Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (17 page)

The closest empirical focus to adaptation has perhaps been made by Seyfang and Smith (2007) who recalibrated socio-technological transitions theory to examine the emergence and diffusion of ideas and practices from grassroots environmentalism in Europe including social businesses, cooperatives and informal community groups. This is helpful in drawing out differences between entrepreneurial innovation, where risks and rewards are managed through the market with modest government support; and innovation in the social economy, where local groups and individuals invest social as well as economic capital in innovations and where rewards tend to be more dissipated and motivations are driven more by ideology than economics. Grassroots niches are found to be catalysts for participation where individuals and communities can build confidence, a shared sense of values and ambition for change, skills and capacity for further rounds of learning and innovation. Some of these very assets that make communities adapt at innovation can also be barriers for diffusion including the geographical specificity of experiments, strong identity and visions for the future which may be antagonistic with overarching regimes suggesting that some degree of translation and compromise is required for bottom-up reform, or that there is significant change affecting the regime from the top down to motivate the search for alternatives (Church, 2005). This is precisely the opportunity that climate change brings.

Haxeltine and Seyfang (2009) identify three modes through which local innovations can come to influence the wider regime:

•
Replication
: horizontal reproduction through multiple, small initiatives

•
Scaling-up
: the expansion of individual initiatives as they attract more participants

•
Mainstreaming
: the absorption of innovations into dominant policy and practice.

Experience from attempts at spreading disaster risk reduction from local community initiatives shows just how difficult grassroots socio-technical transitions can be. This is the case especially when the dominant regime is ambivalent, sceptical or antagonistic, and where innovation is perceived to threaten local or national established interests. Challenges arise when both seeking to support local innovation without disrupting preferred local social relations, and in promoting the wider influence of successful innovations.
Box 4.1
summarises a review of experience generated through a workshop discussion with community-based disaster risk managers including international agencies such Tearfund,

Box 4.1
Lessons in making transitions from community-based disaster risk management

Community-based disaster risk management fosters inclusive approaches to disaster risk reduction, with a special focus on livelihood sustainability in light of disaster risk, and calls for the utilisation of local knowledge and skills. It has become a popular strategy for international and local development and humanitarian NGOs seeking to find ways of empowering those at risk to manage their own vulnerability. Despite such enthusiasm there are relatively few examples of long-term success. Participants in the workshop identified nine reasons for this:

• Ineffective translation and communication of climate science within communities.

• A lack of long-term financial support for local capacity-building and the longitudinal application of community-based disaster risk management.

• Local abuse of power granted by community-based disaster risk management to local actors, which can lead to community fragmentation.

• Resistance from local elites when community-based disaster risk management is perceived as a threat to the status quo.

• Difficulties for implementation in unstable communities facing economic or political stress.

• Difficulties for implementation on a larger scale, and related limits on the analytical and policy applications generated by community-based disaster risk management.

• A failure to link with broader and/or longer-term development priorities and activities.

• The generation of inequality as some neighbourhoods build resilience through community-based disaster risk management while others remain vulnerable.

• The lack of local success stories to act as examples for scaling-up and replication.

These challenges to the repeating of success are likely to apply across policy fields, to other contexts where progressive external actors seek to build local adaptive capacity through empowerment methods. Specific challenges were also reported from those actors who had attempted to support or lead mainstreaming, scaling-up and replication of local successes.

Mainstreaming in governments and communities faced distinct challenges. For governments, seeking support for community-based disaster risk management and its outputs led to competition with other priorities and required a framework to link efforts between local and national actors.

Local communities needed institutional channels to establish dialogue with the government, particularly about risk perception, diversity within the community (social and economic) and legal entitlements to risk reduction.

Scaling-up required a functioning institutional infrastructure and so was most likely to be found within a supportive, inclusive and open governance system.

Replication was also be found where central institutions were supportive but did not rely on this. It can provide a means of reproducing good local practice when governance systems are unable or unwilling to support scaling-up. In urban slum settlements and isolated rural communities beyond the reach of the state, expansion through horizontal replication was undertaken where existing networks of community actors and organisations could provide the institutional framework for replication.

Community-based disaster risk management was found to be most successful when local actors, local leaders and government representatives led and worked together. Where this was possible, it maximised opportunities for mobilising joint action. Furthermore, partnerships led to additional benefits from the extension of local resources and the building of generic human capacity as local actors turned from beneficiaries to planners and advocates taking on rights and responsibility for local risk management.

Where there was an institutional framework to support bottom-up initiatives, this enabled local actors to feed into analysis and interventions designed to address structural issues related to national-level vulnerabilities. These plans were otherwise beyond the reach of community-based disaster risk management and at times conflicted with it. The major challenge for reproducing community-based disaster risk management was how to successfully encourage sustained governmental involvement set against competing budgetary pressures and with the potential that bottom-up innovation may challenge existing norms and practice.

Source: ProVention Consortium (2008)

Oxfam and the Red Cross, and networks of local development organisations such as GROOTS and local NGOs. All had experience of attempting to reproduce the success of pilot projects that had asserted the rights of local marginalised actors (predominantly the poor and women). All were also the product of local action inspired from the outside and top-down (albeit from progressive civil society actors) and were not initiated locally. The lack of local innovation is a key aspect of vulnerability indicating a lack of adaptive capacity. It is also a challenge for external agencies that seek to facilitate local actors in the building of capacity. Experience indicates this is a long process requiring generational shifts in attitudes and individual identity. But extremes of poverty and now also the urgency of climate change put pressure on progressive, external actors to accelerate this process.

An important message from
Box 4.1
is the difficulty experienced by external actors seeking to stimulate innovation and diffusion. In low-income countries where the market has limited reach only the state has the scope and resources to spread innovations throughout society, but is resistant to change. In this context, transitions unfolded over time and with uncertain trajectories, the majority of innovations never extend beyond local impact. For those that did, at some point transitions became coordinated either strategically through a lead actor, like the state agency, or as a convergence of the visions and actions of diverse groups (Geels and Schot, 2007) analogous to a social movement.

The interaction of local innovation with the wider regime in shaping transition is a repeated theme summarised by Geels and Schot (2007) into five transition pathways (see
Table 4.1
). Each is a specific outcome of the interaction between local innovations and the wider regime. The pathways have been renamed in
Table 4.1
to better draw out the salient characteristics for transitions in regimes.

Climate change acts as an external pressure on the regime through changes in markets, international regulation, aid and trade flows as well as environmental risk. Local adaptations can then potentially be inserted into the regime to meet these new challenges as a means of strengthening the status quo following moderate impacts (weak cooption), or after catastrophic change in a search for the realignment of the regime to a new external environment (innovative substitution and innovative competition), until a new round of challenges emerge. The framework was designed to account for change in broad patterns of production and consumption. In so doing it arguably over-emphasises the role of top-down pressure and external triggers and underplays the internal competition between

Table 4.1
Transition pathways

multiple viewpoints on development that persist even during periods of perceived stability and can rise to challenge existing institutions and regimes.

There are parallels between transitions theory and the resilience framing of adaptation as discussed in
Chapter 3
. Both identify critical moments for adaptation as a tension between innovation in sheltered spaces, be it niches or the shadow systems; and subsequent efforts to influence across the system of interest, be it the organisation or governance regime. This is not surprising: both approaches draw on system theory differing in the scales and contexts of application. In organisations and in wider society potential for capacity innovation is indicated through learning processes, social networks, communities of practice and advocacy coalitions that seek to modify institutional structures to allow wider diffusions of innovations (Pelling
et al.
, 2007; Smith, 2007). Both point to a creative optimum where top-down resources such as political will, financial and technical support are available but without undue oversight so that local actors can be left to experiment, even to take risks in doing so, with the benefit to the wider system of generating an array of ideas and practices. The necessity for a coalition of local and higher-level organisations and interests to enable diffusion is a central message from these literatures, demonstrating the limits of autonomous and spontaneous adaptations.

This section aims to illustrate how spaces for transition might open in adaptation processes within a single governance regime: urban risk management. There are as many different models of urban risk management as there are examples (see, for example, UN-HABITAT, 2007), but some general observations can be made that are also illustrative of the interaction of actors, structures and visions of development to be found in other types of regime and this is the aim here.

The starting point for assessing scope and barriers for transition in adaptation is to recognise the contested social construction of the vision, associated priorities and subsequent practices that give substance to the regime, and also describe those fault lines that are likely to come under pressure and may be realigned as transition unfolds. Competing visions of the city are underlain by ideological, material and economic interests (Kohler and Chaves, 2003). The balance of influence accorded to individual visions determines what urbanisation means, who the winners and losers are – and under adaptation to climate change what aspects of urbanisation are to be protected or are dispensable for any one settlement. Indeed in different places across the city different visions and associated actions will have more or less traction even within a single policy sector. This provides opportunities for alternative experiments that may come to dominance once governance space is opened following a disaster event, political or economic change or macro-administrative decision such as decentralisation.