Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (20 page)

The idea of a social contract is the foundation of contemporary liberalism, underwriting both its Kantian and Utilitarian strains (Hudson, 2003), and has had an enormous influence on the construction of liberal political ideologies and institutions (Pateman and Mills, 2007). The social contract is useful for an analysis of transformational adaptation and its limits because it draws attention to the compact in society that determines responsibility for risk management as part of development. More than this, it helps to reveal the basis of legitimacy of
this understanding and so the potential fragility of the existing status quo. This can be examined, for example, through exposing the balance of market, public and social pathways through which security is framed and mediated. Issues of responsibility and pathway are open for contestation as failures in the social contract are revealed during disaster and its aftermath (Pelling and Dill, 2006). Recently, for example, concerns have been raised about the increasing role of the international private sector in disaster reconstruction and subsequent loss of accountability to local actors at risk, and also to those citizens, often of second countries, who provide funds through tax payments of charitable donations (Klein, 2007).

The social contract is a product of Western liberal philosophy. However, the generic idea of collective understanding in which parties agree to cooperate with one another, seeding power according to a set of rules, is not. This can be seen in traditional human understandings of rules concerning socio-cultural and biological reproduction, exchange, reciprocity and respect (Osteen, 2002), recognising the parallels to the social contract operating at different scales and in contrasting cultures where the state is not the dominant actor opens useful scope. This can help in extending the focus of that aspect of social contract theory that explores the often tense and sometimes dynamic distribution of rights and responsibilities in society to other interactions than those between the nation state and its citizens.

In the tradition of Western political philosophy the notion of a social contract has not been built on observed customary practice but rather an abstract set of ideas about the nature of political authority and popular consent (Gierke, 1934; Buckle, 1993) stretching back to the work of Thomas Aquinas (circa 1250). Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke each developed versions of social contract theory. They shared some similarities in approach, drawing from the idea that each human is born into a state of nature and endowed with absolute equality, but with no protections whatsoever against the unregulated violence of anarchy existing where each human competes with all others. They theorised the social conditions under which people might engage as stakeholders in a political society to mediate the violence of an anarchic society. The social contract was the basis for the creation of political societies in which all could secure their basic needs, exercise creativity and enjoy individual autonomy in peaceful sociality. But since the trade-off involved ordinary people forfeiting all or some amount of their freedom/power to the dominant social actor (the state) in order to ensure personal security, the derivation of state authority (previously understood as divine right) was suddenly understood as originating in a consensus of the people. These were deeply radical ideas conceived during a period when absolutist governance and feudalism were destabilising in Europe. Social contract theory constituted the philosophical counterpart to the political and economic changes occurring during the transition to modernity in Europe.

These early theories of state and society paved the way for the creation of the liberal political tradition spearheaded by Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham. Ironically, it was the theoretical descendents of Hobbes rather than Locke that
argued most forcefully for a restricted state. Jordan (1985) explains that like Hobbes, the Utilitarian branch of liberal thought viewed essential human nature as seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but the Hobbesian strong state (designed to ameliorate the conflicts that these motivations would inevitably provoke) was rejected. Instead, Bentham and James Mill subscribed to the view that since governments were made up of humans who would attempt to enrich themselves and seek to increase their power over their subjects, the power and reach of government had to be restrained.

Debate on the most appropriate balance of power between the state and civil society (including the market) continues to this day (van Rooy, 1998). In a precursor to post-modern thinking, Gramsci (1975) argued that the division between political society and civil society was artificial. Just as hegemony captures the state and civil society, and associated fields of culture and education, so too the counter-narratives of belief systems can be found cross-cutting the divides of the market, state and civil society. Consequently, for Gramsci, while the benefits of the social contract extended only as far as the bourgeois periphery, its universalist language is produced and disseminated across all society so that those subservient to the social contract are also caught up in its reproduction. This accounts for some of the inertia in political regimes where inequality is made manifest through disaster and reconstruction yet where pressures for change in the social contract fail to attain popular support. Gramsci believed that by offering marginalised populations the tools of critical thinking, and the structure of organised groups to bring their distinctive cultures to bear in the production of counter-hegemonic discourse, transformational change could be achieved, at least at the level of discourse (Urbinati, 1998).

Habermas (1976) offers a second possibility for transformation through a crisis of legitimacy. This follows the failure of the dominant actor in the social contract to meet its own responsibilities. In this understanding new critical awareness is not required to make the failures of the social contract visible. But Habermas does argue (1985) that collective action is a necessary condition for realising social and political change once the failings of legitimacy are revealed. Both Gramsci and Habermas place great emphasis on the role of culture and identity, and the influence of education on this, in demarcating the fault-lines along which the social contract is vulnerable to transformation, and also its resilience. Identity that is ascribed to social markers such as race or ethnicity (Hite, 1996), but whose logic also extends to include identity through association with place (Wagstaff, 2007) is significant for understanding the transformational possibility of environmental crisis which has the power of physical destruction. It is the potential for disaster to destroy social life (Hewitt, 1997) and the cultural meanings invested in the physical, as well as physical assets themselves, that in turn opens scope for new understandings of identity and social organisation that offer an alternative to established structures in the social contract when legitimacy is lost (Pelling and Dill, 2010).

The application of social contract theory to questions of climate change resilience draws out the significance of shifting political and economic relations
between nation states, citizens and private sector interests. O’Brien
et al.
(2009) show how the dominant global trend in liberalisation has generated new forms of vulnerability to climate change (and wider losses in human wellbeing) in Norway and New Zealand, where comprehensive public welfare provision has been retrenched. This same research also used social contract theory to help identify social groups that are currently marginalised from national political decision-making yet nonetheless impacted by it. This included Pacific Islanders in New Zealand displaced by climate change, food security for Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic and in Norway responsibility for future generations whose wellbeing is ever more closely linked to the legacy of Norway’s oil economy of today.

Given its range of application it is not surprising that criticisms have been levelled at the social contract theory. Communitarians challenge its atomistic notion of humans; feminists and post-colonial scholars argue against its propensity to exclude; postmodernists dislike its reliance on abstract universals rather than the situated here and now (Hudson, 2003); and from resiliency theory comes the warning that climate change cannot be analysed at any one scale alone (O’Brien
et al.
, 2009). Using social contract theory to frame studies of adaptation to climate change requires rights and responsibilities that can be clearly defined, and this is not always the case particularly for future generations and distant populations connected to local events and decisions through the globalised economy.

For climate change adaptation, the most important critique of social contract theory is arguably the difficulty with which current work can move from a state to a multi-scaled/multi-actor analytical perspective; one where dominant norms and their reinforcing institutions are coproduced at all scales from the global through national to the individual and where power cuts across and works inside national administrative boundaries. In this sense social contract theory benefits from working alongside risk society as part of an analytical frame. If progressive adaptation is to address root causes as part of transformational adaptations then this is an essential area for theoretical and empirical research.

There has been some movement to extend social contract theory to the global political-economy and acknowledge global capital as the dominant centre of power through global corporate social responsibility as a contract between private sector and the consumer/producer (Zadeck, 2006). But more problematic are those growing cases where lines of influence and associated responsibility are made increasingly indirect under economic globalisation (White, 2007). Here the social contract can offer a starting point and help characterise the nature of interrupted or unclear responsibility. But global consumers, unlike national citizens, have little capacity for attributing responsibility, ascribing legitimacy and retrieving power. Here dominant power is footloose, beyond the direct control of individual nation-states. The globalisation of civil society and collaboration between governments to regulate business at the regional or global scale provide some scope for action, but so far with limited effect (White, 2007).

The social contract and risk society allow us to see adaptation to climate change as embedded within ongoing development struggles for rights and power. Human security provides a closer lens on our specific domain of interest: the play-offs to be made in balancing rights and risks between actors, and over space and time in the shaping of security. That human security is a product of the underlying cultural assumptions of risk society and institutional rules symbolised by the social contract is neatly indicated by the definition of human security used by the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) programme. This group has a special interest in the interactions of human security and global environmental change; they define human security as:

a state that is achieved when and where individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate or adapt to threats to their human, environmental and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options. (GECHS, 2009)

Human security is then a counterpoint to national security as an objective for adaptation surrounding catastrophic events and climate change more generally. National and human security can be reinforcing, but as Ken Booth (1991) argues, states cannot be counted on to prioritise the security of their citizens. Some states maintain at least minimal levels of security for citizens to promote regime legitimacy, but are unmotivated to go further; others are financially or institutionally incapable of providing even minimal standards; while still others are more than willing to subject entire sectors of society to high levels of insecurity for the economic and political benefit of others who then use their power to support the regime. Adaptation to climate change will be framed by such contexts and can offer both policy justification and practical vehicles for promoting the status quo, regressive or progressive change in human security and the rights and responsibilities in the social contract that it is built upon.

The UNDP’s 1993 and 1994 Human Development Reports advanced human security as a person-centred rather than state- or even region-based approach to security. It presented a holistic and global version of human security as security from physical violence; security of income, food, health, environment, community/ identity; and political freedoms (Gasper, 2005). According to Pinar Bilgin (2003) the UNDP’s position was that the concept of security should be changed in two fundamental ways: (1) the stress put on territorial security should be shifted towards people’s security, and (2) security should be sought not through armaments but through sustainable development. In 2003, the Commission on Human Security (CHS) developed this agenda through a basic needs approach. According to the senior researcher on the project: ‘the goal of human security is not expansion of all capabilities in an open-ended fashion, but rather the provision of vital capabilities to all persons equally’ (Alkire, 2003:36). Gasper
(2005) asserts that while the concept of human security elaborated by the CHS is essentially a widely conceived yet prioritised arrangement of basic needs fulfilment, the discourse that arises from the policy framework is embedded in the concept of human rights. He argues that the integration of the two previously disparate frameworks is the critical contribution of the human security perspective, with each framework supporting the other. The basic needs model is supported and enhanced by its association with a human rights framework as much of needs-based planning has in the past adopted money-metric approaches to aggregate across people (which can lead to perverse, unintended outcomes) whereas from a human rights perspective, no individual can be sacrificed (Gasper, 2005). Moreover, unlike basic needs approaches that focus on specific claims for and by the needy, human rights discourse and practice is geared towards generating duties and seeking accountability through legal structures. Conversely, the human rights framework is supported and enhanced by its association with a basic needs model. Drawing from the work of Johan Galtung (1994), Gasper reminds us that a human rights framework tends to direct our attention towards individuals rather than structures.