Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (8 page)

First developed in the late 1970s to support decision-making under uncertainty for natural resource management (Holling, 1978), adaptive management is part of a wider body of literature on organisational management that sees social/ organisational learning as a key attribute for systems survival (Argyris and Schön 1978) (see Chapters
3
and
6
). This is often explained as the spread of successful innovations from individuals to become common practice; for example, where a new agricultural or management practice is copied until it becomes the norm. Under adaptive management individual and organisational learning is both encouraged from planned actions (such as change in the regulatory environment) and in response to unplanned environmental surprises (natural or technological disasters). While not specifically formulated with climate change in mind, the aim of providing a conceptual framework and subsequent management guidance for decision-making in contexts where information is scarce and contexts are dynamic is analogous to the challenge facing forward looking climate change adaptation (Pelling
et al.
, 2007b).

Learning is enabled in adaptive management through ongoing policy experiment. This usually takes the form of centrally developed management innovations that are piloted locally. If successful they may be replicated or up-scaled across the management regime. Underlying hypotheses explaining relationships between management actions and environmental systems are in this way compared and adapted to over time. This should produce continuous and anticipatory adaptation (Kay, 1997); indeed as the environment changes in response to social adaptations this would demarcate a coevolutionary system over time.

A range of interpretations of the adaptive management approach exist. Learning is framed as an activity at the interface of environmental and economic policy, through to wider questions of democratic principles, scientific analysis and education (Medema
et al.
, 2008). Walters and Hilborn (1978) distinguish between different degrees of formality in learning, between passive and active adaptive management, with active approaches using formal scientific methods to evaluate experiments and, it is claimed, providing more reliable information for decision-makers. Medema
et al.
(2008) describe active approaches as experience–knowledge–action cycles. In all cases high levels of stakeholder involvement are required for the surfacing of hypotheses and the translation of experimental findings into policy learning.

Evidence from existing experiments in adaptive management offer an early opportunity to observe the challenges likely to present themselves if adaptation to
climate change were to become mainstreamed into development. Some very significant challenges to adaptive management have been identified by Walters (1997), Lee (1993) and Medema
et al.
(2008).

In a review of 25 adaptive management regimes in riparian and coastal ecosystems of the USA, Walters (1997) found only two that were well planned with programmes being distracted by focusing on the process of model development and refinement rather than field testing and application. Walters argues that failure in the take-up of adaptive management by senior decision-makers is caused by a combination of the perceived short-term expense and risk of undertaking experiments, concern that the acknowledgement of uncertainty and acceptance of experimentation inherent in adaptive management may undermine management credibility, and lack of participation from stakeholders. Lee (1993) also analyses the barriers to take-up and adds that the high costs of information gathering and monitoring and associated difficulties in acquiring funding have also inhibited the implementation of adaptive management approaches. Medema
et al.
(2008) summarise these challenges into four barriers for implementation of adaptive management, each with an associated research agenda. These are presented in
Table 2.1
. Their most important call is for long-term research on the outcomes and challenges of adaptive management which unfold slowly and very differently in individual contexts; a proposal that fits well with the need to shift from indicating adaptation capacity to verifying the outcomes of adaptive actions.

The institutional and economic constraints identified in
Table 2.1
are all amenable to policy that can support experimentation and make learning from error an acceptable method for living with change. Where climate-change-associated uncertainty is increasing, the efficiency argument may also move in favour of a more adaptive management approach.

Adaptive management also helps to provide insight into a key element of adaptation to climate change – multi-stakeholder collaboration for social learning. Evidence suggests that many of the challenges to this aspect of adaptive management are common to other development approaches that seek to incorporate or be led by community actors. Such challenges are most well studied in international development contexts (for example, Mungai
et al.
, 2004) and often revolve around the distribution of power between local and management actors worked out through the division of labour and responsibilities, and control of information and decision-making rights (Pelling
et al
., 2007b). In a study of seven community-based forestry management organisations supported as part of adaptive management programmes in the western USA, Fernandez-Gimenez
et al.
(2008) found that the best outcomes measured by benefits in social learning, trust and community building, and application and communication of results came from projects where local actors had been given an opportunity to participate, not only in data collection and monitoring but also in design and objective setting, and where projects were supported by commensurately large budgets. Of those projects with much more limited financial support the best results were found where community members participated in multiple roles.

Table 2.1
Barriers for the implementation of adaptive management

From this more bottom-up perspective the key challenges for adaptive management – and by implication for integrating adaptation into development planning more generally – can be identified:

• the need for higher level organisations to be receptive to local viewpoints and undertake learning in response,

• the challenges of maintaining local engagement over extended time-spans, and

• determining and securing the needed level of technical assistance and science capacity to ensure the validity and credibility of community-led efforts.

Fernandez-Gimenez
et al.
(2008) also point to the opportunities that adaptation can open. They note that community-led approaches to adaptive management can be a source of local skill training and employment generation in the establishment of an ecological monitoring workforce. These could in part offset or help to justify the financial costs of adaptation in development.

The notion of coping has acquired a sizable and well developed literature. It describes the strategies used by those living with rapid onset disasters such as flash floods, and chronic disasters, including drought and food insecurity (Wisner
et al.
, 2004). This matches well the dual interests of adaptation to climate extremes and base-line change. Coping has also been used to explore social change in relation to wider impacts of social violence and personal tragedy (Lee
et al.
, 2009). Despite this wealth of knowledge of direct relevance to climate change adaptation, learning has been limited (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). This makes it important to identify what, if any, are the similarities between coping and adaptation, and what adaptation could usefully take from this literature; and also to make clear the boundaries between these two concepts.

Within the natural disasters and food security literature numerous models for coping have been proposed since the 1970s. These have variously been framed by entitlements (Sen, 1981), human ecology (Hewitt, 1983), game theory (Uphoff, 1993) and livelihoods analysis (Leach
et al.
, 1997). Across these theoretical realms models tend to be agency focused, the majority operating at the household level and to differentiate coping either by stage or sector of action. Burton
et al.
(1993) is one of the most encompassing models, connecting slow cultural change with rapid adjustments. This four-stage model commences with loss absorption where hazard impacts are tolerated, absorbed as part of the ongoing coevolution of socio-ecological systems with no tangible impacts or observed, instrumental adjustments. Stage two, loss acceptance, is reached once the negative effects of a hazard are socially perceived but losses are borne without active mediation. The third stage of loss reduction commences once losses are perceived to be higher than costs for mitigation; this is the focus of most disaster reduction work. A final stage of radical change is reached once hazard impacts can no longer be mitigated and major socio-economic changes are experienced either through impact or attempts to minimise disaster loss. This broad view of coping is useful in identifying coping as simultaneously a long-term (cultural) and short-term (economic) process of realignment to changing environmental conditions. This model also flags the importance of perception on action. The implication of a temporal dimension opens the possibility of tipping points where one stage flips into another through changes in vulnerability or hazard.

Alternative categorisations of coping offer typologies of action; for example, Wisner
et al.
(2004) identify four kinds of coping action: disaster prevention and loss management (for example, hazard mitigation schemes, early warning systems), diversification of production (for example, the promotion of mixed
cropping, livelihood diversification), development of social support networks (for example, informal reciprocity or state welfare) and post-disaster actions to contain loss (for example, opportunistic livelihoods, insurance, novel social organisation). This approach has the advantage of providing technical detail but is restricted to Burton
et al.
’s stage of loss reduction and possibly radical change. While these models are designed to accommodate action at multiple spatial scales they less easily reveal the trade-offs and interactions of coping interacting across scale. Livelihoods models are one response to this challenge and explicitly situate agents (normally households) within an institutional context. Coping responses are located at the interface of actors and institutions (Leach
et al.
, 1997).

While a successful concept, coping is ultimately misleading as a metaphor for social responses to environmental change at it implies that actors are getting by, doing okay. This can be the case, with agriculturalists, for example, deploying coping mechanisms to get through the low-productivity periods in the annual agricultural cycle (Davies, 1993). But often, acts labelled as coping require the expenditure or conversion of valuable assets to achieve lower-order outcomes, undermining current capacities and future development options. This ratchet effect (Chambers, 1989) is socially amplified when multiple individuals, households or businesses deploy similar economic strategies – selling assets or changing livelihoods – and so undermining market value. Competition can turn into collaboration with virtuous magnifier effects through the use of social capital, which can be built up and whose impact can be extended through multiple simultaneous actions. There are, however, limits even to individual and societal stocks of social capital so that continuing environmental stress or repeat shocks can lead to a cascade of failure as social and economic assets are expended.
Figure 2.2
indicates a sequence of coping acts that can lead to collapse as assets are depleted in the face of unrelieved stress.

Swift (1989) argues that household collapse becomes inevitable once core social and economic assets are lost and is observed even when macro-economic conditions improve, revealing how individual vulnerability, or capacity to cope, operates with a degree of independence from structural conditions. Households, especially poor households, live with many kinds of risk as well as a desire to fulfil unmet needs and wants. So it is that households have to play off expenditures on immediate household maintenance against investment to recover lost resources or offset anticipated risk, and this can make it more difficult to replace savings or productive assets once they have been expended through coping. The potential for social capital to be undermined through ever more destructive rounds of coping links household collapse to that of collectively held assets such as social cohesion or notions of community. Commencing with a shift in investment and use from bridging to bonding capital that amplifies cultural difference and competitive group behaviour (Goodhand
et al.
, 2000), subsequent coping detracts from more fundamental aspects of local social capital through a withdrawal of investment in short-term (health) and long-term (education) social capital, and finally in fragmentation of the most basic social unit – the household. As with the economic cascade, cultural contexts will determine the order movement. For