Part 6 (1/2)

Context: policy and methods.

In the UK, statements by DFID (2004b), GNAW (2001) and MAFF (2000) have highlighted the dual role of public sector agencies needing both to adapt their own goals and practices to take account of climate change, whilst also shaping the enabling environment to support the adaptive capacity of private, public and civil sector actors and individuals operating within their spheres of influence. In this way it is doubly important to understand the ways in which the capacity and direction of adaptation within such organisations is shaped. Despite this only little thought has gone into planning how adaptive capacity to climate change and variability might be built as a policy imperative alongside efficiency, transparency, accountability, legitimacy and equity. Most work to date has been undertaken within the adaptive management school and there are parallels with the a.n.a.lysis presented here (see Chapter 2). This is important because existing bases for organising and implementing policy are challenged by the complex, dynamic, 'trans-scientific' (Weinberg, 1972) cross-epistemic problems a.s.sociated with climate change. In responding there is a need to develop organisational capabilities that reflect the uncertain nature of knowledge. Central to this task is a better understanding of the ways in which organisations learn and adapt. This is especially so when adaptive innovations challenge dominant ways of thinking and defining goals and responsibilities.

As Chapter 3 demonstrates, research on learning and adaptation to climate change has focused primarily on the influence of formal inst.i.tutions and on reactive adaptation. Empirical work has shown that adaptation can be a source of contestation for political actors operating across hierarchies of scale (Iwanciw, 2004), and with contrasting ideologies; for example, with tensions emerging through the interplay of top-down command and control risk management and local self-organised adaptation (Tompkins, 2005). From the viewpoint of proactive adaptation, Grothmann and Patt (2005) acknowledge the importance of psychological factors in determining the adaptive capacity of individuals.

This chapter presents evidence for adaptive capacity as arising out of cognitive processes (ongoing social learning) embedded in the social relations.h.i.+ps of organisations (which are given shape by both formal and informal inst.i.tutions and their practices). Such generic socio-cognitive attributes of organisations can contribute to the building of robust adaptation, responding not only to surprises a.s.sociated with climate change but also the uncertainties of future economic, social and political change (Schneider, 2004; Willows and Connell, 2003). However, research in crisis management has pointed to the difficulties that can be a.s.sociated with these characteristics. Organisational culture, communication practices and decision-making processes generate the conditions in which crisis events occur (Reason, 1990a, 1990b, 1997; Smith, 1990, 1995; Turner, 1976, 1978). At the same time, this research has sought to push the boundaries of contingency planning by encouraging managers to start 'thinking the unthinkable' (Smith, 2004) as a means of considering the range of problems that can arise and how organisations might be structured to antic.i.p.ate such risks. Preparing organisations for the unimaginable as well as planning for the unexpected is enhanced where there are diverse social relations.h.i.+ps with open informal s.p.a.ce beyond corporate control. These s.p.a.ces allow individuals or sub-groups within organisations to experiment, copy, communicate, learn and reflect on their actions.

Perhaps one reason for the limited literature on adaptation within organisations (compared with research on adaptation within local communities for example), and in particular on the ways in which social agency and inst.i.tutions interact, is the difficulty of surfacing respondent viewpoints. Much of the experience of social learning and self-organisation happens as part of the routine practice of working within an organisation with the distinctions between canonical and shadow s.p.a.ces often blurred. Elsewhere working in the shadow system is on the fringes of professional good practice and seldom disclosed publicly. The approach taken to generate the data presented below was to engage respondents in a three-stage conversation. First, respondents from each organisation were self-selecting, having responded to an open invitation to attend a workshop framed as an opportunity to reflect on the organisation's adaptive capacity and potential future strategy. Second, workshop discussions were followed up with individual interviews, or in some cases researchers were invited to follow-on meetings. Finally, summary data and a.n.a.lysis that had been made anonymous were circulated amongst respondents for comment and as a verification tool. The initial selection of organisations was based on existing contacts and a desire to engage with respondents working in different organisational forms with responsibility for setting the policy or information environment for other actors and businesses.

In the framing workshops respondents were presented with a low probability, high-impact climate change scenario for which no contingency planning existed in the organisations under study. The UK scenario was for strong warming over 20 years to reach a climate similar to that of contemporary southern France, followed by a collapse of the north Atlantic thermohaline circulation systems and a rapid cooling over a subsequent 10 years to reach a new climatic equilibrium close to that of southern Norway. To generate concrete examples of the role of social relations in adaptation respondents were also asked to identify past a.n.a.logues for the climate change scenario. The a.n.a.logues chosen by respondents differed, but common examples of external surprises were the foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2003, ongoing changes to European Common Agricultural Policy and the European Waters Directive: stressors which the organisations acted to mediate and were felt to be wide-ranging and, to varying degrees, unpredictable in their ramifications for respondents' organisations.

The range of climate change impacts considered in one workshop are presented in Table 6.1. The recognition that not only were climate futures uncertain but the development impacts of any one climate future multifaceted and potentially reinforcing was key in justifying the focus of discussion on the relevance of generic, fundamental adaptive capacities built on social learning and self-organisation rather than a search for material adaptation policies.

Table 6.1 Warming and cooling scenarios for Wales Warming scenario Cooling scenario Weather regime Increased winter rainfall and flooding Higher temperatures overall Hotter, drier summers A similar climate to that of Bordeaux Increased flooding in spring due to snow melt Lower temperatures overall Colder winters with one in seven winters 'extreme'

A similar climate to Oslo Rural development Diversified economic opportunities Increased rural population New opportunities for secondary employment Rural depopulation Transport disruption and less accessibility to services during winter Public health Increased respiratory disease in wetter winters New diseases Heat stress Pollution effects?

Increased respiratory disease in colder winters Agriculture Soil loss due to flooding New pests and diseases Late summer grazing reduced but may be compensated by increased gra.s.s production overall More difficult to use land effectively Crop diversification possible, especially on the coasts, but soil quality may limit this Soil loss due to flooding Reduction in stock or capital spending on winter housing Loss of winter growing season less grazing implies less protein production Forestry Timber productivity up while quality down Use of trees for water management?

Timber productivity down, while quality up Pressure on forestry management More forestry on marginal rural land?

Biodiversity Links between habitats forming wildlife corridors gain importance to allow species migration More active management of species migration needed under warming than cooling scenario Loss of key species like sphagnum moss Pollution effects?

Links between habitats forming wildlife corridors gain importance to allow species migration Eco-restoration possible as climate cools from a preceding high?

Warming scenario Cooling scenario Tourism Higher volumes antic.i.p.ated No extended winter slow season Improves in comparison to compet.i.tor destinations Storm and flood risk to infrastructure Loss of 'Green Hills' image Lower volumes antic.i.p.ated Possibility to develop winter sports Seaside market in decline Other industries Less vulnerable water supplies than in England but may be indirectly impacted by English extraction Sh.e.l.lfish production crashes Possible loss of high-tech and footloose industries.

Note: Additional empirical a.n.a.lysis is available on the project website, rcc.rures.net.

Case study a.n.a.lysis.

The aim of this section is to reveal the interplay between inst.i.tutions and individual action that construct the relational s.p.a.ce for adaptation within organisations. The dominant form of adaptation considered is resilience. The two organisations included in the discussion allow two different sides of adaptive capacity to be examined. First, in the Environment Agency, responsibilities for setting the operating environment for more local organisations to adapt are explored. Second we use efforts of a farmers' support group to facilitate aspects of adaptation for individual farmers. In both cases the a.s.sessment of capacity to adapt to climate change is forward looking. That is, we do not seek to describe a.s.sets used in past rounds of adapting to climate change. Rather we explore the social relations.h.i.+ps and actor behaviour that const.i.tute these organisations as a way of mapping out capacity for adaptation based on the theoretical arguments made in the preceding chapters. This frees a.n.a.lysis of capacity to adapt to climate change from a historical determinism which would skew and limit results where future events a.s.sociated with climate change may be very different from past experience. In both cases the aims of the organisations are to promote adaptation as resilience. There are though examples of individual actors attempting to change the direction of the organisation; this is especially so for the Environment Agency. These serve to exemplify the skills and strategies that can enable transitional adaptation within an organisation.

The discussion for each organisation is presented around a series of quotations. This gives voice to the respondents but also provides a contextual richness that would be lost if a summary alone was provided. Themes of social learning and self-organisation help to structure the accounts. Self-organisation is unpacked further by statements on the interplay of shadow and canonical systems and of social communities and networks acting within and across the organisations. Data emerged inductively and act to verify these attributes of adaptation that have so far been described largely in theory. Respondents and in some cases secondary organisations are not named to maintain confidentiality.

The Environment Agency.

The Environment Agency is a key mediator for climate change adaptation in the rural sector in the UK. It is charged with protecting and improving the environment and promoting sustainable development including flood risk management in England and Wales. It acts both to regulate and advise on rural development.

Respondents discussed capacity to adapt to possible future impacts of climate change through focusing on their personal and professional experience of constraints in the canonical system, the role of the shadow system and how together they form an inst.i.tutional architecture for adaptation. Many of the observations are not tied directly to experience of climate change a.s.sociated events or policy but speak to the generic interaction between professionals and inst.i.tutional structures within the organisation. The uncertainties that climate change brings and the knowledge that past events are increasingly inappropriate as guides to future crises makes such knowledge central to understanding and potentially supporting adaptation to climate. What follows is not an a.s.sessment of adaptive capacity across the Environment Agency but rather a reporting of viewpoints from key informants working as professional scientists from different points within the organisation.

Inst.i.tutional constraints.

Taking or designing adaptive actions is facilitated or constrained by existing inst.i.tutions, which have their own logic, history and transactions costs if being reformed or dismantled. Thus an important type of observed proactive adaptation was inst.i.tutional modification: efforts to reduce conflict between adaptive possibilities and existing social realities, and so create enhanced opportunities for adaptive actions to arise as needed. The impetus for this can come from without or within the policy system, for example: In a sense, we're doing that [inst.i.tutional modification] through our seminars, but we are also working in the Welsh a.s.sembly and the Environment Agency, and everybody else. We're trying to get the Welsh a.s.sembly to lead on a Welsh climate change communications strategy. It's not a priority for them, but we are trying to lobby for that.

Inst.i.tutions affecting adaptive capacity and action were found to have a fluid quality. They were renegotiated as circ.u.mstances changed, as different individual and organisational actors became involved and as existing actors readjusted their internal priorities. For example: It is set in their contract that they have to do a workshop and that it needs to have these outputs, but there is nothing in it that says you have to do it in this way. But if one of us were to say to someone, look we think you ought to do it this way, then they're not going to say no. They might come back and say that they've had a better idea.

Negotiation is an a.s.set for facing the uncertainty induced by climate change. But this has financial and other costs. Considering how inst.i.tutions do or might change necessitates an a.n.a.lysis of the power configurations that conserve or act against particular inst.i.tutions. Power relations can be given expression in many different ways, but in an organisational context, the direction of resources is an important one. As the respondent notes, though, agent led external action is challenging: Politics is difficult. I have certainly tried to foster close relations with DEFRA, DOE, DETR whatever it happens to be, but you are dealing with a culture that is fairly rigid there they pay the bills, we do what they say.

Inst.i.tutions can both constrain and enable adaptation. For individuals seeking to influence organisational behaviour and direction this revealed a tension between personal and/or professional agendas. This was particularly difficult when it felt as though inst.i.tutions originated hierarchically, and the costs of renegotiation were exorbitant for the individual: In the day job there is a day job. I have objectives to do. What I do outside of that is my affair so corporately the culture is quite thick quite hierarchical, which is frustrating because if we are moving from managing simplicity in regulated resources through to managing complexity environmental systems one of the first tenets is devolution of decision making and yet we are going diametrically the opposite way so I find it frustrating intellectually certainly personally.

Social learning is central to adaptive capacity. It can be indicated by changes in capacity to act arising through experience for example, through inst.i.tutional modification creating an atmosphere where learning is promoted is part of the shaping of adaptive capacity and can be the difference between important experiences being overlooked, forgotten or translated into enhanced capacity to deal with future climate-change-related uncertainty and threats: There clearly has been a lot of learning: Enquiries etc., and people presenting information back to us. It's had a big impact on how we organize ourselves. It's created new areas of work and funding to tackle gaps.... The lessons are quite general and cross-cutting: How do you get bad news up the line quite quickly? How do you ramp up resources quickly? ... That can now happen very quickly. Not only are there plans to show us how to do that, but we have practice simulations.

Opportunities for learning arise throughout organisational life, and can be fostered: 'We have informal lunchtime sessions, and people ask questions about it. The questions will be more informal. People are sitting there eating lunch and asking questions. It's informal in that respect.'

On the other hand, not all learning is positive. One respondent warned about uncritically accepting the lessons of past experience, without continuing to probe their relevance to new situations; a key lesson for climate change adaptation, but one that is difficult to inst.i.tutionalise: I think one issue that is quite difficult is learning from experience. One has to be very careful that the experience you had is relevant to the problem that you now have. We often come up against the situation where people who've had long experience say 'Oh yeah, we tried that, and it didn't work. That's it.' It cuts off the options and one has to very careful that one is saying that was the experience, but was the context and the problem the same?

Good communication skills are a necessity for inst.i.tutional modification, something that a number of interviewees demonstrated, including strategies for formalising and adding value to knowledge through external collaboration. This was a particularly effective but time consuming method for influencing higher up the hierarchy or across sectoral and professional barriers. Relevant for slow onset and long-term adaptation measures this strategy for crossing the internal barriers within organisations is too slow to respond to rapid and extreme events: That is why I write so much. If it is out there in the white literature then it is in the public domain. A peer review paper has more weight than my opinion particularly when I bring in co-authors who happen to be lawyers.

Successful communicators had cultivated linkages across different epistemic communities and saw themselves as conduits of information and points of influence shaping s.p.a.ces of adaptive capacity within and between both communities and their representative organisations: The x.x.x, which is a national organization ... has done a tremendous amount and in some instances the Agency is being perceived as an obstacle and in some ways it is being perceived as an ally, but there is a risk of that relations.h.i.+p being lost and because I am on the board of various other charities and I'm giving a key note at the x.x.x meeting on Tuesday. I've got a very direct personal relations.h.i.+p there and I'm publis.h.i.+ng papers in my own name, not using work time whatever to get the learning from that, put it in the right literature so I can go to the policy people in the Agency to say LEARN, you don't have to trawl through grey literature, unpublished sources here is all the right literature put together APPLY IT, DO IT please. So yes, I'm keeping doors open, but that is a personal mission and I don't expect that will be a particularly common occurrence throughout the organization.

Learning with wider stakeholders, and especially the public had its costs with a difficult balancing act between efficiency and building adaptive capacity; for example, by protecting staff so they might undertake their work without too much interruption from other stakeholders. The following comments respond to a recently established telephone call centre: In terms of the general public what is happening corporately is walls are being built so I think we are going in the wrong direction. You know if you are re-engineering an organization where your front line, your regional and area staff are delivery merchants then you want to stop then 'wasting time' in dialogue with the punters. You want them to be doing stuff, not talking about stuff.

... a lot of the public trust that the Agency does engender, it does not engender a lot but, a lot of that is simply because the local officers know the local people and the local issues. So actually I fear that what we are doing is losing the connection. I think the call centre is going to make us become a big impersonal monster ... It is a personal view this, I think we are losing an important part of our relations.h.i.+p with people ... the personal relations.h.i.+p with the regulator is vital ... That sort of delivery of service model [the call centre] is what the Agency's reorganization is about, so it is successful in those terms but, you know, not in terms of being in touch with the environment and people who are active in the environmental sense.

Communication that can help build capacity to adapt to climate change requires skills such as knowing who to communicate with, how to find them and how to communicate effectively, and designing acts of communication which are appropriate to the task. Communication is not a neutral act, and there are many conventions that apply to the way that communication is carried out in different relations.h.i.+ps and contexts. Because the appropriate combination of learning and communication strategies available to actors is determined by the cultural characteristics of the organisational setting in which they operate, it makes sense to speak of the knowledge culture of an organisational setting. That is the characteristics of an organisation or other social body that make particular forms of learning and communication possible or not. The sense of a pervasive way of being that both influences the individual and that results from the collective actions of individuals came through clearly in one interview: So to what percentage am I attributable? I don't know. To what extent is culture changing around me and these ideas becoming more and more? I don't know. I can't measure that, but in my own head I'm pretty well convinced that I have banged on at certain people for long enough that we have got an understanding.

An important aspect of adaptive capacity revealed by looking at learning and communication in terms of a knowledge culture was that the informal and the tacit are just as important for knowledge as formal and explicit channels, even from the organisation's perspective. For example, in the case of learning, formal learning was in some cases identified with training, but it was clear that this was just one aspect of learning from the individual viewpoint. Thus, throughout the interviews a range of evidence referred to informal channels of learning and communication, and the ways these were rooted in both formal and informal activities and inst.i.tutions.

So yeah formally, in the formal email, telephone whatever you play the game but you still carry out the learning stuff. If I see the head of x.x.x who I know very well and for many years I'll say 'Have you seen this paper?'. 'No I haven't actually.' 'Oh I've got a few on the line, have you got a minute ...?' 'I've got this one on common law', you know, 'I've got this one on economics'. 'Yeah OK, let's talk about that, that's really interesting blah blah'.

Adaptation and the shadow system.

This section provides support for the claim that shadow systems are an important source of adaptive capacity. Most interviewees could identify an informal shadow system, and argued that the informal is an essential part of organisational life: 'The way I think is that the day job is largely defined by the delivery of regulation and the influencing stuff happens through the informal routes by and large.'

Shadow systems are un.o.bserved by the canonical and allow risk taking. Adaptive management has the ability to experiment and take risks as a core tenet. The benefit to the canonical organisation of the shadow system arises through a degree of alignment between actors' formal roles and their informal skills and capacities. Thus the personal capacities of individuals to wield influence and to work with knowledge became part of the organisation's capacity to adapt: 'I know that statements I have made and discussions I've had with very senior people have later turned out in more or less verbatim in strategy doc.u.ments.'

While individual initiative within the shadow system cannot be planned for, it could be incentivised, opening up a major adaptive resource for the organisation: The organization three years ago had a tokenistic approach to the social, but now has social policy. This is moving more and more mainstream, and arguably there is sort of a change in political direction anyway, but an individual mover and shaker who I happen to talk to quite a lot has been singularly effective in raising that as a policy.