Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (16 page)

All governance systems require actors with varying degrees of power, transparency and legitimacy to undertake at least some limited form of negotiation, causing Young (1999) to describe governance regimes as bargaining processes. The outcomes of negotiation are a product of the relative power of actors during bargaining and the implementation of agreed rules. Change in a governance system ‘involves the alteration of the rules and decision-making, not of norms nor principles’ (Krasner, 1983:5). This is an important distinction to make and points research to the possibility that difference and changes within norms or
principles over time and space may not be mirrored in changes in the rules and decisions made in the regime. This allows for adaptive changes in administrative structure, technical innovation, land use and so on at the level of governance and its subsequent policy framework without challenging the overarching regime of norms and principles within which governance rests. Over time – or as a result of sudden changes in the operating environment or in internal relations – discontinuities between norms and principles on the one hand and governance mechanisms and practices on the other can potentially trigger transformative change in the regime or top-down pressures for transitional change in the governance system. The extent to which dominant norms and principles and governance rules are antagonistic or complementary may be a good indicator of the resistance of both the governance system and the wider regime to reform including that of progressive adaptation.

A sense of the scope for aspects of governance to enable progressive adaptation to climate change can be indicated by the relationships between actors and institutions. Actors include individuals and organisations with stakes in a policy domain; institutions are for formal (legislation and guidelines) and informal (cultural norms) rules that determine how actors interrelate (North, 1990). Institutions constrain the aspirations and behaviour of actors but can also facilitate change by legitimating processes of critique and reform (Seo and Creed, 2002). Much of the literature on governance change privileges institutions over agency (for example, Krasner, 1983); it focuses on the power of decision-making procedures, rules and cultures to determine scope for reform. The focus is on understanding the persistence of institutions over time rather than how they may be changed and the role of actors in this. For example, Gunderson and Holling (2002) refer to rigidity traps where people and institutions try to resist change and persist with their current management and governance system despite a clear recognition that change is essential.

Emerging actor-oriented approaches offer scope for exploring how institutions come to be changed – a central question in studies of adaptation. Work here focuses on networks of social relations and information flow within governance regimes and their capacity to surface new ideas that may generate individual policy entrepreneurs and the evolution of epistemic communities, where actors from across a governance regime come to share a common viewpoint and can collectively promote change through purposeful advocacy or as a result of collective changes in practice where governance systems are more resistant to change (Hasenclever
et al.
, 1997; Warner, 2003).

The points at which change in the institutional architecture might be expected arises from internal contradictions inherent in the institutional systems of governance. Seo and Creed (2002) propose four contradictions which help identify pinch points, where challenges to existing institutional arrangements might be expected to arise. First, where rules and norms are encompassing and general they may confer reputation rewards but constrain other organisational aims such as efficiency or rent-seeking. This tension encourages selective-decoupling where ritual conformity hides deviations. As the gap between the
demands of legitimacy and other behaviour expands so pressure for institutional change grows. Second, path dependency (Arthur, 1989) suggests that incremental investments in physical, human and social capital lead organisations to prefer investments to protect established functions and practices even in the face of environmental change, until a crisis point forces institutional change. Third, where the wide range of institutions within society can lead to conflicts or inconsistencies generated by the interactions between the institutional arrangements of different levels or sectors within a regime forcing change. Fourth, assuming institutions reflect and protect the interests of the more dominant political actors in society, institutional change can arise from political realignment and also when previously passive or marginal actors become conscious of the institutional conditions that leave their needs unmet (Benson, 1977). The capacity for critical consciousness and actor reflection on established institutions is arguably the most fundamental element of any actor-oriented governance reform. The extent to which critical consciousness is able to generate actor mobilisation and collective action is explored in more detail in Chapters
6
,
7
and
8
.

The actor-oriented approach is also useful in avoiding simple, causal explanations for social organisation outcomes. This includes assumptions about the hegemony of state power, the subordination of the local communities and the superiority of the laws of the market (Booth, 1994). In this way one of the significant features of the actor-oriented approach is that it places explanatory value on the agency of even apparently weak or marginal actors (Zimmerer and Basset, 2003). This has encouraged work that has placed emphasis upon the importance of marginal actors (Farrington and Bebbington, 1993) – such as small local NGOs or people at risk. It also allows a more detailed treatment of the state and how it interacts with the non-state groups than was possible under more structural interpretations that saw the state bluntly as a homogeneous entity and also as a tool of the most powerful classes to protect their best interests (Watts, 2000).

The context specific nature of the interaction between actors and institutions is well illustrated by Warner’s (2003) comparative analysis of political entrepreneurship in flood management for Bangladesh and the Netherlands. In Bangladesh rigid governance and a conservative administrative culture constrained opportunities for change from within so that governance responded best to pressure exerted by powerful, external actors; in this case development aid donors. In the Netherlands a flexible governance form fostered political entrepreneurship and allowed interdepartmental alliances to form and collectively push for reform from within, although the participatory Dutch administrative culture actually slowed this process through drawn-out rounds of consultation which also acted as an opportunity for thorough review of proposed reforms.

Where might alternative visions and practices be fostered within existing governance regimes, and how might such innovations be tested and diffused to the wider society? Where canonical systems resist change
Chapter 3
shows the scope for shadow systems to act as a place of experimentation and learning within
organisations. Can shadow spaces exist at the level of the governance systems in collaborations between social organisations on projects that are not supported by or run counter to the dominant governance regime? If yes, can they offer a place for building diversity in thinking and practice that can be formalised if new problems arise (Cohen
et al.
, 1972)? The evidence presented in Chapters
7
and
8
suggests strongly that shadow systems operating as informal networks are a powerful influence of capacity for transitional adaptation. Such polycentric forms can both spread and reduce risk in society, and compensate for failures in other levels of governance (Ostrom, 2005). An example of this is the provision of services or information that are not available formally – information on how to undertake local adaptive measures or by providing post-disaster lifelines when state agencies are compromised (see also IFRC, 2010). Work on socio-technical systems offers some insight onto these questions and it is to this literature that we now turn to add some detail to the broad framework of actor-oriented analysis of regimes.

Socio-technical transitions work has sought to examine what it is that directs individual development pathways. Reminiscent of coevolutionary theory, transitions in policy or economic domains are explained through changes in and interaction between technological innovation, cultural preferences, industrial production processes, government incentives and demography (Seyfang and Smith, 2007). Insight from this literature is helpful in refining a framework to help understand processes of transition in adaptation, although the emphasis of enquiry moves from delineating histories of socio-technical change to identifying those characteristics of societies that can influence the emergence of opportunities for transition as part of adaptation, the consequences of which might be progressive or regressive for social justice and environmental integrity.

The socio-technical transitional literature, which draws broadly from systems science, is compatible with our existing framework in so far as it acknowledges the role of power (Rip and Kemp, 1998) and agency (Seyfang and Smith, 2007) of competing interests, embodied in innovations, established practices and institutions interacting often across governance scales in shaping the institutional architecture of development. One confounding limitation of this literature is a failure to distinguish adequately between transitional and transformational change. Both are used, sometimes synonymously. At root this is a failure to separate governance systems from the overarching socio-political regime. The former is taken as a sub-set of the latter with transitional change an aspect of transformation and not identified as a goal in itself. Thus, drawing on Rotmans
et al.
(2001), Jerneck and Olsson (2008:176) are able to claim that ‘Transitions and transformation processes in societies, or subsystems thereof, change profoundly in terms of structures, institutions and relations between actors. After a transition, the society, or a subsystem, operates according to new assumptions and rules’.

While on the ground it may not always be clear or helpful to distinguish between transition and transformation, it is nonetheless important to identify transformation as an extreme case where profound change alters the distribution of rights and responsibilities and visions of development across society (see
Chapter 5
). Individual transitions fall short of this and describe incremental changes to the aims and practices of geographically or sectorally bound activities that push but do not overturn established political regimes. For this reason the transitions perspective is used below to help identify pathways for change. These can then be applied to analyse capacity for, or past trajectories with, transitional (claiming rights within existing regimes) or transformational (replacing regimes with new rights compacts) outcomes. Empirical work presented in
Chapter 7
applies this framework to examine transitional adaptation and its messy connections with resilience and transformation in the Mexican Caribbean.

From its origins in industrial history, the transitions literature has expanded to critiques of sustainable development, arguing that not only contemporary practices but the solutions they generate for development challenges are unsustainable because they fail to address fundamental values driving dominant development paths (Rotmans
et al.
, 2001). Transitions framings have most recently been applied to climate change mitigation – through, for example, research on transition to low-carbon living in the UK (Haxeltine and Seyfang, 2009). Both agendas demonstrate the potential utility of transitions framing for contributing to understandings of transitional (and transformational) adaptations. This is particularly so in the context of poorer societies at risk to the local impacts of climate change where adaptation is a more pressing priority than mitigation and extremes in social inequality and access to human rights and basic needs demand adaptation confront failed development policy regimes.

Like the socio-technical transitions proposed for sustainable development challenges, analysing opportunities and outcomes for a progressive, transitional adaptation benefits from a lens that can examine technological innovation and evolution as a social process. Geels (2005) describes the protected spaces where new technological or management innovations develop as socio-technical niches, suggesting that innovation originates from local experimentation. Niches are set in contrast with the dominant socio-technical regime operating at the meso-level, and the larger macro-level contextualising political, economic, cultural and environmental ‘landscape’. Berkhaut
et al.
(2004) also observe that change in the regime may be driven top-down by perturbations in the wider landscape. Amongst the most useful findings of this literature are proposals, supported by case study work, for specific pathways and strategies that determine how far a socio-technical innovation is able to escape from its protective niche and overturn the dominant regime (Geels and Schot, 2007), and the identification of the barriers to regime change that promote path dependence. These barriers include the repetition of cognitive routines that blind professionals to developments outside their focus (Nelson and Winter, 1982), regulations and standards that enforce rigidity (Unruh, 2000), lock-in of adaptation to technical systems so that the costs of transition relative to resilience increase over time through fixed investments
in machines, infrastructures and competencies – until systems thresholds are crossed by external drivers such as regulation, market changes or natural disaster (Tushman and Anderson, 1986). These drivers and constraints have suggested to some analysts that activity at the niche level alone is not enough to generate transitions and rather this is an outcome of multi-level collaboration and in the process local experiments and regime practices will be mutually adjusted and compromised (Seyfang and Smith, 2007).