Adaptation to climate change as a development project: A case study from Northern Burkina Faso

The major droughts of the early 1970s and 1980s and the continued climate variability experienced in the Sahel have attracted immense international interest. A plethora of aid organizations and projects have entered the region, particularly the northern areas. In Biidi 2, a small Sahelian village in northern Burkina Faso, development projects began to arrive in the 1970s and 1980s and increased in number in the early 1990s. To understand the impact of development projects in the village, we take our theoretical point of departure in the critical development literature. By way of ethnographic fieldwork we show that the importance of projects in Biidi 2 is often unrelated to their aims and that local participation does not entail a negation of but rather an almost complete compliance with project aims. 'Partnership' between development projects and local populations is also seen elsewhere in the Sahel. A number of good explanations for this have been proposed. None have, however, placed this situation in a climate change context. In this article, we explore whether the development 'partnership' experienced in Biidi 2 is related to climate variation and conclude that there is a close correlation between climate change, the need to buy food and local participation in development projects.