Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (2 page)

Table 6.1 Warming and cooling scenarios for Wales

Table 7.1 Adaptation as an opportunity and narrative for development discourse and action

Table 8.1 Lessons for adaptation

This book would not have been possible without the inspiration and generous exchange of ideas with colleagues, in particular: Kathleen Dill (Cornell University), Cris High (Open University), David Manuel-Navarrete (King’s College London) and Michael Redclift (King’s College London). Research underpinning this book was undertaken as part of three grants awarded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-221-25-0044-A, RES-228-25-0014 and RES-062-23-0367). Without this financial support the work would not have been possible. I would also like to give thanks for the many rich discussions I’ve enjoyed with PhD and masters students in the Department of Geography at King’s College London – two PhD graduates, Marco Grasso and Llewellyn Leonard, have their theses referenced. Wider discussions, in particular through the Global Environmental Change and Human Security Programme led by Karen O’Brien at the University of Oslo, have also been instrumental in shaping this work. For patience beyond the call of duty I thank the Routledge editorial and print teams, in particular Andrew Mould. Special recognition is also due to Ulli Huber for creating the time and atmosphere necessary to complete this work and to Lilly Pelling for her word processing and computer management skills. Of course, the real thanks go to all those respondents who have freely given of their time and energies to provide the empirical backbone for this work, many of whom remain at the sharp end of adapting to the consequences of climate change and development failure.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3)

Climate change adaptation is an opportunity for social reform, for the questioning of values that drive inequalities in development and our unsustainable relationship with the environment. But this outcome is by no means certain and growing evidence suggests that too often adaptation is imagined as a non-political, technological domain and enacted in a defensive rather than a progressive spirit. Adaptation has been framed in terms of identifying what is to be preserved and what is expendable, rather than what can be reformed or gained. Dominant development discourses put the economy as first to be preserved, above cultural flourishing or ecological health. There is a danger that adaptation policy and practice will be reduced to seeking the preservation of an economic core, rather than allowing it to foster the flourishing of cultural and social as well as economic development, or of improved governance that seeks to incorporate the interests of future generations, non-human entities and the marginalised.

The argument put forward in this book suggests that adaptation is a social and political act; one intimately linked to contemporary, and with the possibility for re-shaping future, power relations in society. But it also recognises that different actors perceive contrasting roles for adaptation. That there may be multiple ways of adapting is already recognised in the literature through the range of different scopes and timings for adaptive interventions (for example, Smit
et al.
, 2000; Smit and Wandel, 2006). These are important technical considerations but more emphasis is needed on the underlying socio-political choices that are made through the selection of adaptation pathways. Here we propose three such pathways leading to resilience (maintaining the status quo), transition (incremental change) and transformation (radical change). No one pathway necessarily leads to ‘progressive’ or more equitable and efficient outcomes than the others. The evaluation of pathways and subsequent outcomes will be a function of context and the viewpoint of individual actors. Opening analysis of how it is that individual adaptive pathways come to dominate or be marginalised is one of the aims of this book, which offers theoretical and empirical exploration.

Recent experience suggests that consensus on a progressive adaptation will not be easy. Our current age of adaptation is the second time in recent history that a global environmental challenge has provided an opportunity to question dominant forms of development. The first, coalescing around the notion of sustainable development, has (to date) manifestly failed. The international roots of the sustainable development agenda lay in a concern that the environmental limits to economic growth were fast approaching. Indeed the combination of mitigation and adaptation agendas represents a reprise of the sustainable development agenda, and climate change a strong signal that existing developments are far from sustainable (Le Blanc, 2009). Underlining the significance of adaptation for sustainable development, Adger
et al.
(2009a) remind us that climate change adaptation decisions have justice consequences across as well as within generations.

The first mainstream expression of a sustainable development approach was the Brundtland Commission, 1983, which stimulated a search for radical ecological and social alternatives to development (Redclift, 1987). These peaked in public awareness at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1992. Here, differences in the prioritising of development and environment between rich and poorer nations and the influence of a strong industry lobby limited reform at the international level. The parallels with current challenges facing international negotiations at the UNFCCC are striking. The policy legacy of UNCED has been a constrained version of sustainable development largely restricted to ecological modernisation and an acceptance of the substitutability of environmental for economic value (Pelling, 2007a). Where some success has been achieved through this process it is outside of the compromised domain of international politics through the innovations of civil society groups, fair trade companies and concerned individuals, where environmental and social justice goals have been brought into projects for economic development (Adams, 2008). But these initiatives remain fragmented and overwhelmed by the global policy consensus.

Can climate change adaptation reinvigorate these debates and provide an impetus for stronger sustainable development action? Might climate change adaptation be both a reprise of sustainable development and a new opportunity in its own right? The origins of the UNFCCC process lie partly in UNCED where the first Framework Convention on Climate Change agreement was opened for signature. This connection to debates on sustainable development also reminds us that climate change and resultant adaptation are but one expression of an underlying crisis in environment–society relationships. The deepest root causes of climate change and the inability of those with power in society (locally and globally) to act lie in the dominant processes and values of the political economy that increasingly concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, with unjust social and environmental externalities as accepted. At this level climate change risk is but one expression of a deeper social malaise in modern society. For the poor, comfortable and rich alike aspiring and acquiring in order to consume have become the rationale for development; a rationale propelled as much by fear of
failure as the pleasures of consumption. Can the burgeoning academic and policy interest in adaptation be levers to address these deeper questions of sustainability and justice, as well as adjusting to meet the more proximate risks presented to us by a changing climate?

Here we propose and illustrate a framework to help reveal and understand the social, cultural and political pathways through which adaptation to climate change unfolds. Adaptation is conceptualised through three layers of analysis (
Chapters 3
–5) which build from a starting point in the notion of resilience to encompass adaptation as a process of socio-political transition and transformation. Each stage of theoretical analysis brings together work from systems theory with a wider literature including regime analysis, discourse, risk society, human security and the social contract. This reflects the strong influence of systems thinking on adaptation work but also enables the theoretical precision derived from systems thinking – for example, on social learning and self-organisation – to run throughout the book while bringing to the fore power, which is more ably addressed through other theoretical discourses. These theoretical discussions are then illustrated through three case study chapters showing how adaptation can unfold through contested politics in organisations, urban systems and nation states.

Power lies at the heart of this conceptualisation of adaptation. Power asymmetries determine for whom, where and when the impacts of climate change are felt, and the scope for recovery. The power held by an actor in a social system, translated into a stake for upholding the status quo, also plays a great role in shaping an actor’s support or resistance towards adaptation or the building of adaptive capacity when this has implications for change in social, economic, cultural or political relations, or in the ways natural assets are viewed and used. Accepting that adaptation is contested makes interpreting adaptation as progressive hostage to the observer’s viewpoint. This requires the imposition of a normative framework to provide a consistent and transparent positionality for analysis. Here we are guided by Rawls’ theory of justice that identifies procedural (inclusion in decision-making) and distributional (social and spatial) elements. Rawls (1971, see also Paavola
et al.
, 2006) prioritises human rights over public goods; holds the social contract between citizens and the state in dynamic tension so that it is liable to capture by vested interests at moments of pressure; and argues that society should be governed by principles that protect inclusive governance and seek to enhance the quality of life of the poorest. This final statement is perhaps the most important for making judgements on comparative adaptation pathways.