Adaptation to Climate Change Part 9

This penultimate section provides an overview and synthesis of the main discussion points made in the preceding chapters.

The age of adaptation.

Climate change presents the early twenty-first century with a grand opportunity to reconfigure the meaning and trajectory of development. First mitigation and now adaptation provide global challenges that call for a rethinking of development goals, visions and methods. This is not the first time such an opportunity has arisen: in the 1980s and 1990s sustainable development presented dominant global and local political and economic systems with new challenges and promised to open s.p.a.ce for progressive, international development. These opportunities have not yet been realised, and have rather been captured by and come to reinforce the established political-economy. Sustainable development has morphed into ecological modernisation. The faltering pace of international negotiations around climate change mitigation and adaptation indicate the enormity of the stakes and, if agreement can be reached, also the potential scope for revision.

But just how can adaptation open s.p.a.ce for rethinking development? In looking forward to help answer this question Chapter 1 sketches the existing international intellectual and policy landscape within which reforms can take root. Though not presented in Chapter 1, Bangladesh is an early leader in state-sponsored adaptation planning that acknowledges the centrality of governance. With support from the UK's DFID, Bangladesh has proposed several technical programmes for adaptation. Each of these programmes is supported by a layer of social policy that at once indicates the social justice lying at the core of adaptation: distributional justice is supported through investment in a social protection scheme and procedural justice through partnership with community-based adaptation, though the extent to which governance reforms are implemented remains to be seen.

Importantly, these most fundamental arenas for adaptation are also targets for much ongoing development work by local communities in partnership with international development NGOs and humanitarian organisations so that a large proportion of what might be considered generic investment to build adaptive capacity is being undertaken now, but in an ad hoc way, without large scale collaboration. It is through coordination, as much as financial and technical support, that the emerging international architecture for adaptation can be made to contribute to the effectiveness of local actions to build capacity and adapt.

But as adaptation matures as a policy domain so its construction through the lens of leading international inst.i.tutions like the IPCC and UNFCCC must also be revisited. The original imperative for the IPCC to mark out clearly what climate change adaptation might be, as an additional or separate act to mitigation and everyday development, is useful in policy terms, but in the long-run counter-productive. Adaptation on the ground is seldom an activity that can be neatly separated from others, making it difficult to single out support for activities that adapt to climate change. Accepting the cultural, social and political elements of adaptation only makes this more difficult. The solution proposed here is to move from adaptation defined only as a specific policy domain, to one that also accepts adaptation as an activity and aspiration that cross-cuts all development activities, so that we accept the reality of adapting with climate change. The provision of direct budgetary support instead of targeted development adaptation aid (that may well draw money from existing development budgets) is one practical step that supports this vision of adaptation. The result is that in the future adaptation may need to hold multiple definitions depending upon its application, in the same way that poverty is described in very technical terms for government poverty alleviation targets (for example, indicated by education, access to nutritional requirements, daily per capital income and so on), but also more broadly in the development of poverty alleviation programmes and local pro-poor practice (for example, livelihoods, wellbeing and ent.i.tlements). This raises a challenge of synthesis. But the worse risk is that adaptation is trapped as a technical concern and misses an opportunity to contribute to the rethinking of current unsustainable development visions and paths.

The adaptation tapestry.

A wide variety of adaptive actions have been noted by the adaptation literature (see Smit et al., 2000; Smit and Pilifosova, 2001). Chapter 2 identifies nine continuums along which individual acts of adaptation have been cla.s.sified in the literature, according to the nature of the adaptive action (degree of collaboration, focus, forethought and phasing) or scope of impact (target, timescale, carbon awareness, social consequences, developmental orientation). Together these actions, potentially unfolding through different actors in response to the same climate change a.s.sociated pressure or even on the same object, make for a rich adaptation tapestry.

a.n.a.lysing the conditions that determine adaptive capacity and action and the coproduction of adaptation with risk and development is the core task for contemporary studies which build also on previous attempts to theorise adaptation. Four antecedents of contemporary adaptation studies are detailed in Chapter 2. Each offers lessons for contemporary work. Cybernetics, coevolution and adaptive management share roots in systems theory, a theoretical perspective shared by contemporary work on resilience that has come to influence adaptation thinking (Janssen et al., 2006). Work on cybernetics offers caution for the systems approach in general which surfaces a tension between the imperatives of parsimony for individual adaptations (promoting a single best adaptation based on that which causes fewest resources to be expended) and the need for collective flexibility (adaptive capacity is enhanced by diversity). Watts (1983) further argues that the interpretation of systems theory in cybernetics makes it difficult to include values in a.n.a.lysis, and to consider the adaptive agent changing the system itself excluding transition and transformation (see below) as adaptive possibilities under cybernetics (Morren, 1983). Coevolution (Norgaard, 1994, 1995) is especially useful to our argument because it provides a framework for placing adaptation within history, rather than seeing it as an end point in its own right, and also warns that adaptive actions can form critical junctures with no possibility of reversal.

The less abstract notions of adaptive management and coping also offer lessons for adaptation. Adaptive management has been designed to guide resource management with studies highlighting key challenges to the development of management systems where adaptive learning is built in (Walters, 1997; Medema et al., 2008). These include perceived high costs in the short-term, discomfort at implications for credibility of managers that deliberately experiment in the knowledge some experiments will fail, and the difficulty in maintaining local stakeholder commitment over the medium timespan needed to follow and compare experiments. Coping has been explored through an extensive range of writing and policy in the last 30 years with considerable overlap and lessons for adaptation. For example, Burton et al. (1993) propose four periods in the escalation of adaptive action, which in turn can be used to signify tipping points in systems behaviour as thresholds into each stage are breached: the movement from risk absorption (it is not felt) to tolerance (it is felt but not acted upon); risk tolerance to risk reduction (risk management is implemented); and finally risk reduction to radical change where management practices are unable to cope and risk manifests as unacceptable and unpreventable loss. Each of these thresholds could be breached by increasing hazardousness, but also reduced adaptive capacity and increased vulnerability for example, through demographic or economic change. The literature on coping also makes it clear that multiple actors will have view-points on what to protect, enhance or expend through adaptive actions and these may not be easily resolved, their origins being in values and beliefs so that a key challenge for adaptation in heterogeneous societies is to reveal these different values as a first step to inclusive planning for climate change adaptation.

The resiliencetransitiontransformation framework.

The antecedents and current work on adaptation provide a rich basis for a.n.a.lysis, but they do not yet capture the full significance of adapting to climate change as a dynamic in socio-ecological coevolution. Besides the technical inefficiencies of overlapping adaptations that have been identified in the literature as a scale effect of adaptation, there are deeper political and even epistemological frictions to be identified and addressed in adaptation planning and research. It is here that the proposed framework of adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation aims to make its contribution. These three levels of adaptation stand as distinct categories of intention and action. The theory used to make each aspect visible and a.s.sist in a.n.a.lysis acc.u.mulates so that, for example, social learning and self-organisation (the core of resilience) can also be applied to help understand transitional and transformational adaptation. No one form of adaptation is preferable, with any judgement being dependent upon viewpoint and context. The aim of making these forms of adaptation visible is to surface the tensions between policies and actions aimed at maintaining the status quo or seeking broader change in relations of social and political power through adaptation.

Resilience.

Drawing from socio-ecological systems theory (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006), the IPCC identifies three attributes of resilient systems: functional persistence, self-organisation and social learning. From the perspective of adaptation, resilience is made distinct because of the aspiration of maintaining functional persistence. This can allow unsustainable or socially unjust practices to persist as well as protecting common goods (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008). Self-organisation (the ability of the components of a system to organise without formal, hierarchical direction) and social learning (the capacity for new values, ideas or practices to be disseminated, popularised and become dominant in society or a sub-set such as an organisation or local community) can be found across all forms of adaptation. Of these two, arguably, social learning is the most critical. Social learning is as important for transitional or transformational adaptation. It requires a high level of trust, a willingness to take risks in order to extend learning opportunities, the transparency required to test and challenge embedded values, active engagement with civil society and a high degree of citizen partic.i.p.ation. The advantages for social learning where there is close interaction between social actors is clear, with social learning and self-organisation reinforcing one another, so that a social system exhibiting rich capacity for social learning is also likely to have considerable scope for self-organisation.

Transition.

Transition is an intermediary form of adaptation (see Chapter 4) that seeks to realise full rights under existing political and governance regimes. Where the gap between legal rights and their application is large, transition will align itself closely with transformational adaptation, requiring significant efforts to overcome entrenched vested interests in the status quo. Where governance regimes function fully this gap and the need to aspire for transitional adaptation will be absent. Most likely transition will be felt as a series of incremental adaptations as rights claims are a.s.serted. As rights turn from de jure to de facto the effect is to open s.p.a.ce for new rights to be won so that over time transformational change may be observed. Young (1999) describes this as a bargaining process with depth of change being distinguished between that which takes place at the level of rules for decision-making; or more profound change of the transformational kind that unfolds at the level of norms and principles (Krasner, 1983). a.n.a.lysing potential for transitional adaptation places focus on examining the persistence of inst.i.tutions over time as much as how they may be changed, and the role of actors in this. For example, Gunderson and Holling (2002) refer to rigidity traps where people and inst.i.tutions try to resist change and persist with their current management and governance system despite a clear recognition that change is essential.

Literature on socio-technological transitions has recently been applied to climate change mitigation (Haxeltine and Seyfang, 2009) and offers scope for helping to understand where and why adaptive transitions can be found. Applying this literature to transitional adaptation as conceived here comes with a caveat so far this literature does not distinguish adequately between transitional and transformational change. Both pathways for change are used, sometimes synonymously. The former is taken as a sub-set of the latter, with transitional change an aspect of transformation and not identified as a goal in itself (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008). This said, the frameworks emerging from socio-technological transitions remain useful and more positively serve to show the closeness between transition and political aspects of transformation which on the ground may be hard to distinguish. For example, Geels and Schot (2007) observe that new ideas or discourses emerge from local protected s.p.a.ces but their dissemination and capacity to change established values and practices in the regime is often determined by the extent to which higher-level (for example, international) actors and inst.i.tutions support change. This is relevant for transitional and transformational change.

Transformation.

Chapter 5 argues that for adaptation to be transformative and progressive it must provide scope for the revision and reform or replacement of existing social contracts and the meaning of security and modes of development, as well as defending social gains already won. This is a call to tackle the causes of vulnerability at their roots. For adaptation to be concerned with changing the a.s.sumptions and structures of how we think about and organise development, it must address the causes rather than only the symptoms of vulnerability and risk. The social sciences offer many lenses with which to critique development and derive alternatives. Here we outline three theses that have clear relevance to climate change adaptation: risk society, the social contract and human security.

Beck's (1992) risk society thesis is a critique of the atomising and fragmenting nature of modernity. This has led to dominant modes of contemporary development that too easily produce and do not compensate for or seek to prevent complex environmental and social harm. Risk society is reproduced through established values and a.s.sumptions about development and wellbeing held by individuals as well as being inst.i.tutionalised through the organisation of the market, government and industry. If this thesis is accepted, then adapting to the risks a.s.sociated with climate change needs to confront the way individuals perceive the world and their place in it, as well as challenging the organisation of development. This is both daunting and empowering signalling as it does that each of us is a site for adaptive scrutiny.

The social contract describes the prevailing balance of rights and responsibilities in society and may be held in place by legitimate government or the rule of force. The social contract is determined by the balance of power in society. Culture, ident.i.ty and the control of knowledge through education are frequently identified as key for realising political change by political (Habermas, 1985) and educational (Freire, 1969) theorists. Perhaps the most pointed cases of challenges to the social contract are those following shocks economic, political or environmental that manifest failure in the social contract to provide security from disaster. When climate change is a.s.sociated with extreme events, then it is the potential for disaster to destroy place as well as social life (Hewitt, 1997) that opens scope for new understandings of ident.i.ty and social organisation and an alternative to established structures in the social contract.

The notion of human security provides some substance to this argument. It places emphasis on the responsibility of the state to facilitate the meeting of human rights and basic needs for its citizens, and so goes beyond a narrow state-centric security (Gasper, 2005). Work on disasters has shown the frequency with which alternative social organisation arises post-event, and also the effectiveness with which democratic-market- and authoritarian-state-centred regimes close down opposition, sometimes violently (Pelling and Dill, 2010). Examples of transformative and progressive regime changes have also been observed. They are most likely when a pre-existing alternative provides a discursive and organisational base with which to frame and disseminate a critique of the social contract (Albala-Bertrand, 1993).

Sites of adaptive action.

Most empirical work on adaptation thus far has studied local communities of place, justified by the location specific qualities of climate impacts, especially those a.s.sociated with natural hazards. But as the theoretical framework of resiliencetransitiontransformation explains, adaptation unfolds within all social contexts from the internal to the global. Three important but as yet seldom studied contexts are used in this book to ill.u.s.trate the resiliencetransitiontransformation framework for climate change adaptation: the organisation, the city and the nation-state.

Following Wenger (2000), Chapter 3 argues that the bounded s.p.a.ces offered by organisations provide especially useful contexts within which to study processes of social learning and self-organisation. Five pathways are proposed through which adaptive action can be undertaken by individuals or discrete sub-groups within an organisation: agent-centred reflexive adaptation, agent-centred inst.i.tutional modification, agent-centred resource management, agent-led external action and organisational external action. Only the latter two are visible from outside the organisation as it acts to change its operating environment, which can include interaction with other organisations to effect regime level change, or acting as intermediaries in the transfer of knowledge to allow adaptive action to be taken by the most appropriate organisations. Chapter 6 presents an a.n.a.lysis of a dairy farmer's NGO, Gra.s.shoppers, and one of the UK state agencies that regulates and advises on dairy farming, the Environment Agency. Both are examples of good practice with organisational form, as observed, not being maintained at the expense of function. Both also demonstrate the interaction of canonical and shadow social systems as vehicles for social learning. In Gra.s.shoppers these systems are intertwined and difficult to separate. The Environment Agency, with its more formal structure, has suppressed shadow system activity but this is still critical for those actors who know how to 'work the system'. In this way the imperatives of a public agency for transparency and efficiency are to some extent in tension with those for adaptation, which is enhanced by diversity and where formal observation is limited to allow for experimentation, even where this fails or runs counter to the objectives of the canonical system but meets local needs.

Any city is a social construction. Competing visions of the city are underlain by ideological, material and economic interests (Kohler and Chaves, 2003). The balance of power between such completing visions determines the priorities and actions of political actors and organisations affecting the city. This provides scope for examining the extent to which formal and legal rights are exercised, how far different interest groups those on the margins of society, business interests and so on, are able to organise to defend and claim rights. As Chapter 4 argues, for climate change adaptation this will take in those with stakes in both risk management and development policy and practice. Chapter 7 a.s.sesses and compares governance regimes from four urban settlements in Mexico's rapidly urbanising Caribbean coastline state of Quintana Roo, and finds evidence for resilience, transitional and transformational adaptation. Resilience is indicated by efforts to maintain business-as-usual development paths including those of the private sector mainstream but also migrant labourers drawn to the state for work with little organisation or affiliation to Quintana Roo. Transition is demonstrated by those civil society organisations that exercise existing legal and governance rights to confront unsustainable development with successes in preventing a small number of coastal developments, but little success in extending partic.i.p.ation from consultation to meaningful engagement with the views of local actors in formulating urban development plans. Transformation is least visible, but found in the promotion of fundamentally alternative forms of development built around strengthening citizens' self-worth and a.s.sociation with local places. This echoes Freire's call for critical consciousness as a prerequisite for informed social change.

Nation-states have largely been left out of discussions on adaptation, beyond their roles as aid clients or donors or as regulators to set the policy landscape for local actors to adapt. But the political s.p.a.ce of the state is also a site for adaptation and of compet.i.tion between different vested interests, their visions for the state and its social contract with citizens and other private actors in the future. Risk society, the social contact and human security provide a framework for a.n.a.lysing the influence of adaptation on social relations within states. Central to this is the extent to which legitimacy is maintained by political actors following disaster events and subsequent reflection on the production of and responses to risk and loss. Chapter 8 presents lessons from Cyclone Bohla in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua and Hurricane Katrina in the United States. Each of these events had local impacts with national consequences despite this only Hurricane Bohla is a.s.sociated with regime change, in this case secession from West Pakistan. Hurricane Mitch stimulated progressive discourse at the international and local levels but this was not translated into action, with some reform agendas being reformulated through the lens of neo-liberal restructuring decentralisation became privatisation, for example. Following Hurricane Katrina, a number of discourses offered challenges to the Bush Administration and no doubt the disaster contributed to regime change at the following national elections, but the most profound impact seems to have been a deepening distrust in the political process. The high degree of private sector involvement in managing risk and reconstruction also served to distance the state from direct blame in this case and left citizens without a clear target for opposition.

From theory to action.

The aim of this book has been to offer a constructive critique of the dominant trends in thinking about adaptation and climate change. Considerable progress has already been made in delineating a vision for adaptation that is amenable to the policy process. But such clarity as there is on adaptation is in danger of being won at the expense of tackling wider questions of development through the adaptation lens. In building a case for a deeper interaction between adaptation and development, material presented in this book has tried to stay close to the climate change adaptation debate. At the same time it has sought to broaden the debate by drawing on foundational social science works that point us in new directions for questioning what adapting to climate change should be for, and who should control the process.

In closing, Box 9.1 brings together the opening quotations from each chapter. Together they offer compelling 'highlights' of the adaptation story mapped out here, a story that has a long way to run.

From high beginnings framed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Freire quickly reminds us of the challenges ahead for a progressive adaptation. Not only are external structures likely to resist change, but those at risk themselves are apt to choose to support and adapt to the status quo for lack of access to the tools and opportunities to develop and apply critical awareness. The IPCC formulation of adaptation to date aims to provide clarity for the policy community.

Box 9.1 Other voices make the case Chapter 1: 'Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.' (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3) Chapter 2: 'The adapted man, neither dialoguing nor partic.i.p.ating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and uncritical frame of mind.' (Paulo Freire, 1969:24) Chapter 3: 'The ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.' (IPCC, 2008:880) Chapter 4: 'When special efforts are made by a diffusion agency, it is possible to narrow, or at least prevent the widening of, socioeconomic gaps in a social system. In other words, widening gaps are not inevitable.' (Rogers, 1995, 442) Chapter 5: 'Instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact subst.i.tutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.' (Rousseau, 1973, original 1762:181) Chapter 6: 'What matters is not structures, but relationships.' (Scientific advisor to the Welsh a.s.sembly) Chapter 7: 'In Cancun the most common idea is that "it is not my problem, if things go bad, I can flee to another state".' (Ex-member of the Quintana Roo State Congress) Chapter 8: '... moments when underlying causes can come together in a brief window, a window ideally suited for mobilizing broader violence. But such events can also have extremely positive outcomes if the tension ... are recognized and handled well.' (USAID, 2002) Chapter 9: 'Too frequently adaptation still reflects a narrow framing, which a.s.sumes that climate change is an ultimate, rather than a proximate driver of change.' (Nelson, 2009:496) It does this well but should not be confused with a handbook for critical climate consciousness. In making its contribution the IPCC has stayed close to adaptation as resilience. In so doing this has so far bounded out much that can be achieved by transition and transformation. Amongst a range of social activists and thinkers, Rogers and Rousseau remind us of the need for critical consciousness to prevent the loss of hard won social gains and for social progress to be at the heart of development. Taken together, comments from those facing climate change impacts, from a scientific advisor to the Welsh a.s.sembly, an ex-member of the Qunitana Roo State Congress to USAID, show the rich policy landscape of relevance to climate change adaptation and the need to mainstream policy and research into the concerns of everyday development for any aspect of resilience, transition or transformation to succeed. Finally, speaking from the climate change literature, Nelson succinctly captures the framing challenge for climate change adaptation, which the argument and framework presented in this book have sought to face. Climate change is an expression of deeper and often harder to grasp socio-ecological relationships. Adapting to climate change then requires strategies that address these root causes as well as the more proximate concerns. The linkages are there to be made between livelihoods and governance, or choices on how to spend and invest surplus wealth and connected value systems. We need to make them soon.

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