Part 7 (1/2)
These two organisational case studies both show the idealised nature of resilience as a form of adaptation. Over time and faced with new challenges, policy directives or sources of information organisations are in a constant process of reinvention. Those that are not will likely not survive long in the everyday cut and thrust of market and political life. Given this reality there is a danger that rather than organisations being tools for protecting valued functions they strive to maintain their own longevity: resilience being transferred from function to form. Neither organisation studied here fell into this trap; members of Gra.s.shoppers in particular observed that they valued the social bonds made through the group more than the group itself and that these were a resource should future challenges require new coalitions and communities of practice be formed. The close ties of trust in Gra.s.shoppers also provided a key quality control mechanism that was less easy to observe functioning in the shadow system of the Environment Agency. In the latter case new ideas succeeded better with external validation through academic papers, for example. The need for accountability and measured decision-making in public sector bodies is a particular challenge to those who would argue for embracing the shadow system to build adaptive capacity.
Respondents in both groups described their social relations in terms of communities and networks. Communities provide a powerful focus of social ident.i.ty, but without the linking function provided by networks they risked becoming isolated from the broad pool of human learning. Networks, on the other hand, can be too diffuse, failing to provide an adequate basis for organised action, except in circ.u.mstances where the need to do so overrides the transaction costs involved in negotiating different interests.
The empirical observations made in this chapter support arguments from adaptive management for the contribution of relational qualities such as trust, learning and information exchange in processes of building adaptive capacity. They also caution that social networks or communities of practice will always exclude some actors and ideas and should not be seen as a panacea. For organisational management concerned with adapting to climate change four questions are raised by this research: * Can the informal social relations.h.i.+ps of the shadow system be embraced inside public sector organisations or are potential conflicts with the need for efficiency, transparency and vertical accountability intolerable?
* To what extent can investments in local formal organisations, like Gra.s.shoppers, foster and maintain independent but linked shadow systems providing a secondary local social resource for climate change adaptation?
* To what extent might contingency planning to manage climate change risk compromise or complement efforts to build adaptive capacity to manage uncertainty?
* What management, training and communication tools exist to facilitate the building and maintaining of constructive social capital and social learning within and between organisations?
Modifying formal inst.i.tutions to support motivated professionals in developing informal social ties and expand their members.h.i.+p of communities of practice to cross epistemic divides is one way of addressing this final challenge. At a larger scale investment in boundary organisations and individuals will help thicken the social resource for adaptation, and better cope not only with the direct impacts of climate change but the more dynamic organisation landscape that may well be an outcome of the economic as well as environmental instability a.s.sociated with climate change. Scope for adapting governance regimes through transitional and transformational change is the focus of the next two chapters.
7.
Adaptation as urban risk discourse and governance.
In Cancun the most common idea is that 'it is not my problem, if things go bad, I can flee to another state'.
(Ex-member of the Quintana Roo State Congress).
The population mobility that enables and characterises rapid urbanisation has consequences also for discourses of responsibility, and finally the willingness and capacity of officials and those at risk to take action and reduce exposure and susceptibility to climate-change-a.s.sociated hazards in a specific place. Mobile urban populations and the dynamic economies and social systems they are part of present both a context for climate change adaptation and, through the inequalities they generate, a target for transitional and transformational reform.
This chapter uses urban cases because the social and political concentration of urbanisation brings to the surface competing visions and practices of development. But the key argument of this chapter that as discourses of adaptation begin to emerge worldwide they can either challenge or further entrench development inequalities and failures is applicable across all development sectors.
Evidence for the interaction of adaptation with development norms and practice is presented from four rapidly expanding, but contrasting, urban centres in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo: Cancun (population in 2008 approximately 1.3 million), Playa del Carmen (100,000), Tulum (5,000) and Mahahual (1,000) (see Figure 7.1).
Quintana Roo is amongst the most rapidly urbanising places worldwide. Urbanisation is driven by state-sponsored and globally-financed international tourism in an area exposed to hurricanes and temperature extremes. National policy to exploit the environment of Quintana Roo for tourism attracts over 2 million tourists a year alongside large numbers of labour migrants from neighbouring states as well as international capital, and so generates risk to climate-change-a.s.sociated hurricane hazards and more indirect impacts of climate change on the global economy and subsequent tourist numbers. As capital investment in tourism increases so the environmental attractor for tourists has changed from reef diving to beach tourism and now golf course condominiums. At each stage capital has inserted itself ever more forcefully between nature and its consumer. In so doing capital has generated and extracted greater financial returns while Figure 7.1 Quintana Roo and study sites (Source: adapted from Cuentame ... de Mexico, 2009) alienating the consumer from her ecological foundations. The process has s.h.i.+fted economic reliance from a natural to an increasingly artificial 'second nature' (Smith, 1984). The result is a bifurcation in development strategies between those that exploit residual 'natural' s.p.a.ces and the growing, capital intensive exploitation of second nature with greater environmental and social external costs as well as wealth generating potential. Capital insertion and the imposition of a second nature have occurred at different paces and can be found existing to varying degrees along the Caribbean coast. Cancun is the most intensive, with Playa del Carmen also presenting a mature capitalised urban system. Mahahual and Tulum are small urban centres at the brink of rapid capitalisation. The focus of this study is to explore the character of civil society within each urban form and so to examine the ways in which the urban process has given shape to and been influenced by this aspect of governance with a view to applying this knowledge to a.s.sess capacity to cope with current and adapt to future climate change impacts.
Layered on top of the impacts of capitalisation on the root causes of vulnerability and adaptive capacity is a more superficial but nonetheless important policy realm of hurricane risk management. This is the most tangible expression of hazard liable to be influenced by climate change on the coast. Records for hurricane activity in Quintana Roo begin in 1922 with a category one event (149 kilometres per hour). The first category four event was Charlie in 1951 (212 kilometres per hour), and it has been followed with increasing regularity by four additional category four hurricanes, and Gilbert (1988) and Dean (2007) both making landfall as category five hurricanes. These events reveal underlying vulnerabilities. Hurricane risk management succeeds well in compensating for proximate causes of vulnerability through evacuation of those at risk. But discourse around risk stops here, masking underlying root cause drivers of risk and unsustainable development.
This chapter contrasts with the empirical a.n.a.lysis of organisational adaptation presented in Chapter 4 both in terms of the scale of a.n.a.lysis but also the a.n.a.lytical lens. This s.h.i.+fts from one that stays close to the systems-based a.n.a.lysis of social learning and self-organisation to one that deploys aspects of discourse a.n.a.lysis and regime theory to help emphasise the political and value rich contexts that, alongside capacity for self-organisation, help determine innovation and dissemination of new ideas from the base and how far these might re-shape local governance regimes for adaptation and development in these sites. Different actors are shown to hold contrasting and sometimes conflicting visions of development that in turn lead to preferences for resilience, transition or transformation in society when faced with climate change. Following this introduction a short contextual section provides geographical and methodological background to the study. Each settlement is then a.n.a.lysed using a common framework with a concluding discussion drawing out contrasting relations between adaptation and development in each case.
Context: policy and methods.
In 2007, the federal government launched a National Strategy on Climate Change and is now preparing a Special Programme on Climate Change to implement identified reforms. Thanks to these efforts Mexico has jumped from 14th in 2006 to 4th in 2008 out of 56 countries ranked according to their climate change performance in the Germanwatch, Climate Change Performance Index (Germanwatch, 2008). At the state level, while Quintana Roo's rapid demographic growth and infrastructural expansion open exciting opportunities to build climate-proofing into development, and at the same time provide a market edge around notions of climate friendly tourism, regional government and private developers have been slow to recognise climate change. In the language of transitions theory (see Chapter 4) this is an example of landscape (national/international) change meeting resistance at the regional (state) level. This begs the question: have any niche (local) level innovations emerged that might provide impetus for change at the regional level given the opportunity for change opened by perturbations at the landscape level?
Local impacts of climate change are felt already through perceived increases in the frequency of hurricanes, creeping sea-level rise, coastal erosion and high temperatures. These hazards are interrelated and compounded by local land use which has led to accelerated mangrove and interior deforestation, pollution and damage to in-sh.o.r.e reefs and the neglect of green and blue s.p.a.ce in urban design. In contrast, state and federal agencies have a good record in containing human loss to hurricanes through timely if reactive strategies of early warning, evacuation and reconstruction of critical services. The most recent event, Hurricane Dean, 2007, caused limited economic impact across the region but made landfall close to Mahahual, which was severely damaged.
To reveal the values, capacities and actions of political actors in each urban centre an action research methodology was employed. In each settlement interviews were conducted with 1215 leaders of social, environmental and business a.s.sociations, and where formal organisation was absent amongst informal leaders. Following interviews, respondents were invited to town-level workshops to discuss results. Workshops provided an opportunity to verify reported views and interpretations, and also a vehicle for social actors to network. This was often the first time social actors had met to discuss climate change. A final workshop brought selected respondents from each settlement together to undertake a partic.i.p.atory comparison of town-level findings and again to provide a networking forum. Interviews and workshop texts were transcribed and data extracted and organised around the themes of development narrative, climate change, social-learning and self-organisation. Results have been fed back to civil society and government actors.
For additional material and a.n.a.lysis see: munally owned ejido lands which lie outside of the legal jurisdiction of local governments to provide basic services. Dominant development is controlled by the interests of national and international corporate capital, with many politicians having backgrounds as leading local entrepreneurs. Environmental legislation and urban plans are in place but frequent amendments and the slow pace of bureaucracy allow business interests great flexibility and resilience in the face of legislative, economic and environmental pressures while increasing the time and transactions costs for environmental and social actors seeking to question development proposals. For example, the sensitive Nichupte Lagoon is under constant development pressure; despite an Ecological Zoning Program, hotels and squatter settlements have been allowed. The vision of Cancun as a centre for extractive capital built in a previously unoccupied zone disconnects social actors from a commitment to place and long-term planning. Reflecting on his experience, a Pez Maya Reserve fundraiser noted that 'those who partic.i.p.ated the least were local entrepreneurs; more than 70 per cent of funds came from overseas'. For hotel workers Cancun society is described as fragmented with traditional values of neighbourliness and a strong family replaced by consumerism and undermined by drugs crime, alcoholism and extremes of inequality. Set against this, migrant workers maintain close links with source communities; for example, by sending children to school outside Cancun.
Respondents were clear that climate change impacts were exacerbated by past, and ongoing, development: deforestation was a.s.sociated with increased temperatures and reduced humidity and the development of dunes for hotels contributed to beach erosion. Hurricanes were also a.s.sociated with climate change and seen as integral to the development history of the city with specific hotel developments being cited as having taken advantage of Hurricanes Gilbert and Wilma to extend land claims into protected mangroves and privatise beach fronts. The comment below from an independent journalist shows the variable nature of disaster management and the long-term psychological and cultural impacts when the state does not fulfil its responsibilities for civil protection and security.
I remember that when Gilberto came Cancun was going to celebrate the Miss Universe contest this focused the attention of the government in Cancun. With Wilma, however, the people of Cancun were left completely on their own. Until the army came to help two days later, the city lived in complete chaos. We stayed 15 days without electricity or water. The most incredible was the contrast between the rapid recovery of the hotel zone and the slow recovery of the rest of the population. Wilma brought a lot of despair and demoralized the population. We have not still recovered from that. People stopped to believe. Still today there is not the happiness that used to be. All this happened because we were left alone.
More positively, after Hurricane Wilma a Climate Change a.s.sociation of Quintana Roo based in Cancun was founded. This small organisation has worked to promote recycling and lobbies against deforestation within existing development narratives. Elsewhere, actors seek to promote climate change in primary school syllabi. Business a.s.sociations see climate change in economic terms with hotel a.s.sociations needing to respond to tour operators threatening to lower tariffs or business volumes due to the poor state of the beaches. For the engineering and architecture community, climate change presents opportunities with recent projects including semi-permeable parking surfaces but with limited support from government. Overall civil society actors see their scope for action as limited compared to government which has power to revise urban planning guidelines, or simply enforce those that already exist, and this understanding of the distribution of power acts to suppress civil action and limit outright critique or confrontation of the dominant capital intensive model of development. This is despite civil society actors recognising that an emerging development paradigm that takes climate change into account can be an opportunity to enhance social development, with this being a particular concern in Cancun with its high inequality.
Civil leaders.h.i.+p faces powerful opposition, as an environmental lawyer explained: 'It is dangerous to litigate against some powerful groups. We have to be very cautious'. For local actors the everyday experience of living with crime, including organised protection rackets, governs people's ability to voice complaints or instigate change. Civil society groups cited this and the culture of Cancun society, which is described as apathetic (caused by a crisis of credibility in the authorities), lacking in ident.i.ty (with a diverse migrant population) and community spirit (with individuals working hard with little time for social work or volunteerism), as the main barriers to organising critical alternatives. Ma.s.s media is politicised and commercial. Individual civil society groups, lawyers or engineering companies might be competent and independent but they work alone, and often in compet.i.tion, preventing the formation of a coherent social body and vision. One respondent described this as having a lack of inst.i.tutional infrastructure to promote learning and new practices for adaptation and mitigation, arguing that even if people were willing, without this infrastructure changing behaviour would be slow if not impossible.
While the inst.i.tutional framework for strategic innovation and adaptation was lacking in Cancun informational resources were in place. Federal state agencies (the Ecological Gazette of SEMARNAT was twice mentioned) provided scientific data available for scrutiny and that had been used by civil actors in local litigation or lobbying. The Supreme Court judgement that all doc.u.ments and studies related to a development should be in the public domain had also been used by local groups to challenge developments. The Universidad del Caribe, Cancun, is a local source of promotion for sustainable tourism region-wide. Collaboration with local government has been achieved by Amigos de Sian' Kaan in the preparation of a good practice guide for hotels that covers planning and use. In this way technical and management reform have been achieved by civil society groups to support vulnerability reduction, but social, economic, political and cultural systems remained outside discourse and unchallenged.
Playa del Carmen.
Playa del Carmen has a successful and growing economy based on international tourism and in 1994 became the capital of the newly created Munic.i.p.ality of Solidaridad. Since then, Playa has been amongst the fastest growing urban centres of Latin America (above 20 per cent annually) and at times the fastest in the world (Campos Camara, 2007). In 2005 its population exceeded 100,000 inhabitants. Playa has experienced direct hits from hurricanes. The worst challenge came in 2005, with Emily and Wilma a few months later. However, there were no fatalities and the town recovered very rapidly. In fact, the local tourist economy benefited from the relocation of tourists from Cancun, which had been hit even harder by Wilma.
In Playa, the dominant development narrative emphasised personal economic advancement and reflected the control over the local economy held by corporate private sector. Respondents reported on a disjuncture between people and place. Residents felt they were here to 'make money', not to settle. The result was a lack of popular commitment to local development and for holding private sector and government actors to account, as one social development activist reported: 'there is a lack of civic pride and ident.i.ty with place people do not care about the city or even their house and street'. Respondents described Playa as embodying an extreme version of the American Dream, celebrating individualism and materialism, and short-term gain over long-term development.
Some described climate change as a symptom of a larger problem of consciousness and the alienating effect of rapid urbanisation; as one respondent put it, 'We increasingly behave like machines we need to go back to our community and our roots'. More broadly climate change could be a vehicle to hold the government to account if citizens became more engaged in governance. Adaptation (and mitigation) was seen as a leverage point for existing social and environmental agendas with progress reported in specific sectors; for example, the Sustainable Coastal Tourism Plan, believed to be the first in Mexico, includes guidance on beach and mangrove management. Huge scope for mitigation in the hotel sector was recognised with minimal current use of alternative energy, water recycling and waste management. The Small Hotels a.s.sociation of Playa del Carmen and the Maya Riviera explained that the high proportion of family run hotels in Playa makes the sector responsive to calls for environmentally sustainable practices. Strategy for future adaptation included reinitiating local food production as a local livelihood resource as well as a means of making some independence from global markets. External knowledge and expertise was accessed by NGOs through supporter networks and commercial links and had been instrumental in successful legal challenges to developments made on environmental grounds including X-Cacel, X-Cacelito and the Ultramar Doc. These were important symbolic successes, demonstrating that enforcing environmental controls need not jeopardise local economic growth.
Civil society groups tended to operate as top-down advocates or satellites to the governmentcorporate-business policy-making core. One social development leader observed that 'organisations are closed they inform only staff and families, there is little public communication about plans or opportunities'. This reflected the lack of trust and individualised nature of Playa's society, one where, as one respondent put it, there was 'no culture for donations, public partic.i.p.ation or volunteerism'. Perhaps because of a lack of local embeddedness, the personalised character of civil society organisation and its orientation towards government, there were few examples of collaboration across sectors. This is a particular challenge for building capacity for progressive adaptation.