Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (15 page)

Table 3.1
Five adaptive pathways

model excludes routine responses to external stimuli which are considered part of the legacy of past rounds of adaptation already integrated into existing management and culture.

As has been argued above, self-organised (agent centred), reflexive adaptation targeted at the external environment (4) or institutional architecture (2) are arguably the most significant indicators of resilience. An organisation that enables reflexive adaptation through internal critical reasoning is more likely to be able to respond to abrupt and unforeseen threats and opportunities associated with climate change. Reflexive adaptation, especially that which seeks to challenge existing canonical institutions, is strengthened by a strong shadow system. The key challenge for organisations is how to support – but not to manage – the shadow system. This is a question we turn to in
Chapter 6
.

Adaptation as resilience is characterised by actions that seek to protect priority functions in the face of external threat. In this way resilience does not directly seek to realign development relations. However, within individual organisations protecting priority functions can require internal transitional or potentially transformational change. Existing literature on resilience has attached a range of meanings to this term. Most developed is the socio-ecological systems literature that characterises resilient systems as those that exhibit capacity for social learning and self-organisation as well as displaying functional persistence. Social learning describes the pathways and social relationships that shape information exchange and can lead to new ways of thinking or acting; self-organisation is attributed to novel and un-directed collective action. Both are generic social phenomenon that can be used to examine the shaping of transitional and transformative adaptation. The distinction between these levels of adaptation is the focus and intention behind social learning and self-organisation rather than the mode.

Organisational theory is complementary to SES in providing a framework to examine the ways in which relationships between canonical and shadow systems within and between organisations shape information exchange, providing scope for learning and innovation. Shadow systems provide a key resource for experimentation because ideas and actions are hidden from formal scrutiny. They can also be a challenge for formal management and so represent a source of conflict between the imperatives for flexibility and transparency. This is an especially difficult problem to resolve in public sector organisations and corporate civil society organisations. Wenger’s concepts of boundary organisations and individuals that can work to transfer information between epistemic communities helps to identify a key resource in adapting to climate change where conversations between science and policy are required to prevent maladaptation. They can also help to overcome the limited conceptualisation of climate change adaptation which continues to be framed as a primarily technical rather than a social and political agenda. This framing is in part an outcome of professional specialism and the division of development policy into ministerial silos, and also of the short-term decision-making enforced through budget and electoral cycles. Working to support boundary organisations and to better understand the shadow systems are two ways in which resilience as adaptation can be supported and potentially allowed to contribute towards wider movements of transitional and transformative social change.

Risk and governance

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)

Because socio-ecological relations are embedded within economic, political, social and cultural relations, adaptation will touch every aspect of social life, not simply an actor’s vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. This will include relations with distant others, to future generations as well as those living in geographically far-away places, now connected by the time–space compressions (Massey, 1994) and teleconnections (Adger
et al.
, 2009b) of globalisation and global environmental change. Rogers’ (1995) opening observation reminds us of the intimate connections between the spreading of new ideas and practices in society and social context. Even planned innovation and adaptation in society can exaggerate existing inequalities or generate new ones. Without care, those with most assets and freedom to adapt to climate change will gain additional advantage over those who do not. Rogers’ work on the interaction of social and cultural context with the diffusion of innovations in society has wider relevance to studies of adaptation (Atwell
et al.
, 2008). These are returned to in
Chapter 9
.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a broad conceptual framework to examine adaptation as transition. This is incremental change to social (including economic, political and cultural) relations as part of adapting to climate change. Transitional acts can describe both those that do not intend, or do not result in, regime change (see
Chapter 5
), but do seek to implement innovations and exercise existing rights within the prevailing order. Transitional adaptation is therefore an intermediary form of adaptation. It can indicate an extension of resilient adaptation to include a greater focus on governance, or an incomplete form of transformational adaptation that falls short of political regime change. From an empirical perspective intent is as important as outcome in indicating transitional, resilient or transformational adaptation. Not all transitional actions will achieve the intended outcomes but they nonetheless reveal critical capacity through intention.

The association of innovation making with rights makes the social dimension of adaptation explicit, even when there is no observed change to regime form.
This is especially true in those social contexts where rights may have been dormant or suppressed under the prevailing social system. Where this is the case, their invocation can generate transitional social change. There are many examples of this from the environmental justice movement where the asserting of existing legal rights is seen as a method for reducing vulnerability to industrial pollution, and at the same time reinforces these same rights (as well as building other capacities in local social organisation, confidence and so on) (Melosi, 2000; Agyeman
et al.
, 2003).

The multiple scales at which social systems operate means that transition can theoretically be implemented and observed operating at the levels of local, community or regime systems, and in more complicated analysis across these scales. Where adaptations and associated rights claims involve multiple levels of actor (for example, a squatter community and municipal government) transitional adaptation demonstrates the importance of multi- or cross-scale analysis (see below).

In this chapter we are interested in the potential for adaptation associated with climate change to open space for wider and connected reform within the constraints of existing governance regimes. This provides a driver for actors to assert rights or claim entitlements to participate in development and risk management and enable progressive transition; that is, improved action on social justice and environmental integrity as part of everyday development.

This chapter extends the framework of social learning and self-organisation put forward in
Chapter 3
by considering two additions. First an actor-oriented approach to regime theory is offered. This is then developed by literature on socio-technological transitions to examine in more detail the pressures shaping innovation and the dissemination of alternative visions and practices through governance regimes. The combined framework is then illustrated through an analysis of the opportunities for transitional adaptation in a single management regime rising to prominence in climate change adaptation: urban disaster risk management. This also helps to prefigure the detailed analysis of urban, primarily transitional adaptation presented in
Chapter 7
.

Transitional action is targeted at reform in the application of governance. It goes beyond the aim of functional persistence but falls short of aiming directly to realign political structures. Both transition and transformation indicate adaptation in governance systems. For transitional adaptation reform is incremental, undertaken at the level of individual policy sectors or specific geographical areas. There is the potential for bottom-up, aggregate transformational change through, for example, the promotion of stakeholder participation in decision-making, leading to the inclusion of new perspectives and values in emerging policy. By contrast adaptation as transformation is composed of adaptive acts that consciously target reform in or replacement of the dominant political-cultural regime as primary or secondary goals (see Chapters
5
and
8
).

Governance systems are composed of multiple actors including public, private or civil society organisations held together through formal and informal institutions that reproduce the balance of power and direction of development pathways in society. Governance operates at multiple scales with overlapping influence; for example, a local water management regime including user groups might be responsible for day-to-day decision-making but given legitimacy by, and made accountable to, national regulators. The nested and overlapping quality of governance regimes provides opportunity for adaptations to spread horizontally and vertically through communication networks and also for the top-down support or dissemination of adaptive capacity and practices. Where progressive adaptation as transition challenges established practices, or those of other competing emergent adaptations, overlapping administrative responsibilities with internal interactions, alliances and linkages can generate resistance to change (Foxton, 2007). Some degree of institutional inertia is healthy for governance systems to provide stability and so a predictable policy environment for development actors to invest. The focus of adaptation as transition is on the shifting balance between stability and reform in the organisational structure played out through movement in the social distribution of exercised rights and responsibilities motivated by perceived and felt pressures associated with climate change. This is articulated through the degree of information dissemination, inclusiveness and influence in decision-making within governance systems and constituent organisations and sectors of practice.

The role of governance in determining the speed and direction of innovation dissemination is illustrated by Atwell
et al.
’s (2008) study of adaptation within the north-central US Corn Belt. They observed that individual farmers’ decisions to accept or reject environmentally friendly farming practices were influenced by three scales of governance: individual, community and overarching regime. Interaction between these three layers is further elaborated in transitions theory (see below). The dissemination of new information was most likely to result in the uptake of new practices when communicated to a farmer by a neighbour. Trust embedded in personal relationships and the shared challenges neighbours face was more persuasive than government initiatives and also acted as a sanction on individual actions that might not have been locally socially acceptable as respondents chose between competing strategies in the exercising of farming rights.