Understanding Community Resilience: Co-Creating Climate Governance with Farmers in Jordan

By Mariam Moussa and Sabrina Salameh

Those who have contributed least to climate change are the ones most impacted by it and remain most excluded from the policies meant to address it. In Jordan’s agricultural sector, smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and workers bear the brunt of a changing environment on their livelihoods, communities, and future.

Between early November and mid-December, members of our Shared Planet team recently completed in-depth field work in Jordan, working alongside Oxfam Jordan to co-create a participatory roadmap to inclusive climate governance for the agricultural sector in Jordan.

Through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, and brainstorm sessions we engaged directly with smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and civil society actors, alongside broader eco-system stakeholders, including the Ministry of Environment, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP), and national research institutes.

Our objectives were clear: first, to understand the tangible implications of climate change on agricultural communities and their livelihoods; and second, to co-create solutions and strategies for better climate governance systems that represent smallholder farmers to decision makers.

This work builds on Shared Planet’s continued collaboration with Oxfam, following findings from Oxfam’s recently published regional study prepared by Shared Planet “Climate Plans for the People”, which identified pathways for improved climate governance across Jordan and the Arab region.

Why Participatory Climate Governance Matters

In Jordan, climate change is a daily reality that shapes how farmers plant, harvest, earn a living, and remain rooted in their land. This project centres the lived experiences of agricultural communities who are already navigating the impacts of climate change, yet remain largely absent from the systems that are designed to address it.

By grounding this work in direct engagement with smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and local actors across Jordan’s regions, we aimed to bridge the gap between policy discussions and on-ground realities, moving beyond technical assessments to understand how climate intersects with livelihoods, social stability, and long-term resilience in the agricultural sector.

Working alongside Oxfam Jordan enabled sustained engagement with a wide range of stakeholders and created space for dialogue across farmers, civil society, and public institutions. The insights generated will inform a participatory roadmap for inclusive climate governance in agriculture, while contributing to broader conversations about making climate action more representative, accountable, and effective.

Critically, this project supports the shift from consultation as a "one-off" exercise to participation as an iterative, ongoing practice — one that shapes policy design, implementation and learning over time.

Overview: Our Research Methodology

Achieving a truly participatory process involves centering the lived experiences and perspectives of farmers throughout the initiative’s lifecycle, from design, implementation, validation, and through dissemination. Developing this inclusive roadmap involved the following:

Multi-stakeholder needs assessment and design Focus Group Discussions (FGDs): We began by engaging civil society, activists, smallholder farmers, agricultural coalitions, and private sector agricultural firms to identify key focus areas for this roadmap (i.e. what and who it should address), which ultimately informed the design of all upcoming stakeholder engagement to follow. All participants were compensated for their time and contribution.

Farmers’ cross-country FGDs and consultations: This formed the bulk of our field work. Through a series of FGDs and roundtable discussions from the north to south of Jordan, we captured diverse perspectives of varying agricultural actors, including small-holder farmers, cooperatives, associations, and workers, uncovering how lived climate challenges and respective solutions will vary by regions.

Multi-stakeholder consultation and working session: Following the fieldwork, we convened broader ecosystem actors to complement, validate, and challenge the insights and solutions proposed by the agricultural sector. This also aimed to identify the role of different ecosystem actors in the created roadmap.

Producing the roadmap: Following this project, Shared Planet and Oxfam Jordan will develop the roadmap, documenting key insights produced from this effort to ensure the sustainability of session outcomes.

Validation round: The roadmap will be distributed to engaged key local and national actors to validate insights and achieve buy-in on outcomes of the roadmap.

Dissemination of outputs: Crucially, the intention is for this roadmap to be shared back with local communities, involved stakeholders, and broader audiences to ensure mutual benefit for affected communities, civil society, and beyond.

At A Glance: Who We Spoke With Across Jordan

The field research engaged agricultural communities and actors across three strategically selected locations in Jordan to reflect the country’s diverse climatic conditions, agricultural systems, and livelihood realities:

• Irbid in the North

• Amman in the Centre

• Wadi Musa in the South

In each location, we conducted focus groups with smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and civil society actors, alongside key informant interviews (KII) with ecosystem stakeholders. An additional KII was conducted in Wadi Musa to deepen our understanding of livestock farming and pastoral livelihoods, which face distinct climate pressures in the South. We hosted each session in farms and cooperative centres, bringing dialogues closer to communities.

By combining regional diversity with targeted qualitative engagement, this approach ensured that the findings capture both cross-cutting national trends and context-specific challenges that shape climate resilience in Jordan’s agricultural sector.

Perspectives from the Field: What We Know About Farmers' Lived Realities

The impacts of climate change permeate every facet of farmers' lives, their communities, and the broader agricultural system. Jordan's agricultural sector faces a multitude of structural and systemic challenges, from water scarcity and cross-border resources to geopolitical tensions and challenging market conditions. Climate change only amplifies these pressures through extreme weather conditions, changing soil quality, new crop ailments, and more.

Below represents a small portion of the lively — and sometimes rightfully heated — conversations that took place. Some key themes emerged:

1. Economic precarity and livelihood loss

"We lost our incomes and livelihoods," farmers told us repeatedly.

When a harvest is lost due to harsh weather conditions, a farmer's income and livelihood for the entire season vanish with it. The grave impacts of climate change carry immense risks for destabilising agricultural livelihoods.

2. The erosion of generational knowledge and identity

"The Shoubak* farmer has lost hope to ever be able to cultivate apples from their land."

Rapidly changing local climates have not only led to the loss of crop varieties native to Jordan, but also rendered traditional agricultural and horticultural knowledge, passed down through generations, increasingly redundant. The disappearance of competitive species known to Southern Jordan represents both an economic and cultural loss, contributing to increased hopelessness among farmers. Many farmers are choosing to leave the sector altogether, selling off their lands rather than adapting to new practices.

*Shoubak is a municipality in the South of Jordan.

3. Fraying social fabric

"Climate change is the start of large societal changes," one participant observed.

On a community level, farmers expressed deep concern about the shifts driven by increasingly harsh climates. They reflected on rising tensions, eroding trust amongst retailers, and a pervasive air of frustration and desperation within the farming community — changes with emotional and psychological implications for local communities.

4. Donor fatigue and extractive engagement

Farmers expressed frustration with foreign organisations that convene them, discuss their challenges, then disappear without acknowledging how these insights were used, developed, or disseminated. Recognising our own positionality and respecting this well-placed frustration, it was essential for us to set clear expectations and avoid making promises we could not keep.

While these perspectives shed light on how climate change has implicated farmers' lives, the second component of our discussions focused on envisioning the way forward for inclusive governance:

1. Sustainable change over quick wins

"The fastest solution is not always the best one.”

Farmers cautioned that the agricultural governance system needs sustainable change, not "quick wins,” which they perceive ecosystem actors prioritising. Achieving inclusive climate governance requires concerted, well-coordinated efforts from all stakeholders that prioritise sustainability and longevity, tackling the systemic and structural challenges that climate change will only amplify.

2. Knowledge as the foundation

"There needs to be more resources for farmers, not just tangible ones, but also knowledge, this is the most important aspect of this conversation if we want to move forward."

Farmers emphasised that knowledge and awareness are fundamental to any meaningful progress on climate adaptation and resilience.

3. Centring local and regional expertise

Local and regional experts must be at the heart of any climate governance or action for the agricultural sector. Farmers observed that local experts are consistently sidelined and undervalued in favour of foreign expertise and expatriate consultants, a dynamic that undermines both the legitimacy and effectiveness of climate interventions.

Expected Outcomes

Capturing insights matters, but impacts depend on what happens with the outputs of this work and how they are disseminated. We recognise the limitations of strategic materials — roadmaps, strategies and papers — in reaching the right audiences and leading to tangible change. However, we envision this fieldwork to drive change in three ways:

Convening ecosystem actors: The roadmap will outline what varying ecosystem actors, from donors and the public sector to media and research institutes, can contribute to inclusive climate governance.

Complementing ongoing NDC efforts in Jordan: As Jordan prepares its third Nationally Determined Contribution (expected in May 2026), the country will take part in a series of consultations led by thematic working groups, in which Oxfam will participate. Insights from this effort can inform meaningful consultation mechanisms and effective climate programming that centres smallholder farmers' perspectives.

Informing upcoming climate justice work: One of Oxfam's key strategic pillars focuses on climate justice, meaning such efforts have direct space to shape and inform the trajectory of leading actors such as Oxfam in their climate justice programming. These field insights will help ensure that future interventions are grounded in the lived realities of those most affected by climate change.

The climate crisis demands urgent action, but not action that replicates the same exclusions and power imbalances that created vulnerability in the beginning. This project embodies how Shared Planet works at the intersection of rigorous research and social justice: we design research for implementation, not just documentation. By co-creating this roadmap with farmers, cooperatives, civil society, and government actors, we’re building the ownership and legitimacy needed for actual change. 

Key Takeaways

Move beyond extraction: Meaningful engagement requires reciprocity, transparency about how insights will be used, and feedback loops that share outcomes with the communities who contributed knowledge.

Prioritising the process: This roadmap is a tool, but the participatory process through building relationships, creating dialogue spaces, and validating insights with communities, generates the trust and legitimacy that make change possible.

Centre local expertise: Effective climate action depends on highlighting regional knowledge and leadership. External actors should support and amplify, not replace local voices.

Engaging in this experience was eye-opening and grounding. It was both an honour and a great responsibility to be trusted with the lived experiences of the smallholder farmers, shepherds, cooperatives, and civil society actors who were part of this effort.

This work sheds light on the injustices inherent in our field. As environmental and social researchers and practitioners, we often extract knowledge from local communities without equitable reciprocity and compensation. It also amplified the urgency for climate action. What we clinically describe as "climate change impacts" represents, for communities worldwide, the destabilisation or complete loss of their livelihoods, social fabric, and cultural heritage.

The gravity and urgency of this matter, and the responsibility we all share to not only address the consequences of climate change but also ensure that these lived realities are honoured and reached equitably, are truly at an all-time high.

We hope that this roadmap — and all following efforts that come from it — lay the ground for future momentum, that centres the lived experiences of agricultural communities throughout every stage of climate action, from design to implementation.