Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (22 page)
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Authors: Mark Pelling
Tags: #Development Studies
Cold war security: from modernisation to political stability | |||||||
Affected city/country | Year | State/civil society | Hazard and loss | Local/regional government/civil society response | National government response | International response | Socio-political impact/change/legacy |
Haiti | 1954 | Predatory state; landed peasantry; relative openness (labour unions); major infrastructure modernisations | Hurricane Hazel destroys cash crops; estimated 1,000 killed | Unknown | No disaster plan; corruption soars with international aid | International funds flow; Catholic Relief and CARE begin first work in country | Regime corruption sparks cross-class protests; US-trained military takes control; Papa Doc Duvalier cuts deal with military leading to a long lasting and entrenched violent dictatorship |
Managua, Nicaragua | 1972 | Dynastic dictatorship; civil society repressed; elites disenfranchised; vocal opposition movement | Earthquake destroys much of capital city; estimated 10,000 killed | Extended families provide relief; the city is evacuated | No disaster plan; focus on physical reconstruction of capital and repression of civil society | International funds flow; gross corruption by elite; military appropriates development | Corruption provokes anger; liberation theology and Sandinismo provide oppositional discourse; social capital developed during recovery period feeds into cross-class revolutionary movement leading to regime change |
Guatemala | 1976 | 20 years post CIA-coup; a military state; technocratic president; slight opening for human development; active opposition | Earthquake destroys parts of capital and villages of central and northern highlands; estimated 23,000 killed | Municipalities inadequately funded; peasant groups and Church respond | No disaster plan; focus on physical reconstruction of capital and repression of any non-state organised activities | International assessment teams remain only in capital; few foreigners have firsthand knowledge of high losses in rural indigenous villages | Military threatened by post-disaster peasant organisation in context of active insurgency; state represses indigenous earthquake reconstruction projects; guerrillas use earthquake as oppositional discourse (time for change) for organising purposes; counterinsurgency escalates; insurgency escalates |
International economic security: liberalisation | |||||||
Affected city/country | Year | State/civil society | Hazard and loss | Local/regional government/civil society response | National government response | International response | Socio-political impact/change/legacy |
Tangshan, China | 1976 | No theoretical distinction between state/civil society; a period of political transition during the last days of Mao and the cultural revolution | Tangshan earthquake destroys important industrial city; estimated up to 655,000 killed | Massive self-help campaign; city requests and receives funds and relief from regional administrations | Nationally significant disaster plan (prediction) fails: reconstruction distorted by massive political struggle between Maoists and reformer Hua Guofeng | International aid refused; West denied access and information | Earthquake appropriated as political symbol for loss of ‘Mandate from Heaven’ (oppositional discourse); Cultural Revolution ended; return to previous plan for modernisation and liberalisation of economy |
Turkey | 1999 | Authoritarian secular state, democracy, strong religious civil society seen as threatening secular state traditions | Marmara earthquake; estimated 17,000 killed | Limited, failure to regulate construction a major cause of loss | State slow to respond, local and national civil society (religious and secular) filled vacuum | Constrained by state failures to coordinate response | Civil society demonstrated capacity to provide social support; state responded by closing bank accounts of religious groups in particular |
Gujarat, India | 2001 | Democratic system with a strong civil society; hierarchical | Earthquake in Kutch district; estimated over 20,000 killed | Limited in contrast to widespread civil society mobilisation | Initial response slow, ad hoc and chaotic | Widespread; support for participatory reconstruction schemes from multilaterals | Response reinforced the strength of civil society in India; reconstruction criticised for exacerbating socio-cultural inequalities; some associate this with subsequent religious riots in Gujarat in 2002 |
Global security: advanced privatisation of national economies and services | |||||||
Affected city/country | Year | State/civil society | Hazard and loss | Local/regional government/civil society response | National government response | International response | Socio-political impact/change/legacy |
Nicaragua | 1998 | Electoral democracy; free press; active civil society politically polarised | Hurricane Mitch; 2,000 die when entire town buried in mudslide; estimated 3,800 killed in total | Following a decade of state downsizing, civil defence, fire and police poorly staffed, resourced, and disconnected from central government and scientists, unable to function properly | Government scientists report on impending storm; President denies crisis | World Bank and UNDP sponsor the development of a national disaster reduction system; international mediation to open governance in reconstruction | Brief opening of discourse between state and civil society development actors under international mediation; joint development of a reconstruction plan; retrenchment and re-imposition of pre-disaster political culture with strengthened leverage for global economic interests; a lost opportunity for social reform |
Morocco | 2004 | Authoritarian kingdom; failure of political liberalisation; civil society weak | Earthquake strikes marginalised region; kills more than 560 | Concentrates aid in port town; refuses to extend appropriate aid to villages | Spends almost equal amounts of aid monies on reconstruction and repression | US and European countries compete to come to Morocco’s aid | First political mobilisation in Riff mountain region for many years; youths protest failure of state response; neoliberal political economy; state repression |
Affected city/country | Year | State/civil society | Hazard and loss | Local/regional government/civil society response | National government response | International response | Socio-political impact/change/legacy |
Sri Lanka | 2004 | Entrenched political and armed conflict between Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority; Muslim minority marginalised from both; an electoral democracy with limited but free press | Tsunami devastates ⅔ coastline; 35,322 killed | Civil society in rebel held areas especially prepared for emergency response | Concentrates resources in government-held and economically important regions | Massive supranational and international humanitarian and geopolitical response; swamps local capacity and reignites political tensions | International interventions fail to support transition from ceasefire to peace accords; fishermen worst affected sector; many barred from returning to home site while hotels acquire land; civil society continues to operate in a war zone |
New Orleans, USA | 2005 | Electoral democracy; free press; strong civil society and private sector interests; voter alienation | Hurricane Katrina floods city and region: 1,836 confirmed dead; more than 700 in New Orleans | Mayor does not want to alienate business leaders by calling for mandatory evacuation; acts too late; governor fails to convey urgency of needs | Federal government fails to act on warnings that levees might breached | Some international aid accepted but also politicised, e.g. offers of aid from Venezuela and Cuba | Nation undergoes intense but brief analysis race/class relations; impact of neoliberal policies on disaster reduction now under scrutiny; maladaptive development under scrutiny; real estate speculation and investment soars in flooded region |
social systems that respond to threats with only limited, transitional change. The prospect that without transformational adaptation undertaken with some measure of planning and inclusivity dangerous climate change may force uncontrolled and more anarchic forms of transformation onto societies is worthy of consideration.
Living with climate change
Adaptation within organisations
What matters is not structures, but relationships
Scientific Advisor to the Welsh Assembly
This comment, made by a scientific advisor to the Welsh Assembly, is a very clear acknowledgement of challenges facing managers having to consider the organisational challenges of climate change risk management alongside existing imperatives including efficiency and transparency. Here our respondent was clear that while formal institutional structures are necessary to give organisations shape and direction, when adaptation is required to protect core functions this is nuanced – potentially championed – by the contingent, shadow world of informal relationships. This chapter presents the viewpoints of actors within two different kinds of organisation who reflect on the interplay of social relations within canonical and shadow systems that characterise adaptive capacity. Communities of practice and networks of looser ties are considered. The aim is not simply to illustrate adaptation as resilience but rather to give some substance to the complexity of social relations that give rise to adaptive capacity originating from within organisations. As noted in
Chapter 3
, while resilience may be the dominant external outcome of the social agency described within organisations, internal acts that could be classified as transitional and arguably transformational are also observed.
The empirical evidence presented draws from interviews held with members of the UK Environment Agency active in Wales, and a dairy farmers’ cooperative from Carmarthenshire called Grasshoppers. Earlier work (Pelling
et al.
, 2007) has provided a synthesis of these interviews and also with those from scientific advisor groups to the Welsh Assembly. The aim in this chapter is to provide a detailed examination of the viewpoints of key informants reflecting on their relationships with organisational structures and other actors to use or open space for social learning and self-organisation. Such internal acts of adaptation targeting institutional modification are identified, as are adaptations directed at the external environment.
