Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (18 page)

A range of visions that can provide narratives for the direction of dominant risk management decisions in a city are shown in
Table 4.2
. Different visions of urbanisation include the city as a motor for generating macro-economic wealth,

Table 4.2
Linking visions of the city to pathways for managing vulnerability

an organism turning raw materials into products and waste, a source of livelihoods for urban citizens, an historical accumulation of physical assets and infrastructure or a place for cultural and political exchange and debate.

Visions and associated risk management preferences need not be mutually exclusive and more often visions provide only a rationale for prioritisation. As climate change and other development dynamics interact in the city existing narratives will be tested. With this comes the possibility of opening space for renegotiating priorities within a single policy area and also more broadly so that resources and political will may be drawn into or away from risk management. The complexity of risk management means that there are many potential actors with a stake in the existing regime, and with an interest in any renegotiation of the balance of priorities in risk management that adapting to climate change may offer – whether through replication, up-scaling or mainstreaming.
Table 4.3
summarises the kinds of actors likely to have a direct stake in adapting urban risk management sector. The key message to take from this is the wide range of urban actors that can be engaged with through even a single sector, extending from applied emergency and risk management to development regulation and planning. This indicates both the number of opportunities that can exist for

Table 4.3
Urban disaster risk reduction: multiple activities and stakeholders

inserting progressive practices such as inclusive decision-making or downward-accountability into policy reform in this single sector but also the challenge of overcoming institutional lock-in and inertia that has often been found in sectors with multiple actors where existing inter-organisational alliances act to make the existing regime resilient.

Opportunities exist for innovation niches within private, public and civil sectors and through communities of practice that cross these boundaries. Through local branches or by advocacy at the landscape level international agencies and other governments may also be active in shaping niche or landscape led innovation. Where innovation is fostered and how it is evaluated and diffused throughout the regime in transition will also be a function of the balance of formal and informal or shadow systems in the city. Social networks and communities of practice that cross-cut formal organisational boundaries will influence scope for the development of novel adaptations, and the speed and direction of diffusion and reform. In urban contexts local government should play a pivotal role as a mediator and facilitator of development in addition to any direct regulatory and management roles. That the reality of local government is so often as an under-resourced actor, lacking in human capital, popular legitimacy and political influence is a great constraint. This is illustrative of Jerneck and Olsson’s (2008) observation that the regime level tends to be resistant to change and that innovation comes more often from local niches or the wider landscape and is accepted only when the regime is stressed.

Opportunity for transition opens when adaptations, or efforts to build adaptive capacity, intervene in relationships between individual political actors and the institutional architecture that structures governance regimes. Transitional adaptation falls short of directly challenging dominant cultural and political regimes, but can set in place pathways for incremental, transformational change. Both actor-oriented regime theory and socio-technological transition theory provide ways forward for drawing out the connections between adaptation and social evolution short of regime change. They share an emphasis on the role of agency in the dialectical relationship between actors and institutions that constitute governance systems; agency that if fostered by a supportive governance regime can be a resource of alternative ideas and practices available for implementation following changes in the wider physical and economic–political environment.

Existing regimes can block progressive adaptation at the level of transition, especially when change threatens established power relations. Marginalised actors can also be reluctant to undertake change when there is uncertainty over the outcomes of reform or where short-term transactions costs are high, compared to adapting through resilience. Where local adaptations are successful and open transitions, diffusion into the wider society is also challenging without government support. Fragmented transitions run the risk of exacerbating inequalities as successful adaptations not evenly applied across communities or sectors. External shocks that show the existing institutional architecture wanting can potentially provide the impetus needed to generate political will for transition, and potentially also transformation. This is the opportunity that climate change brings.

Risk society, human security and the social contract

Instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.

(Rousseau, 1973, original 1762:181)

For Rousseau, a just society is one where those with power are held to account over their ability to protect core and agreed-upon rights for citizens. As a normative theoretician, Rousseau argued that the ideal social contract, one that confers upon rulers the legitimacy to retain and exercise power, would ultimately be granted by the citizenry, not assumed or god-given: an agreement ratified at the level of culture as well as law, and one that can be transformed if either side fails in its part of the contract. But Rousseau also recognised that the social contract could be undemocratic, imposed with force or through the manipulated complicity of citizens themselves. When prevailing social relations are a root cause of vulnerability and a target for adaptation, this observation means that change will not be easy (Williams, 2007). The classical formulation of the social contract, such as that offered by Rousseau, is also revealing for what it does not include. Rights are extended only to citizens. The globalised and teleconnected impacts of climate change and adaptation decisions require that future generations and those living beyond national boundaries also be considered, as well as the non-human.

This chapter builds on the preceding discussions around adaptation as resilience and transition. These introduced the notions of social learning, self-organisation, actors in regimes and pathways for socio-technological transition. The notions of risk society, the social contract and human security are offered as theoretical devises to help reveal the fault-lines of dominant society. These are by no means the only theoretical lenses that could be brought to help examine transformational adaptation. They have been selected because together they provide a continuum for transformational adaptation that stretches from conceptualisations of development under modernity to the application of policy for national and human security. In this way they provide a landscape of ideas to help position and understand adaptations that seek to address root causes and leverage
transformation. Like resilience and transition, transformation can be seen as an intention or as an outcome of adaptation. It also operates at all scales, from the local to international, often simultaneously and in ways that are difficult to perceive. In identifying the assumptions that underlie modernity as a potential focus for adaptation transformation is also directed towards internal – cognitive change; for example, through the production and reproduction of dominant cultural perspectives that emphasise and justify individualism and undermine social solidarity and collective action: a frequently identified key component of local adaptive capacity (Smith
et al
., 2003).

The notion of a social contract is not only abstract, it can help in the analysis of crises of legitimacy that precede political regime change, and potentially be used to avoid such crises. Disasters associated with climate change triggers are but one driver of crisis, and do not guarantee transformational change (see
Table 5.2
). In such cases loss of legitimacy is to be expected when observed risk or losses exceed those that are socially acceptable. Beneath this the consequences of climate change are accepted as a play-off against other gains. Of course not everyone in society will hold the same tolerance to risk or loss and both will change over time as cultural contexts evolve. In this way the social contract is kept in a tension by risk and loss (as well as opportunity) associated with climate change, and also by whose values are included in the social contract. In addition to the established social divisions along lines of class, gender, cultural identity, productive sector, geographical association and so on, climate change also requires the recognition of future generations and distant interests in local decision-framing (O’Brien
et al.
, 2009). The inclusion or exclusion of these voices will determine the extent to which climate change is perceived to contribute to individual disasters or crises, and the points at which different actors are held responsible for the management of climate change and its consequences. This in turn shapes priorities for social responses to climate change risk and loss. That the interests of future generations or citizens of second countries should be allowed in this conversation fundamentally challenges established social organisation based upon the nation-state.

Can adapting to climate change incorporate this dynamic and be a mechanism for progressive and transformational change that shifts the balance of political or cultural power in society? Evidence for the potential of transformational change within national boundaries can be found in the slow and limited acceptance of international aid by the government of Myanmar following Hurricane Nargis. In large part this behaviour was a result of fear of the destabilising influences of international humanitarian and development actors on the regime, a policy that analysts have also attributed to the need for the ruling military elite to demonstrate its control over society – especially at a time when the impacts of the hurricane meant its popular and international legitimacy was at crisis point; and the potential for usurping rich agricultural land from Karen ethnic minority
farmers in the Irrawaddy delta where the hurricane made landfall (Klein, 2008). Distrust by the Myanmar regime of international and especially Western and civil society actors has had a byproduct of catalysing organisational reform at the regional level. The leadership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional economic grouping, in responding to Hurricane Nargis has resulted in tighter regional cooperation for disaster response. This is an important regional adaptation, one based on a principal of political non-intervention and so a form of adaptation that adds resilience to the status quo. The durability of this position amidst calls for a more engaged approach of ‘non-indifference’ (Amador III, 2009) and its consequences for bottom-up transitional or transformational capacity are yet to be seen.