing new learning and planning research outputs, seminars with relevant partners and deliberative policy engagement activities with selected policy makers. Virtual writing workshops will support writing processes and new research proposals.

During the two year collaboration we will visit each partner country site exploring the contextually specific nature of uncertainty.