Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (24 page)

Taking or designing adaptive actions is facilitated or constrained by existing institutions, which have their own logic, history and transactions costs if being reformed or dismantled. Thus an important type of observed proactive adaptation was institutional modification: efforts to reduce conflict between adaptive possibilities and existing social realities, and so create enhanced opportunities for adaptive actions to arise as needed. The impetus for this can come from without or within the policy system, for example:

In a sense, we’re doing that [institutional modification] through our seminars, but we are also working in the Welsh Assembly and the Environment Agency, and everybody else. We’re trying to get the Welsh Assembly to lead on a Welsh climate change communications strategy. It’s not a priority for them, but we are trying to lobby for that.

Institutions affecting adaptive capacity and action were found to have a fluid quality. They were renegotiated as circumstances changed, as different individual and organisational actors became involved and as existing actors readjusted their internal priorities. For example:

It is set in their contract that they have to do a workshop and that it needs to have these outputs, but there is nothing in it that says you have to do it in this way. But if one of us were to say to someone, look we think you ought to do it this way, then they’re not going to say no. They might come back and say that they’ve had a better idea.

Negotiation is an asset for facing the uncertainty induced by climate change. But this has financial and other costs. Considering how institutions do or might change necessitates an analysis of the power configurations that conserve or act against particular institutions. Power relations can be given expression in many different ways, but in an organisational context, the direction of resources is an important one. As the respondent notes, though, agent led external action is challenging:

Politics is difficult. I have certainly tried to foster close relations with DEFRA, DOE, DETR whatever it happens to be, but you are dealing with a culture that is fairly rigid there – they pay the bills, we do what they say.

Institutions can both constrain and enable adaptation. For individuals seeking to influence organisational behaviour and direction this revealed a tension between personal and/or professional agendas. This was particularly difficult when it felt as though institutions originated hierarchically, and the costs of renegotiation were exorbitant for the individual:

In the day job there is a day job. I have objectives to do. What I do outside of that is my affair so corporately the culture is quite thick – quite hierarchical, which is frustrating because if we are moving from managing simplicity in regulated resources through to managing complexity – environmental systems – one of the first tenets is devolution of decision making and yet we are going diametrically the opposite way so I find it frustrating intellectually certainly personally.

Social learning is central to adaptive capacity. It can be indicated by changes in capacity to act arising through experience – for example, through institutional modification creating an atmosphere where learning is promoted is part of the shaping of adaptive capacity – and can be the difference between important experiences being overlooked, forgotten or translated into enhanced capacity to deal with future climate-change-related uncertainty and threats:

There clearly has been a lot of learning: Enquiries etc., and people presenting information back to us. It’s had a big impact on how we organize ourselves. It’s created new areas of work and funding to tackle gaps…. The lessons are quite general and cross-cutting: How do you get bad news up the line quite quickly? How do you ramp up resources quickly? … That can now happen very quickly. Not only are there plans to show us how to do that, but we have practice simulations.

Opportunities for learning arise throughout organisational life, and can be fostered: ‘We have informal lunchtime sessions, and people ask questions about it. The questions will be more informal. People are sitting there eating lunch and asking questions. It’s informal in that respect.’

On the other hand, not all learning is positive. One respondent warned about uncritically accepting the lessons of past experience, without continuing to probe their relevance to new situations; a key lesson for climate change adaptation, but one that is difficult to institutionalise:

I think one issue that is quite difficult is learning from experience. One has to be very careful that the experience you had is relevant to the problem that you now have. We often come up against the situation where people who’ve had long experience say ‘Oh yeah, we tried that, and it didn’t work. That’s it.’ It cuts off the options and one has to very careful that one is saying that was the experience, but was the context and the problem the same?

Good communication skills are a necessity for institutional modification, something that a number of interviewees demonstrated, including strategies for formalising and adding value to knowledge through external collaboration. This was a particularly effective – but time consuming – method for influencing higher up the hierarchy or across sectoral and professional barriers. Relevant for slow onset and long-term adaptation measures this strategy for crossing the internal barriers within organisations is too slow to respond to rapid and extreme events:

That is why I write so much. If it is out there in the white literature then it is in the public domain. A peer review paper has more weight than my opinion – particularly when I bring in co-authors who happen to be lawyers.

Successful communicators had cultivated linkages across different epistemic communities and saw themselves as conduits of information and points of influence shaping spaces of adaptive capacity within and between both communities and their representative organisations:

The XXX, which is a national organization … has done a tremendous amount and in some instances the Agency is being perceived as an obstacle and in some ways it is being perceived as an ally, but there is a risk of that relationship being lost and because I am on the board of various other charities and I’m giving a key note at the XXX meeting on Tuesday. I’ve got a very direct personal relationship there and I’m publishing papers in my own name, not using work time whatever to get the learning from that, put it in the right literature so I can go to the policy people in the Agency to say LEARN, you don’t have to trawl through grey literature, unpublished sources here is all the right literature put together – APPLY IT, DO IT please. So yes, I’m keeping doors open, but that is a personal mission and I don’t expect that will be a particularly common occurrence throughout the organization.

Learning with wider stakeholders, and especially the public had its costs with a difficult balancing act between efficiency and building adaptive capacity; for example, by protecting staff so they might undertake their work without too much interruption from other stakeholders. The following comments respond to a recently established telephone call centre:

In terms of the general public what is happening corporately is walls are being built so I think we are going in the wrong direction. You know if you are re-engineering an organization where your front line, your regional and area staff are delivery merchants then you want to stop then ‘wasting time’ in dialogue with the punters. You want them to be doing stuff, not talking about stuff.

… a lot of the public trust that the Agency does engender, it does not engender a lot but, a lot of that is simply because the local officers know the local people and the local issues. So actually I fear that what we are doing is losing the connection. I think the call centre is going to make us become a big impersonal monster … It is a personal view this, I think we are losing an important part of our relationship with people … the personal relationship with the regulator is vital … That sort of delivery of service model [the call centre] is what the Agency’s reorganization is about, so it is successful in those terms – but, you know, not in terms of being in touch with the environment and people who are active in the environmental sense.

Communication that can help build capacity to adapt to climate change requires skills such as knowing who to communicate with, how to find them and how to communicate effectively, and designing acts of communication which are appropriate to the task. Communication is not a neutral act, and there are many conventions that apply to the way that communication is carried out in different relationships and contexts. Because the appropriate combination of learning and communication strategies available to actors is determined by the cultural characteristics of the organisational setting in which they operate, it makes sense to speak of the knowledge culture of an organisational setting. That is the characteristics of an organisation or other social body that make particular forms of learning and communication possible or not. The sense of a pervasive way of being that both influences the individual and that results from the collective actions of individuals came through clearly in one interview:

So to what percentage am I attributable? I don’t know. To what extent is culture changing around me and these ideas becoming more and more? I don’t know. I can’t measure that, but in my own head I’m pretty well convinced that I have banged on at certain people for long enough that we have got an understanding.

An important aspect of adaptive capacity revealed by looking at learning and communication in terms of a knowledge culture was that the informal and the
tacit are just as important for knowledge as formal and explicit channels, even from the organisation’s perspective. For example, in the case of learning, formal learning was in some cases identified with training, but it was clear that this was just one aspect of learning from the individual viewpoint. Thus, throughout the interviews a range of evidence referred to informal channels of learning and communication, and the ways these were rooted in both formal and informal activities and institutions.

So yeah formally, in the formal email, telephone whatever you play the game but you still carry out the learning stuff. If I see the head of xxx who I know very well and for many years I’ll say ‘Have you seen this paper?’. ‘No I haven’t actually.’ ‘Oh I’ve got a few on the line, have you got a minute …?’ ‘I’ve got this one on common law’, you know, ‘I’ve got this one on economics’. ‘Yeah OK, let’s talk about that, that’s really interesting blah blah’.

This section provides support for the claim that shadow systems are an important source of adaptive capacity. Most interviewees could identify an informal shadow system, and argued that the informal is an essential part of organisational life: ‘The way I think is that the day job is largely defined by the delivery of regulation and the influencing stuff happens through the informal routes by and large.’

Shadow systems are unobserved by the canonical and allow risk taking. Adaptive management has the ability to experiment and take risks as a core tenet. The benefit to the canonical organisation of the shadow system arises through a degree of alignment between actors’ formal roles and their informal skills and capacities. Thus the personal capacities of individuals to wield influence and to work with knowledge became part of the organisation’s capacity to adapt: ‘I know that statements I have made and discussions I’ve had with very senior people have later turned out in more or less verbatim in strategy documents.’

While individual initiative within the shadow system cannot be planned for, it could be incentivised, opening up a major adaptive resource for the organisation:

The organization three years ago had a tokenistic approach to the social, but now has social policy. This is moving more and more mainstream, and arguably there is sort of a change in political direction anyway, but an individual mover and shaker who I happen to talk to quite a lot has been singularly effective in raising that as a policy.

Conversely, this allowed individuals to enact their values through the operation of the formal organisation, uncovering contrasting types of legitimate behaviour:

That it depends who you ask these questions to. There are those who work hard to get the job done. There are other[s] who have moved between
different organizations and have some weird idea to try and change the world and migrate around the place to try and do that.

My private action has feedback into the organization.

The re-alignment of formal and informal knowledge networks in this way is an example of agent-centred resource management. This helps the organisation learn about its environment, improving adaptive capacity, even when the canonical structures build barriers to communication and flexibility:

And then we get back in our boxes and I don’t communicate with him because he is not part of my section.

Management tends to perceive that [personal lobbying] as rocking the boat so I have kind of given up.

This suggests that an important area for working with adaptive capacity is positioning the role of canonical management with respect to the shadow system. This is not straightforward. The shadow system is almost by definition resistant to management effort. But while it is not necessarily manageable, there is scope for management activity with respect to shadow systems. The simplest strategy is perhaps to recognise the role of the informal and to accept a degree of imprecision and failure when risks are taken, allowing spare capacity in planning including providing time and flexibility for individuals to work around the formal system where required. This is not straightforward, and a key problem is providing examples of outcomes from working the shadow system where these are often indirect: