Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
     
Structure of the book
    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
 
Resilience
Transition
Transformation
Functional persistence
*
 
 
Self-organisation
*
*
*
Social learning
*
*
*
Regime theory
 
*
*
Socio-technological transitions
 
*
*
Social contract
 

*
Human security
 
 
*

    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