Power, voice and participation: reflections on participatory methods and oral histories for community-based loss and damage assessments in Chikwawa, Malawi

Following the establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage at COP27, interest in community-based loss and damage (l&d) assessment methodologies has rapidly grown. Community-based l&d assessments traditionally rely on group-based, visual and participatory methods such as participatory mapping and calendars for understanding l&d, informed by their longstanding use in Participatory Rural Appraisal. This article emerges from data collection with a village in southern Malawi, which applied these ‘participatory’ frameworks and, additionally, oral histories for understanding participants’ experiences of climatic stressors. The author conducted 15 participatory maps, 8 participatory calendars and 38 individual oral histories with the village in 2024. This article critically analyses how three groups of participants – people with disabilities and older people, women and aid recipients – engaged with ‘participatory’ methods and oral histories respectively. Based on these findings, this article makes two methodological contributions to the emerging literature on l&d assessments. Firstly, it proposes that ‘participatory’ methods have practical, epistemological and socio-political limitations for effectively and equitably understanding l&d due to their group-based and visual formats. Building on this, this article proposes that oral histories rebalance many of these limitations and are specifically well-suited for grappling with the complexities of assessing l&d.