Climate change governance and development cooperation in Zambia: Navigating stakeholder interactions

In an era of intensifying climate impacts, the question around who governs climate change, and how, is increasingly important. Whilst, global climate governance is embedded with conflicting interests, such tensions most starkly materialize in the Global South, where power asymmetries between International Development Actors (IDAs) and local actors are more prominent. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews in combination with secondary sources, this research explores how IDAs working in Zambia shape national climate change action and discourse. Notably, it focuses on the international and local perspectives of IDAs roles in Zambia’s climate governance landscape to examine how governance is structured or understood. Drawing on theoretical concepts including norm-localization theory, the coloniality of power and the depoliticization of climate change, the research findings explore underlying tensions which shape the relationships between local and international actors. The findings show that IDAs develop their authority through technocratic dispositions of climate vi change, epistemic control and conditional financing. Within this context, local actors try to negotiate their own priorities, agency and knowledge through resistance or aligning with agendas. This contributes to a governance architecture which values IDAs for their resources and technical skills, whilst pushing local actors into implementation roles in which local and indigenous knowledge is marginalized. By exploring these dynamics, this thesis contributes to a nuanced understanding of transnational climate governance which can inform more inclusive, localized and participatory approaches to climate coordination. Importantly, it highlights the every-day practices of negotiation between IDAs and local actors, and how this contributes to the existing policy frameworks and climate solutions being implemented in Zambia.