Despite substantial contemporary research and a growing trend in exploring the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, most research efforts have been invested in macro-level supply-side infrastructure and policies. However, prioritizing demand-side management policies can provide new opportunities and untapped potential for addressing interconnected resource challenges. Demand management inherently encompasses users’ consumption patterns, behaviors, socio-economic conditions, and choices, thereby necessitating active engagement and participation. Understanding household-level demands is fundamental to assess the demand for and consumption of water, energy, and food, as well as to inform policy decisions. In this context, our study investigated household consumption patterns within the interconnected WEF nexus, including daily practices such as cooking and washing, conservation measures, household governance, and their cross-cutting relationships with climate change. As a case study, we conducted our research in the Jabal Al Natheef neighborhood of Amman City, Jordan. Our findings reveal that households can propose and enact climate-friendly decisions. Significant gender-related differences were also observed in decisions made across WEF household practices. Additionally, households’ perspectives highlighted governance issues and revealed gaps in policy implementation along with the need for more inclusive decision-making processes. Our results underscore the importance of understanding household-level WEF nexus dynamics and daily practices in informing environmental policies, particularly those related to climate action. Such policies are best developed from the bottom-up by incorporating household insights, rather than relying solely on top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions.

The transformation of gender roles and responsibilities have implications for how men and women and other social groups are impacted by and cope differently with the changing climate. However, such dynamics are often not considered in formulating and implementing climate resilience interventions. Through a case study in rural communities of the northwestern part of Ghana, Africa, using a mixed-methods approach, this paper investigates the gendered nature of transformations and the implications for climate resilience building. The study found that compared to ten years ago, women have increase access to farmland, participate more in agricultural development decision-making, better access to credit, and more diverse livelihood pathways. Nevertheless, women’s ability to adapt to climate change impacts like droughts is worsening because of cultural norms that restrict women’s control over land resources and their limited adaptive capacities. To achieve positive gendered transformation outcomes while minimising negative social transformation trade-offs, policy makers must rethink the strategies for building climate resilience. There is the need to focus on strategies that support the formulation and implementation of well-funded and targeted interventions with a perspective on gender realities and dynamics that provide women with real resources and agency, enabling institutional support and transformative opportunities.

This study was conducted in the traditional pastoralist communities of Dolo Ado and Bokolmayo districts in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. These are refugee-hosting communities where the World Food Programme (WFP) is providing humanitarian and livelihood support. This research was designed in partnership with WFP with the expectation that its findings may provide lessons that can inform the organization’s program activities benefiting refugee-hosting communities and integrated refugees. Our study examines livelihood and collective action practices in these communities in the context of climate and waterrelated stresses. It seeks to highlight factors and practices that can enhance drought-resilient livelihoods. This aspect of the study required an understanding of traditional, but changing, livelihood strategies and related institutional and sociocultural practices. In this report, we discuss a range of interrelated topics and their implications for livelihood sustainability and linked interventions—which we highlight in the section Conclusions and Suggestions. We envisage that these findings will be useful for WFP’s program agenda of integrating its emergency-humanitarian response with livelihood resilience building through long-term structural and multidimensional food security approaches. Analysis of the historical and social context of farming and collective practices in these communities revealed that crop production and pastoralism have long co-existed as means of livelihood. While cooperative farming has recently expanded in the two study areas, their past experience of collective labor practices did provide the social and cultural foundation for current cooperative action. Local users appreciate irrigation farming conducted through cooperatives for its valuable contribution to food and income security. However, irrigation farming in the study areas operates in terms of cooperatives rather than on the basis of irrigation water users’ associations (IWUAs), which possibly affects the prospect of legal recognition and sustained practice. Understanding such issues is important for improving the practices of current WFP-supported irrigation cooperatives for the benefit of both refugee-hosting communities and hosted refugees. The livelihoods of people in the study areas have historically and traditionally been associated with pastoralism, characterized by livestock herding and mobility. However, there has been a shift from pastoralism toward sedentary farming. This change is being shaped by climatic and political economy factors and processes, thereby giving it the character of an adaptive livelihood strategy. The shift of livelihoods toward farming and crop production involves gender dynamics. It opens new areas of responsibility for women and increases their workload while having implications for gender disparities in economic gain and financial decision-making power. Therefore, it is imperative that cooperative farming and other intervention pr