Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (34 page)

Thresholds mark the tipping points from one systems state to another, and have been recognised in climate science and also through the concatenated impacts of climate change. Less work has been undertaken on thresholds between different stages of adaptation. Research on coping has long recognised the staggered nature of household responds to risk as economic pressures cause first non-productive and then productive assets to be expended and finally see the dissolution of households and migration as hazard impacts and vulnerability increase. The parsimony rule in cybernetics presents a similar guidance; that action requiring the least expenditure of resources will be undertaken first. But both coping and
cybernetics focus on ex-post-adaptation; less is known about stages in proactive adaptation, which is curious given the volume of writing presenting this as the preferred adaptive form.

But focusing on a single adaptive choice or mechanism will be increasingly difficult, and miss the bigger picture of interactions between adaptations and the wider development agenda, as climate change impacts are felt through ever increasing multiple, direct and indirect pathways, often without being recognised. In this context critical thresholds will be those that set the broad scope for what is possible through adaptation and here the distinctions between resilience, transition and transformation are potentially helpful.

The interaction of multiple simultaneous adaptations has been recognised across scale when, for example, household adaptations are undermined or enhanced by local government action. But this is only one axis around which adaptation and efforts to shape adaptive capacity can interact. The competing values that underpin adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation indicate a ‘vision effect’ operating alongside the scale effect. This points to horizontal as well as vertical competition and complementarities in adaptation. This axis in large part explains the observed divergence between policy intention (policies) and emergence (self-organised activity) identified (Sotarauta and Srinivas, 2006) during the implementation of policy to support or enact adaptation; a gap that reveals tensions between the actions and values of competing adaptive strategies. The vision effect also helps explain difficulties in replicating, scaling-up and mainstreaming innovations that may be set within wider, contradictory visions of adaptation – local efforts at transformation will have most difficulty being mainstreamed if higher levels of governance construct adaptation as an act of resilience.

Shifting of thinking on climate change from an external process to one unfolding as part of the coevolution of humanity and the environment makes it more important to understand internal – cognitive and cultural – drivers for adaptation. These are no longer fringe interests but part of the nexus of internal and external drivers that shape the who, where and when of adaptive capacity and action. The possibility that different adaptive initiatives could be in competition and lead to risk shifting between social groups and to non-human lives or future generations makes it all the more important to understand the deep psychological and cultural pressures that shape the propensity for different social groups to undertake particular adaptive strategies (including those that to the outside observer may appear to be self-limiting or detrimental to individual wellbeing).

Two final aspects of adaptation that researchers and policy-makers find especially difficult to grasp and that cross cut all of these emerging areas for policy and research are contingency and chance. What we do is no longer influenced only by local or even national processes and policies but also by increasingly unforeseen connections between systems, be they ecological, economic or political, worldwide. Scope for adaptation, as with any capacity, is exposed to such tele-connected linkages and this will bring surprises. Anticipating risk in this context becomes more difficult and consequently places greater emphasis on the core beliefs and capacities of a society – the generic attributes that can be applied to novel and unforeseen pressures. These lie in culture and governance, the roots of adaptation.

This penultimate section provides an overview and synthesis of the main discussion points made in the preceding chapters.

Climate change presents the early twenty-first century with a grand opportunity to reconfigure the meaning and trajectory of development. First mitigation and now adaptation provide global challenges that call for a rethinking of development goals, visions and methods. This is not the first time such an opportunity has arisen: in the 1980s and 1990s sustainable development presented dominant global and local political and economic systems with new challenges and promised to open space for progressive, international development. These opportunities have not yet been realised, and have rather been captured by and come to reinforce the established political-economy. Sustainable development has morphed into ecological modernisation. The faltering pace of international negotiations around climate change mitigation and adaptation indicate the enormity of the stakes and, if agreement can be reached, also the potential scope for revision.

But just how can adaptation open space for rethinking development? In looking forward to help answer this question
Chapter 1
sketches the existing international intellectual and policy landscape within which reforms can take root. Though not presented in
Chapter 1
, Bangladesh is an early leader in state-sponsored adaptation planning that acknowledges the centrality of governance. With support from the UK’s DFID, Bangladesh has proposed several technical programmes for adaptation. Each of these programmes is supported by a layer of social policy that at once indicates the social justice lying at the core of adaptation: distributional justice is supported through investment in a social protection scheme and procedural justice through partnership with community-based adaptation, though the extent to which governance reforms are implemented remains to be seen.

Importantly, these most fundamental arenas for adaptation are also targets for much ongoing development work by local communities in partnership with international development NGOs and humanitarian organisations so that a large proportion of what might be considered generic investment to build adaptive capacity is being undertaken now, but in an ad hoc way, without large scale
collaboration. It is through coordination, as much as financial and technical support, that the emerging international architecture for adaptation can be made to contribute to the effectiveness of local actions to build capacity and adapt.

But as adaptation matures as a policy domain so its construction through the lens of leading international institutions like the IPCC and UNFCCC must also be revisited. The original imperative for the IPCC to mark out clearly what climate change adaptation might be, as an additional or separate act to mitigation and everyday development, is useful in policy terms, but in the long-run counter-productive. Adaptation on the ground is seldom an activity that can be neatly separated from others, making it difficult to single out support for activities that adapt to climate change. Accepting the cultural, social and political elements of adaptation only makes this more difficult. The solution proposed here is to move from adaptation defined only as a specific policy domain, to one that also accepts adaptation as an activity and aspiration that cross-cuts all development activities, so that we accept the reality of adapting with climate change. The provision of direct budgetary support instead of targeted development adaptation aid (that may well draw money from existing development budgets) is one practical step that supports this vision of adaptation. The result is that in the future adaptation may need to hold multiple definitions depending upon its application, in the same way that poverty is described in very technical terms for government poverty alleviation targets (for example, indicated by education, access to nutritional requirements, daily per capital income and so on), but also more broadly in the development of poverty alleviation programmes and local pro-poor practice (for example, livelihoods, wellbeing and entitlements). This raises a challenge of synthesis. But the worse risk is that adaptation is trapped as a technical concern and misses an opportunity to contribute to the rethinking of current unsustainable development visions and paths.

A wide variety of adaptive actions have been noted by the adaptation literature (see Smit
et al.
, 2000; Smit and Pilifosova, 2001).
Chapter 2
identifies nine continuums along which individual acts of adaptation have been classified in the literature, according to the nature of the adaptive action (degree of collaboration, focus, forethought and phasing) or scope of impact (target, timescale, carbon awareness, social consequences, developmental orientation). Together these actions, potentially unfolding through different actors in response to the same climate change associated pressure or even on the same object, make for a rich adaptation tapestry.

Analysing the conditions that determine adaptive capacity and action and the coproduction of adaptation with risk and development is the core task for contemporary studies which build also on previous attempts to theorise adaptation. Four antecedents of contemporary adaptation studies are detailed in
Chapter 2
. Each offers lessons for contemporary work. Cybernetics, coevolution and adaptive management share roots in systems theory, a theoretical perspective
shared by contemporary work on resilience that has come to influence adaptation thinking (Janssen
et al.
, 2006). Work on cybernetics offers caution for the systems approach in general which surfaces a tension between the imperatives of parsimony for individual adaptations (promoting a single best adaptation based on that which causes fewest resources to be expended) and the need for collective flexibility (adaptive capacity is enhanced by diversity). Watts (1983) further argues that the interpretation of systems theory in cybernetics makes it difficult to include values in analysis, and to consider the adaptive agent changing the system itself – excluding transition and transformation (see below) as adaptive possibilities under cybernetics (Morren, 1983). Coevolution (Norgaard, 1994, 1995) is especially useful to our argument because it provides a framework for placing adaptation within history, rather than seeing it as an end point in its own right, and also warns that adaptive actions can form critical junctures with no possibility of reversal.

The less abstract notions of adaptive management and coping also offer lessons for adaptation. Adaptive management has been designed to guide resource management with studies highlighting key challenges to the development of management systems where adaptive learning is built in (Walters, 1997; Medema
et al.
, 2008). These include perceived high costs in the short-term, discomfort at implications for credibility of managers that deliberately experiment in the knowledge some experiments will fail, and the difficulty in maintaining local stakeholder commitment over the medium timespan needed to follow and compare experiments. Coping has been explored through an extensive range of writing and policy in the last 30 years with considerable overlap and lessons for adaptation. For example, Burton
et al.
(1993) propose four periods in the escalation of adaptive action, which in turn can be used to signify tipping points in systems behaviour as thresholds into each stage are breached: the movement from risk absorption (it is not felt) to tolerance (it is felt but not acted upon); risk tolerance to risk reduction (risk management is implemented); and finally risk reduction to radical change where management practices are unable to cope and risk manifests as unacceptable and unpreventable loss. Each of these thresholds could be breached by increasing hazardousness, but also reduced adaptive capacity and increased vulnerability – for example, through demographic or economic change. The literature on coping also makes it clear that multiple actors will have view-points on what to protect, enhance or expend through adaptive actions and these may not be easily resolved, their origins being in values and beliefs so that a key challenge for adaptation in heterogeneous societies is to reveal these different values as a first step to inclusive planning for climate change adaptation.

The antecedents and current work on adaptation provide a rich basis for analysis, but they do not yet capture the full significance of adapting to climate change as a dynamic in socio-ecological coevolution. Besides the technical inefficiencies of overlapping adaptations that have been identified in the literature as a scale effect of adaptation, there are deeper political and even epistemological frictions to be identified and addressed in adaptation planning and research. It is here that the proposed framework of adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation aims to make its contribution. These three levels of adaptation stand as distinct categories of intention and action. The theory used to make each aspect visible and assist in analysis accumulates so that, for example, social learning and self-organisation (the core of resilience) can also be applied to help understand transitional and transformational adaptation. No one form of adaptation is preferable, with any judgement being dependent upon viewpoint and context. The aim of making these forms of adaptation visible is to surface the tensions between policies and actions aimed at maintaining the status quo or seeking broader change in relations of social and political power through adaptation.