ABSTRACT
There is a significant body of literature on climate change in Zimbabwe indicating the trends and nature of changes, and its impacts using systematic observations, quantitative techniques, global and downscaled models, and statistical analyses. Scholarly literature focusing specifically on how people in marginal ecosystems understand, read and interpret the environment is comparatively limited. This chapter examines such narratives in Mutoko District in Mashonaland East Province, based on original fieldwork. The concern is to comprehend how farmers problematise their circumstances – the specific circumstances being climatic changes. This is imperative because there is a lucid discrepancy between the conclusions of macro assessments and the experiences of local societies living with environmental change. At the same time, although there is an argument that the idea of climate change has been somewhat ‘universalised’, people in local contexts possess complex ways of reading the climate and their concerns are much more variegated. Therefore, there is urgent need for empirical research that moves away from the essentialist discussions and categories developed a priori in the macro assessments of climate change, to consider the complex ways in which people in local contexts experience climatic shifts. In doing so, the chapter not only exposes the apparent and persistent prejudices in climate change knowledge production but more importantly contributes data derived empirically to existing knowledge about the nature and meanings of climatic changes occurring in rural spaces in the country.
