Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (7 page)

The notion of adapting to environmental stress and shock has been the focus of previous rounds of academic investigation from fields outside climate change. To varying degrees the ideas generated have been recognised and incorporated in the development of the idea within the climate change community. Jeffry and McIntosh (2006) identify relevant literature dispersed across economics (industry sector dynamics, innovation processes and risk-taking behaviour), psychology (characteristics of inventors and risk takers), philosophy of science (roles of innovation/invention), sociology (population dynamics, sociology of groups and networks), anthropology (collapse of complex societies) and evolutionary theory (role of diversity and adaptation in survival).

Despite the rich inheritance of contemporary writing on adaptation to climate change this is rarely explicitly noted. Four streams of thinking on adaptation are examined in this section; the first historical, the others still in use and interacting with the climate change adaptation discourse, but all largely outside the mainstream of writing on climate change adaptation. First to be reviewed here are those perspectives on adaptation that have drawn from the ecological systems
(cybernetics and coevolution). This strategy has its roots in early sustainable development theory building with efforts to overcome the false dualism of nature and society. Second is a body of work that uses the language of adaptation and learning to describe policy development over time (adaptive management). Third are those approaches that have come from the interface of international development, governance and disaster studies (coping).

Together these antecedents of the contemporary debate on adaptation in the climate change community make up a conceptual backdrop, one with which to contextualise contemporary literature on adaptation to climate change, and to identify gaps and repetition in the development of the idea and its critiques.

Academic geography has a long history of engagement with adaptation. In the 1970s and ’80s this was first explicitly formulated as part of an experiment with cybernetic theory. Cybernetics drew on evolutionary theory to connect analysis of social and natural systems. It was in part a response to the preceding schools of regional geography and human ecology studies that tended to present the environment as little more than background, assuming its malleability to human intervention. Cybernetics sought to provide a more integrated approach to human–environment relations, and one that could be engaged with in a quantitative manner and so exploit the new computer modelling capacities emerging at that time. Natural disasters, including slow onset drought and food security events, were used to exemplify the need for the more integrated approach offered by cybernetics. Given that the cybernetic approach and contemporary resiliency school (see
Chapter 3
) have similar roots in ecological theory, the criticisms levelled at cybernetics are especially worthy of consideration.

In 1975, Vayda and McCay first advocated adaptation as a bridging concept between cultural ecology and natural hazards research. They conceptualised the interaction of social and natural systems through backward and forward flows in energy and material. This helped to provide some quantitative modelling purchase but was not further developed. But many elements of adaptation introduced in this period do reoccur in contemporary debates. This includes an interest in the temporal staging of adaptive actions, on the possibility of mal- or sub-optimal adaptation, and in later work on social context as a root cause of adaptive actions. With its base in ecological understandings of systems dynamics this perspective used parsimony (rather than equity) as a measure of effectiveness in adaptation. Under this rubric adaptive actions should not require any unnecessary or excessive commitment of resources. Should initial adaptations prove insufficient additional actions would be taken so that adaptation unfolds in a sequential and rational pattern of increasingly resource-intensive interventions (Slobodkin and Rappaport, 1974). The ecological origins of this approach to adaptation inspired this rationalist logic and also removed any discussion of values or justice. The aim of adaptation was to maintain stasis in the face of environmental perturbations, not to enable progressive change in social or socio-ecological
systems. A contemporary critic, Morren (1983), also regarded the cybernetic approach as being limited by focusing on loss reduction not prevention.

Under the cybernetic approach, adaptive capacity was approached through the notion of flexibility: ‘uncommitted potentiality for change’ (Bateson, 1972:497). The principal of parsimony meant that loss of flexibility (opportunity for future adaptive actions) was seen as a particularly significant cost of adaptation. Much effort was put into developing typologies of flexibility and adaptation and comparing this with specific environmental pressures. Counter to the rule of parsimony, great variation was observed in the actions taken by people facing similar hazards (Morren, 1983). By supporters of this approach such findings were considered as irrational actions by those at risk. Critics argued that while the cybernetic approach had made progress in providing a framework that recognised social context as a mediating pressure on the environment, shaping risk and adaptation, it did not have the conceptual tools to analyse these relationships. Analysis of adaptation was trapped at the level of information access, transmission and decision-making apparatuses. Deeper social relations of production and power were not included.

One outcome of this failing of the cybernetics approach, which continues to influence work on adaptation and vulnerability to disaster risk today, was to provide the inspiration for the self-styled, alternative school (Hewitt, 1983). The alternative school sought to reveal the structural root causes shaping risk by drawing from neo-Marxist dependency theory. Within this tradition, Watts argued that:

the forces and social relations of production constitute the unique starting point for human adaptation which is the appropriation and transformation of nature into material means of social reproduction. This process is both social and cultural and it reflects the relationships to and participation in the production process. (Watts, 1983:242).

For Watts, adaptation went beyond human responses to environmental change or natural hazard to incorporate all processes of environmental transformation and interaction with the natural world including extraction for wealth creation. This key conceptual contribution continues today with the realisation that climate change adaptation is but a part of deeper and broader processes of social change and inertia. In analytical terms the key contribution of the alternative school was to open a theoretical framework grounded in critical theory for the analysis of the structural constraints that they argued determined human capacity and action in response to external environmental shocks. This critical view expanded analysis from the technical attributes that surround specific adaptation decisions, to the social life in which they are embedded. Contributions included critique of the structures of humanitarianism and international development that it was argued allowed vulnerability to persist and did not support progressive adaptation in the face of environmental risk (Susman
et al.
, 1983). This critique has particular salience given the influence of ecological and systems inspired theory on the conceptualisation of adaptation within climate change science today.

Drawing metaphorically from the language of evolutionary biology, coevolution, as proposed by Norgaard (1995), extends the cosmology of adaptation by bringing in values. It also expands the time-horizon and scale of what might be considered adaptive action from the local and immediate to global and long-term interactions. Adaptation in the context of climate change similarly extends coevolution, by including inanimate natural elements as well as biotic and human ones as subjects and forces for change (Adger and Brooks, 2003). In short, coevolution is found in the reciprocity of interacting components (including human, technological, physical and bio-chemical elements and systems) within evolutionary systems. Norgaard (1995) includes knowledge and values alongside technology, social organisation and the natural environment as categories, sites and drivers for adaptation. Norgaard also moves from a materialist (adaptation can be described through technical changes, for example, in engineering or farming practices) to a relational and constructivist epistemology (where adaptation includes changes in identity and wellbeing including humanity’s relation with the non-human) so that:

a technological innovation or introduction from another region will affect the fitness of various aspects of social organisation, perhaps favoring a different mix of individual and community rights, or favoring more or less hierarchical ways of socially processing information. The changes in social organisation, in turn, might feedback on the fitness of other components in the technological system, or favor some types of values or types of knowledge over others. (Norgaard, 1995:486)

Adaptation seen through the lens of coevolution is not an end point. It is a transitional and relational episode in history; one that is open to back-sliding, distortion and amplification as outcomes interact with other sub-systems in the coevolving whole. Coevolutionary processes change structure and interaction rules. They typically preclude the possibility of previous system states reoccurring. This is a distinction from the dynamic characteristics of non-evolutionary models where only status can be changed, not guiding rules. The rules in ecological systems are fixed (until our understanding of nature and physics changes) – in social and socio-ecological systems rules of culture and law are mutable.

Coevolution emphasises change. Innovations drive the coevolutionary process, but their drivers (disaster events, macro-economic cycles, household collapse) are often not amenable to planning. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict with high confidence what will work best in the other subsystems as adaptations and their consequences coevolve with the whole system potentially never reaching a new equilibrium (Klüver, 2002). This challenge argues for a
shift from seeking to predict and control sub-systems, and through this the whole, to a framing that argues for adaptive planning. This is achieved through the maintaining of diversity to keep options open and a preference for monitoring rather than a presumption for managing or resisting changes. Consequently discourse and the flow of information, decision-making capacity and processes and ability to implement decisions are highlighted as subjects for research and policy if adaptation is to be understood and supported.

Norgaard (1995) also reflects on the relationships between humanity, nature and hydrocarbons. Under the coevolutionary epistemology he argues that humanity has coevolved with hydrocarbons, not nature/ecosystems (Norgaard, 1995). In the short–medium term this has been possible because hydrocarbons have shielded (and alienated) us from nature, but the consequences of a failure to select production systems and institutions that coevolve with nature is now being felt (Norgaard, 1995). At this scale of analysis living with climate change includes acts that are not simply adaptive or mitigative, but that underpin generic capacity, such as a movement from material consumption to community as a source of identity including the (re)building of communities of place and personal relationships with nature. Coevolution, then, points to a large gap in contemporary climate change science which has only recently begun to consider the deeper cultural needs of and drivers for adaptation (O’Brien, 2009). It also offers a framing for thinking through this problem.

The abstract nature of coevolution makes for difficult translation into an empirical research framework. While coevolution has been successful at the level of metaphor to frame accounts of adaptive behaviour within complex systems (Pelling, 2003a) and economic-ecological systems interaction at the global scale (Schneider and Londer, 1984) it has more limited applicability as a tool for local analysis. One useful line of analysis highlighted by this lens is the relationship between intention (policies) and emergence (self-organised activity) in policy sectors, the latter in large part accounting for observed divergence from policy during implementation (Sotarauta and Srinivas, 2006) and so revealing tensions between the actions and values of competing adaptive strategies or other behaviour. Jeffrey and McIntosh (2006), in a review of the coevolution of land use and water management, argue that ‘noise’ from the range of interconnections in any system makes it difficult to distinguish coevolution from state-based dynamic change, and at a more general level they ask what it is that coevolution brings that has not already been proposed through complex systems theory. More contestable is Costanza’s (2003) criticism that this approach offers little potential as a planning or predictive tool. To be sure, coevolutionary approaches are more able to capture backward than forward looking assessments of adaptation, but methods have been developed, in particular integrated scenario assessments, that allow some purchase for forward looking analysis of the interaction between sub-systems and constraints on adaptation (Lorenzoni
et al.
, 2000).

Like cybernetics and coevolution, adaptive management draws from systems theory and recognises the interdependence of the social and ecological. Its focus is also on large and complex socio-ecological systems dynamics; for example, watershed or forestry management. Its major contribution is in taking us from abstract, modelling or conceptual work to that based firmly in the empirical reality of decision-makers who wish to mainstream adaptation into changing socio-ecological contexts.