Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (5 page)

Literature on the limits to adaptation has largely been framed by the concerns of international actors. The challenge so defined is to provide guidance for policy makers on what might be achieved through adaptation to limit or avoid the
dangerous impact of climate change as a parallel agenda to mitigation – to help achieve a balance in investment between mitigation and adaptation (Hulme, 2009). At first this seems a technical problem of assessing the economic costs of a range of technical solutions and applying cost–benefit analysis to a range of scenarios. This can certainly help. But if adaptation is to move us towards a more sustainable development path then technological investments are only part of the solution. Changes in values and associated governance regimes will also need to be on the agenda, or may force themselves on as established institutions fail in the face of climatic extremes. Examining these limits is more difficult.

At root this approach to defining the limits to adaptation is contingent upon the levels of risk associated with climate change that are socially acceptable (Adger
et al.
, 2009a). Given the unequal social and geographical distribution of costs likely to come from mitigation or adaptation (and acceptable, or ‘unavoidable’ impacts) led strategies, this is also a political question. The limits to climate change adaptation when framed in this way are cultural, social and political. This may produce some surprising outcomes. Kuhlicke and Kruse (2009), for example, show how local adaptive actions to reduce flood risk along the Elbe river, Germany, rely mainly on anticipation and assumptions about state support, the latter actually being seen to undermine local resilience. In Australia risk of the re-introduction of mosquitoes carrying dengue disease is increasing as a consequence of government advice for households to adapt to increasing drought risk by installing domestic water tanks, the perfect breeding environment for the
Ae. Aegypti
mosquito (Beebe
et al.
, 2009).

So, how can the limits of adaptation be ascertained? There are big lessons from the past in the failure of sophisticated civilisations from the Greenland Norse to Easter Island and the Maya of Central America. In each case a changing climate interacted with dynamic social pressures to undermine productive systems that overwhelmed adaptive capacity and led towards collapse (Diamond, 2005). Contemporary extractive land management systems are revealing their limits too. Sharer (2006) shows how contemporary industrial agriculture in lowland Guatemala and southern Mexico supports fewer people and generates more local environmental degradation than Mayan farming practices, forcing an intensifying drive to fell more forest for short-term productive gain. More than anything these cases tell us that the risk from environmental change is a product of social amplification – the failure to recognise and respond in time to emergent risk – rather than an intrinsic quality of the hazard itself. More contemporary evidence of the limits to adapt alongside climatic variability and extremes comes from the failure of coping and past rounds of adaptation made manifest by natural disasters from regional food security crises, to major hurricanes and floods, or local events such as flash floods, water logging and landslides that are local disasters (ISDR, 2009).

Disasters occur when socio-ecological systems coping capacities are overwhelmed (ISDR, 2004). There are four basic pathways for this failure. First, as a result of a lack of resources – and the marginality that underpins this. This can force people (the poor and marginalised) to knowingly live or work in places
exposed to risk in order to access other benefits such as close proximity to livelihood opportunities. Lack of resources also limits people’s ability for self-protection. Second, as a result of a lack of information. Proactive adaptation is constrained when new hazards or vulnerability drivers emerge that are not planned for and may not be recognised until it is too late. This was the case in the 2003 heat-wave that claimed more than 35,000 lives in Europe, with earlier events, notably in Chicago, USA (Klinenberg, 2002), failing to stimulate learning and anticipatory adaptation in European cities. At the local level social networks can be as important as formal extension and advisory services for learning. Most acutely information fails when early warning is not provided (IFRC, 2005). Third, as a result of institutional failures. This is the principal reason for physical infrastructural failure – the proximate cause for many events. Institutions fail to enable adaptation when those at risk and managing risk are not able to learn critically, but rather are trapped in cycles of marginal improvements of existing behaviour (see
Chapter 4
); when those at risk and their advocates cannot hold risk managers to account; and when information and resources cannot be used effectively or equitably (Wisner, 2006). Fourth, as a result of the speed of development and application of appropriate technological innovations. In South Asia, in the space of a generation cell phone technology has enabled mobile phones to spread from being the preserve of the wealthy to a ubiquitous feature of urban and rural life alike with knock-on benefits including providing early warning for disaster risk (Moench, 2007). These accounts indicate the complexity of identifying limits to adaptation and the great sociological and geographical variation to be expected.

The argument presented in this book responds to these four strands of enquiry starting from a perspective of wishing to understand, rather than measure adaptation. This requires a broad lens, close to Fankhauser’s comment that adaptation as a research field can be interpreted as a revision of sustainable development. Following the critical literature on sustainable development (for example, Grin
et al.
, 2010), climate change adaptation is seen as a process not an object, with discrete capacities, actions and outcomes offering windows for observation. Elements that are subject to being contested in discourse (as different explanations for events and situation are presented) as well as materially (as different actors compete for the control and use of assets and resources). This approach also builds on a belief that the limits of adaptation are rooted in culture and society; they can be subjective but are mutable (Adger
et al.
, 2009c). The primary aspiration of this work is to open debate on adaptation as a critical process. It uses adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation as a basis for this contribution. In one sense this can be seen as adding a novel line of categorisation to those discussed in the typology above. But a more fundamental aim is to highlight adaptation to climate change as a multi-layered process, with observed acts of adaptation potentially concealing or denying opportunities for alternative pathways that could lead to different social and socio-ecological futures. Making these three levels of adaptation transparent is an initial step in supporting actors at risk and managing risk in questioning the power relations that give shape to adaptation as observed. These are tools for a critical consciousness in climate change adaptation.

The book is organised into four parts.
Part I
(Framework and theory) contains Chapters
1
and
2
.
Chapter 1
seeks to outline the intellectual and policy landscape that has thus far shaped understanding of adaptation to climate change. Following from this,
Chapter 2
offers a detailed account of those theories and research agendas in social science that have preceded the current interest in adaptation to climate change, but nonetheless, and often without recognition, continue to shape thinking. Lessons that can be learned from these precursors are then taken into a discussion of the contemporary literature on adaptation to climate change. This chapter ends with the outlining of three broad categories of adaptation based on the intention of the initiating actor: resilience, transition and transformation.

The characteristics and the range of literature from which tools can be built to analyse governance for each type of adaptation are outlined in
Table 1.1
. Adaptation that enhances resilience is characterised by functional persistence, self-organisation and social learning. Adaptation to promote transition in governance regimes includes self-organisation and social learning but can also benefit from insights provided by literature on governance and socio-technological systems. Understanding adaptive capacity or actions that could result in transformational change in socio-political regimes can usefully incorporate social contract and human security theory in addition to literature on regimes, socio-technological regimes, self-organisation and social learning.

In
Part II
(The resilience–transition–transformation framework) Chapters
3
,
4
and
5
describe the qualities of and develop the resilience–transition–transformation framework; this is explored empirically in
Part III
(Living with climate change) through Chapters
6
,
7
and
8
.

Table 1.1
Frameworks of the analysis of adaptation

In this way the book builds its argument across Chapters
3
–
8
, and to some extent its separation under the heading of resilience (
Chapter 3
), transition (
Chapter 4
) and transformation (
Chapter 5
) is heuristic as much as it is analytic. This said there is a logical progression with the analysis of functional persistence, self-organisation in
Chapter 3
being added to by the analysis of governance regimes and socio-technological transitions in
Chapter 4
and finally socio-contract and human security in
Chapter 5
.

Each case study is set in a different context:
Chapter 6
focuses on the organisation,
Chapter 7
on urban settlements and
Chapter 8
on the national policy as sites for adaptation. These contexts have been chosen because they highlight the preceding chapter’s discussion, but they also serve two other tasks. The first is to indicate the complexity of distinguishing adaptive capacity and action which is always dependent on the viewpoint of the observer. In each chapter elements of resilience, transition and transformation can be found. The second goal is to use these case studies to demonstrate the range of social contexts where adaptation unfolds and analysis is needed. At present the majority of analysis of adaptation focuses on local actions, with the site of analysis being the local community or household.

Part IV
(Adapting with climate change) contains the concluding
chapter, Chapter 9
. This final chapter synthesises the detailed discussion made in each preceding chapter and outlines the research and policy development needs that arise from the central argument that adaptation is a social, cultural and political as well as a technological process.

The adapted man, neither dialoguing nor participating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and uncritical frame of mind.

(Paulo Freire, 1969:24)

Freire warns us that without a critical awareness, adaptation is hostage to being limited to efforts that promote action to survive better with, rather than seek change to, the social and political structures that shape life chances. Similarly, Clarke (2009:21) warns that people tend to adapt to poverty by ‘suppressing their wants, hopes and aspirations’ rather than attempting to change the structures that constrain their life chances. Can the same critique be levelled at adaptation to climate change – that efforts are being directed more towards accommodating risk and its root causes rather than at the root causes themselves? The difference is between responding to drought by proving humanitarian relief to alleviate hunger, and identifying distortions in agricultural trade policy and market conditions that prevent food surpluses from moving to meet human need.

This chapter builds on
Chapter 1
by reviewing the academic literature on adaptation and adaptive capacity. The aim is to map out an analytical framework and set of linguistic tools to examine the socio-political nature of adaptation. The framework is developed in
Chapters 3
–5 and applied in
Chapters 6
–8. We begin by defining key terms and outlining the broad intellectual legacy that thinking about adaptation can learn from. Contemporary debates are then outlined and the notions of adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation are introduced.