A Critical Approach to Climate Change Adaptation

Discourses, Policies and Practices

Silja Klepp, Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351677127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

This edited volume brings together critical research on climate change adaptation discourses, policies, and practices from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Drawing on examples from countries including Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Russia, Tanzania, Indonesia, and the Pacific Islands, the chapters describe how adaptation measures are interpreted, transformed, and implemented at grassroots level and how these measures are changing or interfering with power relations, legal pluralismm and local (ecological) knowledge. As a whole, the book challenges established perspectives of climate change adaptation by taking into account issues of cultural diversity, environmental justicem and human rights, as well as feminist or intersectional approaches.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Introduction

1 Governing climate change

The power of adaptation discourses, policies, and practices¹

Silja Klepp and Libertad Chavez-Rodriguez

Introduction

Climate change adaptation is an influential discourse and a powerful political concept linked to many material practices. It has the power² to set political agendas and policies and to reframe development programmes on different scales – from global to local. ‘Adaptation’ – and linked to this the concepts of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ – is currently the main notion mediating ideas on anthropogenic climate change and society. Nevertheless, it is often difficult to understand what various scholars have observed: that despite its significant political effects, most of the discussions concerning ‘adaptation’ are effectively framed in an apolitical manner (Cameron 2012; Gesing et al. 2014; Eriksen et al. 2015; Taylor 2015). This means that the political implications behind climate change adaptation are not explicitly addressed, and so remain invisible. Why is this so? And what do we learn if we focus our analysis on the political aspects, on changing power relations, growing vulnerabilities, and different kinds of injustices linked to climate change adaptation rather than the apolitical aspects of the process? This book aims to contribute to a better understanding of how climate change adaptation politics is evolving, to provide a more accurate account of what is happening on the ground, and to discuss what is needed to set free potentials for change in climate change adaptation to make it a more just and fair tool of governance.

This may be illustrated using the example of Kiribati (Oceania), where adaptation narratives are especially powerful. These Pacific islands – 33 low-lying atolls and reef islands extending just a few feet above sea level and with a permanent population of just over 110,000 – have been identified by climate scientists as highly vulnerable to climate change because of sea-level rise, more intense storms, and drought.

National budgets and aid programmes are being reframed and adaptation projects and policies are today crucial for national and regional household budgets and aid programmes in Oceania and elsewhere. In Kiribati, adaptation thinking informs political decision-making on all scales. In contexts from national to local, the people of Kiribati (the I-Kiribati) receive, appropriate, and transform adaptation measures. Here, climate change adaptation has emerged as a powerful assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Head 2009) where different interests, worldviews, and futures are negotiated. One such example is the Kiribati Adaptation Project (KAP) (Storey and Hunter 2010; Webber 2013; Donner and Webber 2014). This exemplifies those features of large adaptation projects that are most criticised: it is financed by the World Bank, it has been running since 2002, and it was established because Kiribati was seen as the ‘vulnerable of the vulnerable’. To date, the project has cost around US$10 million and has recently (2015) entered phase III. Numerous consultants have been contracted since 2002, many knowing little about the country and staying in Kiribati for a couple of days only. Even World Bank managers agree that a lot of money has been wasted and that the needs of the population were not sufficiently considered (Klepp 2014). Meanwhile, Kiribati has changed socio-economically on various levels. Arguably, this change is mainly due to aid programmes having been reframed as climate change adaptation programmes, which in turn has often resulted in a shift in responsibility from the Kiribati Government to a more abstract and ever-changing assemblage associated with climate change effects. This process is referred to by some as the ‘garbage can effect’, metaphorically being used to contain and pose diverse and often previously existing social and socio-ecological problems. Other programmes, such as those concerning domestic violence, may no longer be financed. One researcher has coined the phrase ‘performative vulnerability’ (Webber 2013), which must be enacted to receive funding from major donors. The former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, has been especially masterful at enacting performative vulnerability in international fora, drawing on images of vulnerable sinking islands partly linked to colonial legacies of perceived weak, isolated, small islands in the Pacific (Farbotko 2010). However, Kiribati’s international standing has also increased (Klepp 2014) and this has resulted in adaptation funds for many positive things, such as sanitation infrastructure, health programmes, and education. Kiribati is clearly undergoing profound change – owing to both the direct effects of the changing climate (environmental effects) and the so-called second-order effects of the changing climate (social effects) that are often also bound to discursive formations (UFZ 2008: 18). Although climate change adaptation, as realised by international donors seems to be the only viable option for survival (de Wit 2014: 57), what is missing in Kiribati are discussions about what this means for the development of the country as a whole. For example, which adaptation concepts and goals would be most appropriate and how should the growing funds for climate change adaptation be spent. These political implications, although fundamental to the future of the country, are not yet openly debated in any public fora.

Motivated by this situation and by what is happening elsewhere in the world regarding politics of climate change adaptation (Chavez-Rodriguez 2014; Klepp 2014; Klepp and Herbeck 2016; Klepp 2017), around 20 scholars – the majority from and/or undertaking research in the Global South – met in Oaxaca, Mexico, in September 2016 for intensive discussions on climate change adaptation discourses, policies, and practices. Two main themes arose: that cultural, social, and political diversity is more or less absent from climate change adaptation (Bravo 2009; Cameron 2012; Eriksen et al. 2015; Taylor 2015) and that the overwhelming social inequalities under which adaptation to climate change is taking place are not only ignored, but are often naturalised (Gesing et al. 2014: 5) or even strengthened (Bravo 2009; Dietz and Brunnengräber 2016). In this book we discuss how social science approaches can be used to move away from the prevailing viewpoints and so capture under-represented perspectives. We also discuss how to use these findings to imagine different possible futures.

Figure 1.1 Kiribati Adaptation Project’s placard, Kiribati.

Source: photo: Silja Klepp.

To show how the politics of climate change adaptation can be addressed rather than ignored, an academic ‘re-politicising’ of climate change adaptation could create a more holistic perspective: referred to by von Benda-Beckmann et al. (2009: 9) as a ‘multi-sited arena of negotiation’. This includes the structural aspects, namely the networks of interactions connecting various actors and different kinds of actants (Latour 1996; Ingold 2008) and the power relations and rationalities that organise these interactions and are reproduced or changed by them (von Benda-Beckmann et al. 2009). Our approach implies a process-oriented analysis and more attention to the socio-political context (Eriksen et al. 2015; Moloney et al. 2018). It promotes climate change adaptation as a ‘travelling idea’ that is interpreted, localised, and modified in different settings (Weisser et al. 2014) or as ‘mobile policy’ locally translated through practice (Cochrane and Ward 2012: 7). We also recognise the idea that climate change is a neutral, apolitical, and universal imaginary projected by climate science, and detached from local responses to climate (Jasanoff 2010: 235) and a global imaginative resource (Hastrup and Fog Olwig 2012: 2). The various chapters of this book will explore a number of questions: which social dynamics can evolve within the framework of climate change adaptation in various spaces? Which assumptions and rationalities are inherent in mainstream climate change adaptation discourses, policies, and practices? Which patterns of use and misuse can we observe regarding climate change adaptation? Which social processes are initiated or hindered through climate change adaptation?

The rest of this introductory chapter summarises the different strands of discussion regarding a political analysis of climate change adaptation. These ideas are examined in greater detail in Chapters 2 to 15. We start by providing a short history of the term ‘adaptation’, in order to better understand its dramatic revival (Taylor 2015: 6) in the context of climate change, especially under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Head 2009; Bassett and Fogelman 2013; Watts 2015). We then examine those perspectives and lines of research that seem fruitful in scrutinising given terminologies and assumptions in climate change adaptation projects and policies and that are effective in politicising climate change adaptation. This will help us to establish how and why climate change adaptation can become such a powerful tool in the hands of the elites and, to a lesser extent, of the subaltern.

Reinventing and de-politicising adaptation through climate change

Academic understanding of socio-economic and political processes for transforming the environment first emerged in the mid-twentieth century in the context of American geography and anthropology: the Berkeley School of Cultural Geography was developing particular interest in empirical, often ethnographic, research on the interlinkage between culture, land, and environment (Watts 2015: 23). Borrowed from evolutionary biology, where it meant constant adjustment by organisms to newly arising challenges from their external environment (Taylor 2015: 3), the term adaptation or ‘adaptational strategies’ was first used in cultural ecology and then found its way into the social sciences as a whole in the 1960s (Watts 2015: 28). Cultural aspects, ecological principles, and ecosystem analysis approaches were combined in writings about adaptation, for example those concerning Native Americans and their environmental history in the southwest USA (Steward 1955), the practices of ethnic groups managing their resources on the prairie of Alberta, Canada (Bennett 1969), or the padi rice systems that organise society in Bali, Indonesia (Geertz 1963). Again, shaped largely by American anthropology and geography, natural hazards literature and its notions of vulnerability (which focused on how natural hazards created social vulnerabilities) and adaptation began to appear in the 1970s and was soon criticised by a developing political ecology in ways that still sound familiar today (Bassett and Fogelman 2013).

Debate about hazards, risks, and vulnerabilities and an emphasis on social root causes such as poverty and lack of rights in colonial contexts, or on the so-called natural sources of disaster, shaped a discussion that led to fundamentally different views on adaptation (Bassett and Fogelman 2013: 44). These varying conceptualisations are an integral part of the different understandings of vulnerability that exist within international fora, in the field of development aid, and in academia. The natural-hazard approach dates back to the 1960s and is based on a long tradition of disaster research. It was particularly influenced by the early work of Gilbert F. White (a prominent American geographer), who began to analyse natural hazards and human responses (Kasperson et al. 2005: 259). By integrating knowledge of natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, an attempt was made to explain the connections between physical system elements, such as exposure, probability, and impact of hazards (Adger 2006: 271). Nevertheless, the natural hazards literature of the 1970s and 1980s was still relatively apolitical, seeing the vulnerability of a system as the result of the intensity, frequency, and nature of external events (Dietz 2006: 14), that is, primarily implying biophysical vulnerability (Füssel 2005). The ‘environment as hazard’ work of Burton et al. (1978) brought together the most important elements of the natural-hazard approach. With regard to vulnerability, it established that almost all types of hazard have different effects on different social groups (Burton et al. 1978). Nevertheless, the approach was dominated by problem analysis and solutions from engineering science. As a consequence, an explanation for the differences in vulnerability shown by different groups of people, and within social groups at any one geographic location, the focus of later human-ecological research, was not addressed for some years (Adger 2006: 271; Dietz 2006: 15).

In the 1970s, critiques coming mainly from a political-economy background and following social-constructivism approaches considered that nature and society should not be analysed as separate entities. They analysed context-dependent aspects such as social structures and power relations and underlined that adaptation cannot be based on too simplistic homo economicus considerations of human behaviour (Dietz 2006: 14; Bassett and Fogelman 2013: 44). In the 1980s and 1990s, political ecology and researchers such as Blaikie et al. (1994), Dow and Downing (1995), Hewitt (1997) and Watts and Bohle (1993) began to address social vulnerability, thereby focusing on causal structures. They suggested that the vulnerability of individuals or communities to environmental change is mainly based on their position in social and political contexts (Watts and Bohle 1993; Clark et al. 2005).

Even if new conceptual approaches to vulnerability analysis are committed to combine social and biophysical vulnerability in an effort to overcome the separation between natural/biophysical sciences and social science analysis³ (see for example Peluso and Watts 2001), this ‘great divide’ (Bassett and Fogelman 2013: 44) in the conceptualisation of vulnerability was taken up again after the re-introduction of ‘adaptation’ to climate change after the Rio Summit in 1992 (Pelling 2011). It still persists today and leads to different understandings of legitimate adaptation strategies.

Multiple de-politicising factors in climate change adaptation

Many factors make it difficult to consider political dynamics in mainstream adaptation approaches. In this section, we address those that appear most important. Later, we discuss analytical perspectives and tools to deconstruct these factors and shed light on the politics of climate change adaptation.

What adaptation means is still open to debate. It is used in a highly contested way (Arnall et al. 2013; Taylor 2015) and how it is interpreted, for example in development projects, is often unclear. Following its re-introduction to the social sciences and policy debate after the Rio Summit in 1992 (Pelling 2011), Bassett and Fog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Chapter summaries
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Conceptualising climate change adaptation
• PART III The political economy of climate change adaptation
• PART IV Local vs national vs global understandings of climate change adaptation
• PART V Beyond critical adaptation research: innovative understandings of climate change adaptation
• PART VI Conclusion
• Index