Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (29 page)

meaningful way are not insubstantial.
Table 7.1
seeks only to represent the most influential narratives and associated actions and key actors linked to resilience, transitional and transformative adaptations. Resilience is indicated by efforts to maintain business-as-usual development paths; transition exercises existing legal and governance rights to confront unsustainable development, and transformation uses adaptation to promote fundamentally alternative forms of development from those described for each site as dominant.

Across the sites some commonalities emerge. Local government and business interests are prominent in responding to climate change through building resilience, which is also the predominant form that adaptation takes in each case. In contrast civil society groups and environmental lawyers are most prominent in transitional acts, using adaptation to push for greater transparency, participation and accountability within the existing governance system. Cultural actors, including NGOs and journalists, emerge as leading transformation, which exists largely at the level of discourse, with some acts of popular education and symbolic initiatives aimed at promoting popular critical consciousness. Given the strong voice of government and business in shaping the limits of adaptation it is perhaps not surprising that ecological modernisation is the dominant overarching worldview within which adaptation is being constructed as resilience (from coastal engineering in Cancun and Playa to the greening of business in Tulum), and transition (the use of legislation to regulate development in Cancun and Playa).

For individual workers coping with risks, including those associated with climate change but driven more by a search for economic opportunity, is played out within the use of migration as a livelihood strategy. Emotional commitment to locales in Quintana Roo is spread thin and legitimised through cultural norms that accept local residence as temporary and extractive. In contrast migrant workers maintain close links with places of origin, even sending children ‘home’ to be educated. This offers an opportunity for individual and familial resilience with low social transactions costs – without the need to engage in social or political collective action in the place of residence.

Given the general acceptance that climate change is already impacting negatively through beach erosion, high temperatures and hurricane activity the level of proactive planning is minimal. This may be a function of the linking of climate change with environmental management and subsequent policy marginalisation, but possibly also points to a denial of risk, especially by those most vulnerable. The common tendency amongst the poor and vulnerable to prioritise economic opportunity over risk reduction is heightened through a majority migrant population that has little association with place or community. Corporate interests in Cancun and Playa have access to engineering solutions and international insurance, and beyond this possibly view their investment in Quintana Roo as temporary. For smaller businesses and the resident population scope to adapt is more limited, and as was most keenly demonstrated in Tulum, for many migrants rapid transformation of the environment into a form that can be exploited by capital has attracted them to the coast. Climate change is pushed to the margins of people’s imagination as well as their actions. The one major exception is
Mahahual where Hurricane Dean caused the loss of the town’s economic base. While Mahahual’s population is almost entirely composed of recent migrants, the effect of Dean as well as the recent awarding of town council status has begun to build a social identity.

The aim of this chapter has been to reveal the messiness of analysing adaptation where political values and actions are both contested and tightly circumscribed by a rigid political and economic framework. In the language of transitions theory the cases all display strong tendencies for stability with limited scope for local innovations to affect change in regimes through adaptation, partly a result of the limited range of innovations observed (examples included the La Ceiba Park in Playa, which provided the dual function of meeting a service need for urban green space but also potentially inspiring critical consciousness, and material alternatives such as ejido controlled development and the Chan Chay Ecological Shop in Tulum). This is compounded by a lack of a supporting institutional architecture (including values and a legal–administrative framework) to aid the dissemination of innovations; and a strong dominant existing political-economic and administrative regime. Even where disaster events have been experienced, revealing failures in the dominant regimes and development pathways, pre-disaster political, economic and cultural structures have changed little. Resilience remains the dominant mode of adaptation across this region. It remains to be seen how far this will be true as increasing population, physical and financial assets are exposed to climate change associated hazards in the future.

… moments when underlying causes can come together in a brief window, a window ideally suited for mobilizing broader violence. But such events can also have extremely positive outcomes if the tensions […] are recognized and handled well.

(USAID, 2002)

This description of post-disaster political space highlights the possibility that political outcomes are not predetermined by history but open to influence, in this case by the interests of an international political and economic actor.

The reflexivity of socio-ecological systems allows us to envision climate change impacts as unfolding within ongoing socio-political trajectories. Disaster events, and especially reconstruction periods, open space for change in dominant technical, policy and political regimes (Pelling and Dill, 2010). Very often such changes are best classified as adding resilience to pre-disaster socio-technological systems. New technology to improve the resistance of infrastructure, or policy reform such as the enforcement of building regulations, allow political and economic business as usual. Sometimes, however, unacceptable failures in the dominant regime to meet its responsibilities for risk reduction and response can act as a catalyst for political level change and open scope for transformational adaptation that goes beyond disaster risk management to influence social life and the distribution of political power in society.
Chapter 7
identifies the most likely pre-conditions for such changes, which include economic inequality, a pre-existing and organised alternative to dominant politics and a sufficiently high impact event (Albala-Bertrand, 1993; Drury and Olson, 1998; Pelling and Dill, 2006).

It is not only natural disasters that provide sufficient shocks to destabilise dominant political regimes, but these are perhaps the most directly related to the influence of climate change. In the future, climate change will likely be a factor of growing significance in many other kinds of shock, especially those compound events felt locally from the conjuncture of multiple factors. The most recent example of this was the 2008 global food crisis. A combination of changes in local planting regimes (a shift from wheat and maize for consumption to bio-fuels), increasing demand (for example, from China’s rapidly expanding middle class), exceptional drought and the failure of key regional harvests (for example, the Australian rice harvest), and instability in the global financial systems (commodity speculation at a time of high carbon fuel price) destabilised water-food systems resulting in increased hunger and malnutrition for the poorest with crises in 37 countries. At places this has fed back into the political system through violent protests in such diverse countries as Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal and Yemen (FAO, 2008). In this context, natural disaster events provide early insight into the ways in which specific political systems respond to shocks and what we might reasonably expect if failure to adapt to reduce risk leads to more frequent and severe events (Schipper and Pelling, 2006).

This chapter presents three case studies. Each is summarised in
Table 8.1
. The first case study from Bangladesh unfolds in a period of post-colonial nation building; the remaining studies from Nicaragua and the USA occur in the contemporary period of globalising capital where political dominance is not simply concentrated in the state but more diffusely spread amongst national and international private sector and civil society interests. Each case is built around direct quotations from eyewitnesses or observers with comment on the pre- and post-disaster polity. The cases serve to illustrate that adaptation is more than a narrow technical activity, and can encapsulate the political as well. In doing so adaptation becomes a contested space that competing social actors attempt to capture at the level of symbol and discourse as well as through material actions. The final impacts of disaster events are difficult to describe as with passing time new events place their influence on political trajectories. Two possibilities have been hypothesised: a critical juncture (Olson and Gawronski, 2003) describes those moments that when passed cannot be reversed; in contrast an accelerated status quo (Klein, 2007) is felt when pre-disaster social and political relations are further entrenched through disaster. The core distinction between these models is between change as an outcome of the successful concentration (accelerated status quo) and contestation (critical juncture) of established political and associated economic and cultural power (Pelling and Dill, 2010).