Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (33 page)

As significant for some will be the impact of demographic changes wrought by Katrina with the residents of predominantly poor, black neighbourhoods being displaced through evacuation and redevelopment. A final reminder of the resilience of incumbent politicians in the US and especially New Orleans comes from the 1966 floods of the city which were also precipitated by poor government planning and levee failure during a hurricane. The incumbent mayor used disaster relief to bolster his public image and was re-elected to office a month later despite being personally responsible for the reallocation of city funds originally destined to shore up the levee (Abney and Hill, 1966).

What can these case histories tell us about adaptation and transformation? Certainly they show that decision-making for risk management is not only a technical matter but framed by and invested in the rough and tumble of politics. Importantly this is not only politics in the narrow sense of elections but rather more broadly refers to governance: the balance of private sector, state and voluntary sector provision of goods and services including the upholding of human rights. In each case this balance, which lies at the heart of the social contract, was challenged by disaster, and in particular by failures in the established regime to both reduce risk and prevent avoidable losses as part of everyday practice before the event, and be seen to act justly and effectively in response and reconstruction.

The most dramatic political outcome, the only example of regime change, unfolded in East Pakistan, when electoral politics failed to meet popular expectations for change. This is a prime example of disaster acting as a catalyst for political trajectories already entrained pre-disaster. The succession movement successfully presented the disaster as a symbol for state failure and provided the organisational base for propelling popular discontent into the political arena.

Table 8.1
Lessons for adaptation

The symbolic significance of disaster and failure in response and reconstruction is shown in each case. Following Mitch international actors sought to open Nicaragua’s political-economy to the values of inclusive democracy. But battles lost at the level of discourse allowed distortions to appear in policy that undermined this agenda. The reinterpretation of decentralised governance as privatisation by international financial institutions is a case in point. Reflecting the scale of shock generated by Hurricane Katrina, this event has led to multiple competing discourses, there was though only marginal impact in the delivery of response. Given the administrative failures that prefigured the disaster one might expect a greater degree of internal reflection but this was not clearly present in the federal regime so that the impacts of the disaster were in many cases exacerbated by the exploitation of reconstruction opportunities by private contractors, large and small. The lack of an advocacy coalition and possibly also deep rooted popular disengagement from politics at the time weakened oversight and reflexivity.

Table 8.1
summarises each case study. Context is critical in judging the capacity for adaptation to open scope for progressive transformation. Adaptation can be championed through instrumental policy but also as part of a more diffuse cultural reaction to risk. It is at the conjuncture of cultural and instrumental adaptations that discourse is most influential, shaping the transfer of popular complaint into political prioritising and policy. Technical analysis is part, but not the whole, or even necessarily a dominant element, of this process of discursive competition which encompasses emotional as well as intellectual reasoning at a societal level. The narratives and metaphors that give collective shape to individual emotions hold the power to challenge or reinforce the status quo as adaptation to climate change becomes internalised as a social process – part of history as well as a technical and policy domain.

Too frequently adaptation still reflects a narrow framing, which assumes that climate change is an ultimate, rather than a proximate driver of change.

(Nelson, 2009:496)

The potential, and even likely, implications of climate change for ecological and physical systems are profound and disturbing. Social systems that deliver specific management functions and organise governance serve to mediate between these impacts and people at risk. In this way understanding adaptive capacity and action requires a lens that can examine organisational behaviour and governance regimes, as well as the feelings, values and actions of individuals. Perhaps most important are the interactions between different levels of social actor (individuals and organisations) and the institutions that give shape to social systems. Research and policy on adaptation to climate change is just beginning to recognise the full contribution of values and governance to behaviour and action. Work on adaptation is emerging from an early period in its evolution as an intellectual domain where adaptation has, as Nelson (2009) rightly observes, been narrowly framed. Until now the overriding need has been for an articulation of adaptation as a function of climate change impacts (and for some a sub-set of vulnerability). Under the influence of the UNFCCC and IPCC this has in turn required but not quite achieved a clear definition. Adaptation, though, has in the process been separated from mitigation and development. As we have seen throughout this book, climate change is affecting socio-ecological systems in many ways. The majority are compound and indirect, and many quite ambiguous, so that it is difficult to imagine science will ever be able to identify the proportion of an expected or past event that is attributable to climate change alone and so precisely what climate change adaptation, narrowly defined, should be.

As our technical understanding of climate change adaptation is accompanied by a more nuanced view that can include governance as a field of adaptation, as well as a context within which technical adaptations unfold, so the relationship between humanity and climate change shifts. Sites for adaptation become internalised within socio-ecological systems. We turn from adapting
to
climate change, towards adapting
with
climate change. This is quite a leap and also requires an
admittance that anthropogenic climate change is with us now, and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Adapting
with
sees climate change as internal (a product of humanity’s values, decisions and actions), but also its coevolution with the environment, so that neither environmental nor social change is independent (Castree and Braun, 2001). Once the social, and governance in particular, is given more emphasis so the opportunities arising from adaptation to enhance sustainable development become more apparent, the aim of adaptation becomes not one of defensive but progressive risk management as part of a renewed sustainable development. To be sure, the efficiency based engineering and economic debates that have tended to dominate technological adaptation thus far will remain central to the material expressions of adaptation. But they will now be positioned as part of a wider social and political agenda, so that understanding our capacity for adaptation and which adaptive options are preferable becomes a social, cultural and political as well as a technical or economic judgement.

The following discussion outlines the consequences of this perspective on adaptation for future research and policy and provides a synthesis of the argument and evidence for adapting
with
climate change made in this book.

What are the consequences of moving from seeing climate change risk as an external threat to development to accepting that it is both a product and driver of development? Beck’s seminal work on risk society provides some insight into the shape that future research and associated policy directions might take; in light of the proposals made in this book, two lessons can be taken.

First, groups in society compete not only for material wealth but also for security. In societies where wealth is achievable, security can become an overriding concern. Risk and its management is therefore a political as well as a technological concern and one where the poor are at risk of carrying a double burden when competition leads to their being marginalised from mechanisms providing security as well as wealth, or indeed where such burdens are interpreted as unfortunate but necessary costs for the production of security and wealth for others, elsewhere or in different times. This is a politic that needs to be critiqued from the perspective of social justice, leading to a vision of adaptation as a potential tool for progressive development, not one that uncritically defends the status quo.

Second, the risk society thesis contends that increasingly the most important risks are hard to detect and require technological innovation to make them visible. For climate change this is certainly the case and includes the challenge of making future risk and the carbon costs of risk reduction tangible and actionable in the present. The advances made in climate science have recently been applied to questions of adaptation through techniques like scenario planning that seek to provide decision-makers with a range of possible futures as a basis for planning infrastructure investments. This is useful but limited. Living with climate change means accepting future hazards cannot be planned out, or even necessarily
predicted. Rather than seeking ever more precise technological guidance and solutions the urgency of climate change adaptation suggests we need to learn how to live with the fuzziness of climate change. Indeed what need to be made visible are not only the physical forcing mechanisms but also the human processes driving anthropocentric climate change and the distribution of its impacts. This lesson has already been learned at the sharp end of climate change adaptation practice. Here local vulnerability assessments place at least as much, if not more, emphasis on acting as a tool to facilitate local reflection on governance and underlying development processes as they do in providing technical accuracy on climate-change-associated vulnerability and risk (van Aalst
et al.
, 2008; Pelling, 2007b). The need to confront climate change risk by moving from a race for accuracy to a mechanism for studying governance as part of risk assessment is spreading, and has also been encompassed in methods for the participatory assessment of national capacity to manage disaster risk across the Americas by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB, 2005).

How might research and policy development on adaptation move forward? Building on the discussions made in this book four priorities for research are proposed that can help to better frame adaptation as a development problem:

Early work on adaptation has rightly focused on a tightly bounded object for research and in so doing has succeeded in contributing to a clearly defined domain for policy. But if we see adaptation as a social as well as a technological phenomenon then there is a need to extend from this core. The object of analysis necessarily broadens from the behaviour of individuals and their constraining institutions to include organisations, governance systems, national and international politics. In parallel the subject of analysis extends from economy and technology to include cultural, social and political opportunities, play-offs and costs of adaptive options. Importantly it is in the interaction of different worldviews and priorities established from viewing adaptation through these contrasting lenses that the richness of adaptation policy, potential conflict and scope for coordinated and progressive, sustainable development could emerge.