Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (19 page)

Where transitional adaptation is concerned with those actions that seek to exercise or claim rights existing within a regime, but that may not be routinely honoured (for example, the active participation of local actors in decision-making), transformational adaptation describes those actions that can result in the over-turning of established rights systems and the imposition of new regimes. As with adaptation as resilience or transition, any evaluation of the outcome of transformational adaptation will be dependent on the viewpoint of the observer (Poovey, 1998). Efforts undertaken to contain or prevent scope for transformational adaptation are as important as the adaptive pathways themselves in understanding the relationships between climate change associated impacts and social change. For example, it is very common for the social instability that follows disaster events to be contained by state actors. This is achieved through the suppression of emergent social organisation and associated values halting the growth of alternative narratives or practices that might challenge the status quo, and lead to transformation as part of post-event adaptation (Pelling and Dill, 2006).

The socio-ecological systems literature has less to say about transformation than resilience and transitional change. Nelson
et al.
(2007:397) describe transformation as ‘a fundamental alteration of the nature of a system once the current ecological, social, or economic conditions become untenable or are undesirable’. But for many people, especially the poor majority population of many countries at the frontline of climate change impacts, everyday life is already undesirable and frequently often chronically untenable. Here we come to a central challenge for systems analysis which places the system itself as the object of analysis. Resistance in a social system can allow it to persist (be resilient) in the face of manifestly untenable or undesirable ecological, social or economic features for sub-system components. Theoretical work on nested systems allows some purchase on this (Adger
et al.
, 2009a), but is very difficult to develop empirically. The points at which these failures lead to challenges for the overarching regime serve as tipping points for transformation. Tipping points that Nelson
et al.
(2007) point out can be driven by failures that are absolute (untenable) or relative (undesirable), so that cultural values play as much a role as thermodynamic, ecological or economic constraints on pushing a system towards transformation.

There is scope for transformation to arise from the incremental change brought about by transitions (see
Chapter 4
). Subsequent claims on the existing system
results in modifications at the subsystem level. Over time and in aggregate this forces an evolutionary transformation in the overarching system under analysis. It is this pathway to transformation which existing climate change literature has focused upon. With an interest in practical ways in which productive systems might transform under climate change, Nelson
et al.
(2007) describe this process as systems adjustment and include the implementation of new management decisions or the redesigning of the built environment as examples. This aspect is considered in
Chapter 4
.

Classifying transformational adaptation is sharpened by identifying: (1) the unit of assessment – sub-systems and overarching systems may be undergoing different kinds of adaptation, or none at all – as well as their interactions; (2) the viewpoint of the observer, which can place a logic for a normative assessment of transformation; and (3) distinguishing between intention, action and outcome. A single type of action, for example greater local actor participation in risk management decision-making, can promote resilience, transition or transformation – it is the outcome that counts, and outcomes cannot always be planned for. It is the fear of surprises and incremental change in social relations that encourages tight control of emergent social organisation for risk and impact management and forces many actions into the shadow system of informal relations and organisation.

Where should one look to reveal the challenges and potential directions for transformative elements of adaptation? Most practical work on adaptation focuses on addressing proximate causes (infrastructure planning, livelihood management and so on). Transformation, however, is concerned with the wider and less easily visible root causes of vulnerability. These lie in social, cultural, economic and political spheres, often overlapping and interacting. They are difficult to grasp, yet felt nonetheless. They may be so omnipresent that they become naturalised, assumed to be part of the way the world is. They include aspects of life that are globalised as well as those that are more locally configured. The former do not have identifiable sites of production and require individual and local as well as higher order scales of action to resolve (Castells, 1997). The latter are more amenable to action within national and local political space.
Table 5.1
identifies three analytical frames that each reveal different aspects of domination and the associated production of vulnerability. Each points to specific indicators for transformation as part of adaptation.

The indicators of transformation identified in
Table 5.1
require deep shifts in the ways people and organisations behave and organise values and perceive their place in the world. Together they help describe the features a sustainable and progressive social system might be expected to exhibit. They operate at the level of epistemology: the ways people understand the world. Surface – transitional – changes are already observable; for example, in the uptake of socio-ecological systems framing in adaptation and more widely in natural resource management. But transformation speaks to much broader processes of change that encompass individuals across societies, not only specific areas of professional practice, though such enclaves may yet prove to be the niches that lead to

Table 5.1
Adaptation transforming worldviews

profound societal change (see
Chapter 4
). More tangibly, transformation that moves beyond intention also unfolds at the level of political regime. Here the root causes of vulnerability are made most visible when latent vulnerability is realised by disaster. The post-disaster period is an important one for understanding the interplay of dominant and alternative discourses and organisation for development and risk management and is examined below.

Following this initial discussion of the nature of transformational adaptation this chapter examines risk society, human security and the social contract as lenses to direct analysis of transformation within adaptation. The influence of disasters as moments in national political life that can catalyse regime change are then reviewed.

For Western science and policy discourse, fear of surprises from climate change has been predominantly interpreted through adaptation as requiring actions that can help to manage risk by greater control of the environment. This confounds proximate with root causes of climate change risk (Pelling, 2010). Environmental
hazard under climate change is an outcome of the coevolution of human and bio-physical systems, not simply of external environmental systems acting upon human interests. In this context, perhaps the most profound act of transformation facing humanity as it comes to live with climate change requires a cultural shift from seeing adaptation as managing the environment ‘out there’ to learning how to reorganise social and socio-ecological relationships, procedures and underlying values ‘in here’. This in turn demands a strong component of conceptual and social reorganisation. How far this might precipitate political and economic regime change is unclear.

Ulrich Beck has written extensively on the nexus of modernity, technology, the environment and human security in what he calls risk society (Beck, 1992). His theory of reflexive modernity posits that transformations in the nature of rationality are the basis for contemporary environmental and social challenges, and it is at this deep level that change must arise for risks to be avoided at root cause. Beck argues that modernity has produced a simplified model to understand the world, one that fragments and isolates different components. This approach has led to the application of sector specific technologies for development and risk management. There are undeniable successes with this approach but climate change impacts reveal the limits. The complexity of socio-ecological systems dynamism exemplified by climate change and adaptation cannot be captured by individual sectors or sciences. The influence of socio-ecological thinking and systems theory in the sciences is one response to this. Policy actors have been slower to respond with administrative structures and political regimes, sticking with increasingly inappropriate structures. These are structures – in administrations including Ministries of the Environment, Civil Defence, Central Banks and Foreign Affairs – that need to work together to adapt progressively to the risks of climate change. Beck’s analysis is striking, suggesting that the isolated and fragmented nature of management and practical technologies created within this model of reality allow uncontrolled interactions inbetween. This results in unforeseen and catastrophic consequences including climate change. Moreover, due to the closed nature of the system, alternative trajectories are blocked:

Risk society arises in the continuity of autonomous modernization processes, which are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats. Cumulatively and latently, the latter produce threats, which call into question and eventually destroy the foundations of industrial society. (Beck, 1992:5–6)

While developed with rich, industrialised economies in mind, Beck’s basic thesis is transferable to those poorer countries that have used industrialisation to drive agricultural and urban development (Leonard, 2009). Foreign direct investment and the conditionalities of aid that promote market led industrialisation from the outside broaden responsibility and perhaps undermine the reflexivity of local and even natioanl actors. But the root causes of the climate change challenge and the consequent need to situate adaptation (and mitigation) within development,
not as technical adjucts to it, remains the same. Beck channels his hope for recovery in the formulation of a radically alternative model of modernity, but finds the tools and insights needed to challenge the socioeconomic policies that lead us towards disastrous outcomes
within
society. He believes that risk society is inherently reflexive and perceives the contradictions between its original premises (human advancement), and the outcomes (environmental disaster), but argues that radical change must come from socio-political interventions designed to transform development driven by industrialisation, going well beyond the risk management agenda, including that being associated with climate change. Progress has been slow; five years after publishing his thesis of the relationship between risk society and modernity, Beck observed that consumption had become a key driver alongside industrialisation in the production of hazards and vulnerabilities. This suggested that neoliberal economic policies are an increasing threat to human security – reflexivity has not yet led to transformation but rather an acceleration of the root causes of crisis (Beck, 1999). In the succeeding decade little has changed beyond the increasing pace and intensity of consumption and associated risk production, and the depth of inequality in risk at scales from the global to local. A slow but growing concensus for the reorganisation of technology and finance was given a brief and short lived stimulace by the 2008–10 global economic crisis.

In the existing policy landscape, the challenges of attaining a more holistic and reflexive approach to living with climate change and its impacts can be seen playing out in the disaster risk reduction community – a critical component of adaptation. This community has long argued for the advantages of conceiving of environmental risk as embedded within development and of confronting development, not the environment, in seeking to reduce risk, but has a long way to go in embedding this within dominant policy frameworks. Some progress is being made and is reflected, for example, in sections of the guiding Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–15. This international agreement is non-legally binding but compels signatory states to work towards five areas of action. The first of these promotes institution building and calls for the integration of disaster risk management within development frameworks such as poverty reduction strategies (see
http://www.unisdr.org
). Reflexivity, though, is ultimately about changing values and requires a political and cultural process in addition to the sectoral-technical one described above.