Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (12 page)

Returning to the question of how to prioritise resources to support adaptation, a review of Western philosophical traditions suggests there is no simple or single answer. Justice theories distinguish between logics of equality, priority, sufficiency
and desert. Egalitarian principles demand that justice be concerned with equality of some relevant distributable elements. Prioritarian principles claim the importance of supporting adaptation for the least advantaged subjects. Sufficientism holds that every subject must have a sufficient, yet not equal, share of support in adaptation. The justness of a society depends on its capacity to give people the support they deserve (Grasso, 2008). Theories are further differentiated by feminist and communitarian arguments that justice is contextual (Konow, 2003) and over the nature of equality. With respect to egalitarian principles, Sen (1987) differentiates between equality in outcomes (equal post-adaptation vulnerability), the meeting of needs (some basic level of security for all) and command over resources (equality in adaptive capacity). Individual principles can be reinforcing strengthening arguments. For example, prioritarian logic is supported by Shue’s ‘guaranteed minimum’ principle of equity (Shue, 1999) which, from a sufficientarian standpoint, states that those who have less than enough for a decent human life be given enough. This general principle of justice has been applied to climate change adaptation to support the argument that interventions prioritise the most socially vulnerable first (Paavola and Adger, 2006; Paavola
et al.
, 2006, Adger
et al.
, 2009c).

Of the approaches outlined above, it is worth spending some more time with Rawls who helps add clarity to the different realms within which justice for climate change adaptation is manifest. Rawls argues that for any social system justice requires both the application of distributional and procedural justice. Rawls made these two elements of justice the cornerstones of his
Theory of Justice
(1971). Procedural justice talks to the institutions and behaviours that frame decision-making, distributional justice talks to the outcomes of these decisions. Under Rawls, a just society is one where procedural justice is embodied in an egalitarian social contract based on reciprocity, so that individual or sectional interests are given les weight than the overriding drive for distributive justice (Chapters
5
and
8
develop the importance of the social contract for establishing justice in adaptation). This understanding of procedural justice places with individual citizens the responsibility for producing specific declinations of equality and defining the basic structures for their society. With this responsibility comes the right to craft and argue for alternative development and adaptation visions. The climate change literature highlights three aspects of procedural justice that it is argued determine the quality of procedural justice (Paavola, 2005; Paavola
et al.
, 2006):

• Recognition demands acceptance of minority perspectives in planning and decision-making processes, implying that the views and aspirations of the most marginalised and vulnerable be acknowledged.

• Participation requires access to knowledge so that all affected parties can formulate informed viewpoints and be involved in the decision-making process with engagement ranging from consultation to local autonomy.

• Distribution relates to whom holds and uses power to ensure equal participation and recognition of the weakest in decision-making.

This triad can be applied across scales from global negotiations on adaptation regimes to local planning for adaptation in development and together with distributional justice is necessary to underpin legitimacy and popular consent for international, national and local adaptation strategies (Adger
et al.
, 2006).

As with economic analysis, ethics does not provide an easy answer but rather a logic around which options can be discussed with more transparency. Experience from the disaster risk reduction community suggests that while ethical arguments may be useful in the shaping of priorities, once political attention is gained economic based arguments are more persuasive in advocacy.

Adaptation offers a unique lens for understanding and influencing development, and operates at different levels of engagement with specific social systems.
Table 2.4
identifies three levels at which adaptation can intervene in development – through enabling resilience, transition or transformation. These three levels are introduced below to provide a framework for assessing adaptation aims and outcomes and then developed in the following chapters. No level of adaptation is intrinsically more desirable than the others; everything depends on context and viewpoint. Very little in social life is uncontested, so it is unlikely there will be many cases where there is an easy consensus on which form of adaptation is required. Indeed different actors may be working to build capacity and action for adaptation at different levels simultaneously; for example, when local community actors organise to challenge local power asymmetries as part of an agenda for transformative adaptation in a locale which is also the target of government sponsored technical reforms to livelihood or infrastructure provision seeking to build resilience (and possibly mollify local acts of transformation).

Adaptation to build resilience acts at the most contained level, seeking only change that can allow existing functions and practices to persist and in this way not questioning underlying assumptions or power asymmetries in society. Transformation is the deepest form of adaptation indicated by reform in over-arching political-economy regimes and associated cultural discourses on development, security and risk. Transition acts at an intermediary level of engagement, focusing on the governance regime but through acts that seek to assert full rights and responsibilities rather than make changes in the regime. In asserting rights or undertaking responsibilities that might previously have been neglected or disallowed incremental transformation is a possibility. Each form of adaptation can include changes to values, institutions, behaviour and assets so that it is the scope and range, rather than depth of change that distinguishes each adaptive form.

While it is possible to distinguish individual ideal types theoretically and empirically, for a specific policy domain or social group different levels of adaptation may not be clearly bounded and can influence one another. Transformative adaptation will at a minimum include a critical reflection on existing institutions

Table 2.4
Attributes of adaptation for resilience, transition and transformation

and practices working at the levels of transition and resilience. Over time, resilient and transitional adaptations may highlight wider challenges, build capacities and weaken barriers for reform and so feed the adaptive transformation of regimes. It is also possible that apparent success at one level of adaptation may hide problems at other levels so that resilience can inhibit transition or transformation. The power of resilience to suppress deeper changes in the institutions and values that shape development and risk management is reinforced by its attractiveness as a solution to climate change risks for donors and government precisely because it does not challenge the wider status quo. The technical and organisational innovations required by resilient adaptation are less politically challenging, often more visible and quicker to implement than transitional and transformative adaptations.

Social learning and self-organisation

The ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.

(IPCC, 2008:880)

The IPCC definition of resilience, presented above, is forward looking, placing emphasis on capacities rather than outcomes of self-organisation and social learning. Within this, adaptation is positioned as a sub-set of resilience (along with functional persistence and self-organisation). Following from this definition, the framework suggested uses the idea of resilience to capture the first kind of adaptation to be discussed in detail in this book. In our use, adaptation as resilience is a form that seeks to secure the continuation of desired systems functions into the future in the face of changing context, through enabling alteration in institutions and organisational form.

Elsewhere (Olsson
et al.
, 2006; Nelson
et al.
, 2007) the need to recognise adaptation as including more fundamental shifts has led authors to include the areas of transition (
Chapter 4
) and transformation (
Chapter 5
) as sub-sets of resilience. These are not problematic arguments, but the framework presented in this book finds the distinctions so central to the nature of adaptation that separate identities are proposed for these three forms of adaptation. This conviction comes from empirical work where imposing resilience in the face of great social inequality is very problematic (see Chapters
7
and
8
).

The IPCC definition, and ours, both point at the influence of socio-ecological systems (SES) theory on the understanding of resilience. The three cornerstones of the SES construction of resilience are included: functional persistence, self-organisation and adaptation (if seen as an outcome of social learning) (Folke, 2006). The contribution of SES theory to understanding resilience will be reviewed here and also in following chapters where the elements of resilience described in SES theory contribute to understanding transitional and transformative adaptation. The defining quality of resilience that distinguishes it from transition and transformation is a desire to maintain functional integrity.

This chapter begins by presenting a vision of adaptation as resilience. The contribution of SES theory to this construction of resilience is then examined with a detailed assessment of social learning and self-organisation. This framework is then combined with organisational management theory to build a framework for examining adaptation as resilience.

Resilience seeks to protect those activities perceived by an actor to be beneficial for human wellbeing and ecological sustainability but threatened by contemporary or future pressures associated with climate change. The vision of adaptation as resilience is to support the continuation of desired systems functions into the future through enabling changes in social organisation and the application of technology. Such changes are facilitated through social learning and self-organisation (see below) to enable technological evolution, new information exchange or decision-making procedures. More than this, and within the limits of bounded systems, such as development policy for a single watershed or a dairy farming business, achieving resilience may require change in values and institutions within managing organisations, and this can include the challenging of established priorities and power relations and potentially lead to a redistribution of goods and bads (Eakin and Wehbe, 2009). In this way, adaptation as resilience has the potential to contribute to incremental progressive change in distributive and procedural justice within organisational structures. When individual cases that build resilience through internal value shifts are upscaled through government action or replicated horizontally, real opportunities can open for contributing to transitional or transformative change in society (see Chapters
4
and
5
), though outcomes can be regressive as well as progressive for sustainable development.

Adaptation as resilience can also allow unsustainable or socially unjust practices to persist (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008). This is perhaps easiest to understand in social contexts where entrenched power asymmetries and exploitative economies are manipulated by the elite to maintain power, even when this undermines sustainability. Such outcomes are less likely when local or national decision-making is held to account, but resilience can still undermine long-term sustainability while appearing to meet the demands of adapting to climate change. This can happen when sustainability challenges are recognised but the transactions costs (including political costs) of change are perceived to be higher than doing nothing, with the least bad option being to adapt within available constraints until perceived thresholds of sustainability are breached, forcing change. For example, in the use of desalination plants to compensate for water demand, the proximate need is met but at a cost of high energy use and pollution of the marine environment. The dynamism of climate change and the unpredictability of local impacts provide the additional rationale of uncertainty to justify resilience as the preferred form of adaptation.