Since there has not been a catastrophic flood in the Limpopo River valley since then (FEWS-NET, 2007), it is too early to tell whether the radio and resilient housing programs have succeeded.<sup>3</sup> The resettlement program, however, has failed. After a few months living in the new houses, farmers began to return to the floodplain to farm, and rebuilt their dwellings in their old villages. The government then encouraged them to maintain two homes: temporary ones near the fields, where they could live for several days at a time, and permanent ones on higher ground, where their families would stay, and where they would keep their possessions. But that too failed. The farmers wanted to live in the floodplain, and very few of them maintain households in the new dwellings that had been built for them.

This was not the first floodplain resettlement program to have failed. There have been many such schemes in Asia, and while a few success stories exist, in general “this mitigation measure has proven to be less successful, costly, and economically, politically, and socially insensitive” (ADPC, 2005, 100). It is also not the only type of policy to help people adapt to the threat of climate change, and climate variability, for which the implementation has been poor. Ironically in the Limpopo Valley a threat at least as big as flooding is of drought, especially in El Niño years (Arndt et al., 2003). There, as in many parts of southern Africa, the government and civil society have developed policies and practices to develop timely seasonal forecasts, to communicate these forecasts to potential “users”, and to recommend a shift away from water intensive maize toward more drought tolerant seeds (International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, 2000; NOAA, 1999; O'Brien and Vogel, 2003; Unganai, 1998). But these policies rely on the assumption that farmers will actually use the forecasts. Again, while there have been some success stories, in general few subsistence farmers have made use of the forecasts, and most continue to plant maize, which requires more water than alternatives such as millet or sorghum (Suarez and Patt, 2004), but which also can be more productive when the rains are good, and which commands a higher market price.

A common factor in these difficulties implementing policies is the failure of the people who are most vulnerable to change their behavior in ways that policy makers think they should. There are three questions that arise. First, to what extent is it important that citizens support adaptation policies? Second, why might people not support such policies? Third, what can be done to increase the willing participation of people in adaptation policies? In this paper we examine these three questions in general, but focus our attention on the second. We report on an empirical case study in the Chókwe District of Mozambique to support the conclusion that different perceptions of relative risk can account for the lack of popular support for adaptation policies. There are good reasons, based in behavioral economic theory, to suspect differential risk perception.

> 3 Based on evidence from the Zambezi River valley, however, there is reason to believe that new programs are helping. In early 2007, the worst floods since 2000 hit central Mozambique. While over 130,000 have been left homeless, there have not been reports of widespread loss of life, suggesting that early warning efforts have been successful (FEWSNET, 2007).

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