Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (25 page)

How do I demonstrate that by going to this meeting rather than that one that a particular outcome came about? It’s all about influencing, but only sometimes can you point to a report or a policy document and show that they’ve used your wording.

Thus a more positive strategy with respect to the shadow system might be to find ways to report on it and to incentivise individuals to use their skills in creating and maintaining informal relationships for the corporate good. Above all, it is a matter of making sure that the individual skills are available in the first place. This creates a demand for individuals with competencies relevant to the shadow system. Interviewees produced a range of examples of skills they utilised in skilled informal interaction:

Learning the ways that the organization works is the only way you are ever going to be able to influence it at all because if you try to influence it from a different discourse or dialogue you just bounce off it …

I write books as well and ask people to tell me what is wrong about them – this is a way of roping people in. I treat publications as a way to integrate views with some clarity and common sense.

In terms of playing the corporate game, it is about knowing to put the right, copy the right, people on emails, don’t jump levels over and above bosses, all the basic hierarchical things; that is the way it works formally. The way it works informally – having been around the organization for a million years and knowing all the other people that have been in the organization a million years, you know – that is what water coolers and coffee machines are for.

Understanding organisations and the institutions that shape them is a key part of balancing canonical and shadow space and facilitating adaptive capacity. In this section we examine respondent viewpoints on institutional architectures in terms of communities and networks that cross-cut the formal organisation.

Communities comprise groups of people who share identity expressed through similar interests and common values:

So I am not interested primarily in a community that want[s] people to play by the rules. I am interested in people who, for want of a better word – although it is a shitty old phrase – ‘want to make a better world’. In other words, if someone really cares about social factors and sustainability and they have sorted out a job in an organization that can do something, I will feel sort of attracted to spend time with them. In terms of my community it is people who are looking to make the step changes.

Community boundaries do not necessarily reproduce those of the formal organisational contexts in which they occur. Thus communities tend to arise through mutual engagement rather than management fiat, and are very much of the shadow system. But although they have their own rhythm of development it is possible to give them space to grow by making time for individuals to interact. From the individual’s perspective, communities can be a significant resource, opening up opportunities for action though links with others with similar interests: ‘There are other trouble-makers out there that I tend to gravitate towards. My community is people often dressed as very establishment but who are basically in the organization for their own agenda.’

Shadow communities are a natural unit for adaptive action, as shared interests and similar worldviews make negotiating and endorsing plans and reactions quicker and easier.

For example, there’s a group of farmers in mid-Wales who are looking at how they can make agriculture more sustainable, looking at how to deal with flood control, with soil quality. That’s like a self-motivated group of 10 farmers, acting as a community because they see particular environmental threats. You’d have to look at groups like that to get that core of adaptation.

As with any form of organisation, communities have internal differentiation, and there can be disagreement within their membership over their shared identity and boundaries. Also membership is not necessarily mutually exclusive, and communities overlap, giving a dense texture to social architecture – Wenger’s (2000) constellation of communities. Because shared interest is assumed and may be beyond challenge, they can also close down opportunities for change.

A more open social form is the network. Networks arise in social life across boundaries of difference. Thus, unlike communities, common interest is not assumed, but instead is negotiated. As with communities, interviewees were able to point to examples of networks with significance for their professional lives. Networks were a site of bridging social capital, linking together organisations and communities. The encounter with different values and worldviews that occurred through networks made engagement in networks a significant opportunity for learning:

Yes, there’s a network. If you can identify where to implement different policies … you can identify certain people, you can see who has done this and been quite successful at it. You build a little network of people to go to. A little expert group in a sense. It’s important to learn from people, rather than start off from a blank sheet all the time.

Thus networks provided opportunities to build and operate adaptive capacity:

The [Welsh] Assembly would need to base its case for change on reasonable evidence, and that’s where it works with networking. Networking with the likes of the Environment Agency in order to say ‘This is a current situation’, and be able to make predictions in terms of what is likely to happen.

It may be that operating as an individual in a network requires a different skillset from working within a community. With their basis in relationships between individuals, there is a danger that forcing networks into existence will result in a paper exercise or a locus of discontent. However, there is much that can be done from a management perspective to foster networks:

When you’re dealing in a cross-cutting issue, which this [adapting to rapid climate change] would be, then you have to try to pull the people together in some sort of project group. The difficulty is making sure that that happens more than in name. You can get people along to meetings, but it requires issues to be sorted, actions to be taken, so that it permeates out into additional action, with all the resource that requires.

What both networks and communities have in common is that they are founded in relationships of trust. Within communities, trust was shown to arise from shared interest:

You tend to know certain people, certain groups, and they establish a track record of whether they can deliver or not, because you are clearly trying to find the ones who are most effective, rather than spend a lot of time saying you want this to start from grassroots sort of thing.

In a network, trust was required in order to negotiate a mutual interest, and arose through ongoing engagement. Trust can be invested in individuals and expressed in personal relationships. However, it can also arise through institutions, from the social contracts embedded in formal organisational forms. Trust was important in adaptive capacity, because it enabled social action and decreased the amount of effort involved in maintaining communities and networks. That is not to say that creating and maintaining trust does not have costs of its own:

If you pull that lever and nothing happens, then you lose all credibility for what it is that you’re doing. It makes it clear that you don’t understand what you’re doing and people will therefore take no notice of you. So there’s a credibility issue here in actually making things work.

The Carmarthenshire based dairy farmers’ support group, Grasshoppers, has about 20 members and was established six years before our study. Its aim is to explore what became known as the New Zealand grazing system. This system differs from dominant dairy practices in the UK through a combination of conserving hay for the winter, turning cattle out earlier in the year and calving only once a year. This results in little or no spending on winter feed and reduced labour costs. Thus although less milk is produced than under a more intensive regime the profits are greater, and the farmer has more time to pursue other interests. The intention of Grasshoppers’ members is to maintain their rural livelihoods and quality of life by changing farming practices: a case study in resilience.

The members of Grasshoppers are well positioned to discuss the generic attributes of organisational relations that shape adaptation. As a group they have already demonstrated an ability to adapt proactively to changing economic conditions within the dairy sector. Their current mode of practice is probably better adapted to climate warming than conventional dairy production in the UK. Nevertheless, under an extreme climate change scenario there would be substantial challenges to be faced. Exploring the proven adaptive capacity of the group offers an opportunity to explore the role of institutions and social learning in shaping organisations to support individual farmers in planned and proactive climate change adaptation.

Group activities centred around monthly, rotating farm visits. Meetings had a sharply critical tone which, over time, had developed a culture of mutual respect, trust, fostered social learning and encouraged innovation. As with the
Environment Agency, the themes of community, network, trust and exclusion arose from discussions and provide themes for understanding the production of adaptive capacity and social learning within Grasshoppers.

Seen as a community, Grasshoppers appeared to have a strong and well-developed shared identity. Grasshoppers was created intentionally with new members being recruited through invitation only, reinforcing this shared and distinct group identity. Importantly, membership did not focus directly on joint commercial activity. Members were more concerned with sharing knowledge, improving practice and mutual support in meeting the challenges of the New Zealand system than in striking business partnerships or joint commercial advocacy: ‘Sharing information is really key, something I realise from these other farmer groups compared to us.’ One member likened this feeling of being in a learning community to adaptation: ‘Openness and sharing information is a major part of adaptation.’

Examining Grasshoppers in terms of networks highlights external relationships, and once again the focus is on information and learning. That is, through Grasshoppers members were able to manage their access to information resources. The strongest expressed links were with dairy farmers outside the UK, drawing on contacts made from a range of contexts, because: ‘Overseas is best. The UK is too mainstream [in dairy farming] – and we’re not! Also there is no basic/market research in this area because there is no commercial basis so it is not picked up on.’ In this case, it was clear that a wide base of information sources was a valued resource for adapting to future climate change. For Grasshoppers, this enabled both improvements in existing practices, as well as challenging adaptations, with shifts in livelihood and lifestyle goals.

In terms of adapting to a different climate, you could go and look at places in the world where people already live with it. Now we have learnt from New Zealand, but if the climate cooled we would learn from other parts of the world.

In Grasshoppers, trust was closely tied to the duty of confidentiality, identity and membership, indicating that it arose first and foremost as a function of community building:

Trust is very important to the group’s functioning and this has taken time to build up. For example, Grasshoppers started with members sharing limited information on the purely financial aspects of the grass economy. We now share economic and other information on all aspects of farmers’ livelihoods.

Trust was described as having built up over time to extend beyond members’ professional affairs to finances and even friendship, the latter effectively blurring the boundaries between the canonical and shadow relationships and roles of
Grasshoppers members: ‘Other than my wife and the nucleus of my family I’d talk with group members first [about a problem].’ As a result, members of Grasshoppers felt they could rely on the information they received from one another (in contrast to other members of the wider farming community). Within the group, trust also enabled honest criticism of one another’s business. This was essential for Grasshoppers’ ability to fine-tune and adapt the New Zealand system, and at the same time in this case it helped to avoid the trap of groupthink where trust and community can lead to the uncritical reproduction of a shared way of seeing the world, a key asset in adaptive management (see
Chapter 2
). Instead, the values that are conserved through this supportive community were a tolerance for risk taking and innovation, and an openness to new ideas, even those that challenged individual perceptions and led to modified practices, the essence of organisational adaptive capacity. This was perhaps best shown in the expressed willingness of members to move from the New Zealand system to other solutions if the economic or environmental consequences of climate change required it.

The reciprocal of trust is exclusion suggesting the social limits of adaptation. In the case of Grasshoppers, exclusion was particularly strong around alignment with the culture of open criticism of farming practice. This could result in a personal challenge. The cost of membership is maintaining group standards, and dealing with group dynamics:

I’d have to admit that at some points I’ve had to ask ‘Is this worth the extra hassle? Do I need to be a member of this thing?’. But if you look at it in the longer term, I suppose everybody goes through points when they’re extremely keen, and then not so keen.