Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (35 page)

Drawing from socio-ecological systems theory (Gunderson and Holling, 2002; Folke, 2006), the IPCC identifies three attributes of resilient systems: functional persistence, self-organisation and social learning. From the perspective of adaptation, resilience is made distinct because of the aspiration of maintaining functional persistence. This can allow unsustainable or socially unjust practices to persist as well as protecting common goods (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008). Self-organisation (the ability of the components of a system to organise without formal, hierarchical direction) and social learning (the capacity for new values, ideas or practices to be disseminated, popularised and become dominant in society or a sub-set such as an organisation or local community) can be found across all forms of adaptation. Of these two, arguably, social learning is the most critical. Social learning is as important for transitional or transformational adaptation. It requires a high level of trust, a willingness to take risks in order to extend learning opportunities, the transparency required to test and challenge embedded values, active engagement with civil society and a high degree of citizen participation. The advantages for social learning where there is close interaction between social actors is clear, with social learning and self-organisation reinforcing one another, so that a social system exhibiting rich capacity for social learning is also likely to have considerable scope for self-organisation.

Transition is an intermediary form of adaptation (see
Chapter 4
) that seeks to realise full rights under existing political and governance regimes. Where the gap between legal rights and their application is large, transition will align itself closely with transformational adaptation, requiring significant efforts to overcome entrenched vested interests in the status quo. Where governance regimes function fully this gap and the need to aspire for transitional adaptation will be absent. Most likely transition will be felt as a series of incremental adaptations as rights claims are asserted. As rights turn from
de jure
to
de facto
the effect is to open
space for new rights to be won so that over time transformational change may be observed. Young (1999) describes this as a bargaining process with depth of change being distinguished between that which takes place at the level of rules for decision-making; or more profound change of the transformational kind that unfolds at the level of norms and principles (Krasner, 1983). Analysing potential for transitional adaptation places focus on examining the persistence of institutions over time as much as 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.

Literature on socio-technological transitions has recently been applied to climate change mitigation (Haxeltine and Seyfang, 2009) and offers scope for helping to understand where and why adaptive transitions can be found. Applying this literature to transitional adaptation as conceived here comes with a caveat – so far this literature does not distinguish adequately between transitional and transformational change. Both pathways for change are used, sometimes synonymously. 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 (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008). This said, the frameworks emerging from socio-technological transitions remain useful and more positively serve to show the closeness between transition and political aspects of transformation which on the ground may be hard to distinguish. For example, Geels and Schot (2007) observe that new ideas or discourses emerge from local protected spaces but their dissemination and capacity to change established values and practices in the regime is often determined by the extent to which higher-level (for example, international) actors and institutions support change. This is relevant for transitional and transformational change.

Chapter 5
argues that for adaptation to be transformative and progressive it must provide scope for the revision and reform or replacement of existing social contracts and the meaning of security and modes of development, as well as defending social gains already won. This is a call to tackle the causes of vulnerability at their roots. For adaptation to be concerned with changing the assumptions and structures of how we think about and organise development, it must address the causes rather than only the symptoms of vulnerability and risk. The social sciences offer many lenses with which to critique development and derive alternatives. Here we outline three theses that have clear relevance to climate change adaptation: risk society, the social contract and human security.

Beck’s (1992) risk society thesis is a critique of the atomising and fragmenting nature of modernity. This has led to dominant modes of contemporary development that too easily produce and do not compensate for or seek to prevent complex environmental and social harm. Risk society is reproduced through
established values and assumptions about development and wellbeing held by individuals as well as being institutionalised through the organisation of the market, government and industry. If this thesis is accepted, then adapting to the risks associated with climate change needs to confront the way individuals perceive the world and their place in it, as well as challenging the organisation of development. This is both daunting and empowering – signalling as it does that each of us is a site for adaptive scrutiny.

The social contract describes the prevailing balance of rights and responsibilities in society and may be held in place by legitimate government or the rule of force. The social contract is determined by the balance of power in society. Culture, identity and the control of knowledge through education are frequently identified as key for realising political change by political (Habermas, 1985) and educational (Freire, 1969) theorists. Perhaps the most pointed cases of challenges to the social contract are those following shocks – economic, political or environmental – that manifest failure in the social contract to provide security from disaster. When climate change is associated with extreme events, then it is the potential for disaster to destroy place as well as social life (Hewitt, 1997) that opens scope for new understandings of identity and social organisation and an alternative to established structures in the social contract.

The notion of human security provides some substance to this argument. It places emphasis on the responsibility of the state to facilitate the meeting of human rights and basic needs for its citizens, and so goes beyond a narrow state-centric security (Gasper, 2005). Work on disasters has shown the frequency with which alternative social organisation arises post-event, and also the effectiveness with which democratic-market- and authoritarian-state-centred regimes close down opposition, sometimes violently (Pelling and Dill, 2010). Examples of transformative and progressive regime changes have also been observed. They are most likely when a pre-existing alternative provides a discursive and organisational base with which to frame and disseminate a critique of the social contract (Albala-Bertrand, 1993).

Most empirical work on adaptation thus far has studied local communities of place, justified by the location specific qualities of climate impacts, especially those associated with natural hazards. But as the theoretical framework of resilience–transition–transformation explains, adaptation unfolds within all social contexts from the internal to the global. Three important but as yet seldom studied contexts are used in this book to illustrate the resilience–transition–transformation framework for climate change adaptation: the organisation, the city and the nation-state.

Following Wenger (2000),
Chapter 3
argues that the bounded spaces offered by organisations provide especially useful contexts within which to study processes of social learning and self-organisation. Five pathways are proposed through which adaptive action can be undertaken by individuals or discrete sub-groups
within an organisation: agent-centred reflexive adaptation, agent-centred institutional modification, agent-centred resource management, agent-led external action and organisational external action. Only the latter two are visible from outside the organisation as it acts to change its operating environment, which can include interaction with other organisations to effect regime level change, or acting as intermediaries in the transfer of knowledge to allow adaptive action to be taken by the most appropriate organisations.
Chapter 6
presents an analysis of a dairy farmer’s NGO, Grasshoppers, and one of the UK state agencies that regulates and advises on dairy farming, the Environment Agency. Both are examples of good practice with organisational form, as observed, not being maintained at the expense of function. Both also demonstrate the interaction of canonical and shadow social systems as vehicles for social learning. In Grasshoppers these systems are intertwined and difficult to separate. The Environment Agency, with its more formal structure, has suppressed shadow system activity but this is still critical for those actors who know how to ‘work the system’. In this way the imperatives of a public agency for transparency and efficiency are to some extent in tension with those for adaptation, which is enhanced by diversity and where formal observation is limited to allow for experimentation, even where this fails or runs counter to the objectives of the canonical system but meets local needs.

Any city is a social construction. Competing visions of the city are underlain by ideological, material and economic interests (Kohler and Chaves, 2003). The balance of power between such completing visions determines the priorities and actions of political actors and organisations affecting the city. This provides scope for examining the extent to which formal and legal rights are exercised, how far different interest groups – those on the margins of society, business interests and so on, are able to organise to defend and claim rights. As
Chapter 4
argues, for climate change adaptation this will take in those with stakes in both risk management and development policy and practice.
Chapter 7
assesses and compares governance regimes from four urban settlements in Mexico’s rapidly urbanising Caribbean coastline state of Quintana Roo, and finds evidence for resilience, transitional and transformational adaptation. Resilience is indicated by efforts to maintain business-as-usual development paths including those of the private sector mainstream but also migrant labourers drawn to the state for work with little organisation or affiliation to Quintana Roo. Transition is demonstrated by those civil society organisations that exercise existing legal and governance rights to confront unsustainable development with successes in preventing a small number of coastal developments, but little success in extending participation from consultation to meaningful engagement with the views of local actors in formulating urban development plans. Transformation is least visible, but found in the promotion of fundamentally alternative forms of development built around strengthening citizens’ self-worth and association with local places. This echoes Freire’s call for critical consciousness as a prerequisite for informed social change.

Nation-states have largely been left out of discussions on adaptation, beyond their roles as aid clients or donors or as regulators to set the policy landscape for
local actors to adapt. But the political space of the state is also a site for adaptation and of competition between different vested interests, their visions for the state and its social contract with citizens and other private actors in the future. Risk society, the social contact and human security provide a framework for analysing the influence of adaptation on social relations within states. Central to this is the extent to which legitimacy is maintained by political actors following disaster events and subsequent reflection on the production of and responses to risk and loss.
Chapter 8
presents lessons from Cyclone Bohla in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua and Hurricane Katrina in the United States. Each of these events had local impacts with national consequences – despite this only Hurricane Bohla is associated with regime change, in this case secession from West Pakistan. Hurricane Mitch stimulated progressive discourse at the international and local levels but this was not translated into action, with some reform agendas being reformulated through the lens of neo-liberal restructuring – decentralisation became privatisation, for example. Following Hurricane Katrina, a number of discourses offered challenges to the Bush Administration and no doubt the disaster contributed to regime change at the following national elections, but the most profound impact seems to have been a deepening distrust in the political process. The high degree of private sector involvement in managing risk and reconstruction also served to distance the state from direct blame in this case and left citizens without a clear target for opposition.

The aim of this book has been to offer a constructive critique of the dominant trends in thinking about adaptation and climate change. Considerable progress has already been made in delineating a vision for adaptation that is amenable to the policy process. But such clarity as there is on adaptation is in danger of being won at the expense of tackling wider questions of development through the adaptation lens. In building a case for a deeper interaction between adaptation and development, material presented in this book has tried to stay close to the climate change adaptation debate. At the same time it has sought to broaden the debate by drawing on foundational social science works that point us in new directions for questioning what adapting to climate change should be for, and who should control the process.