Part 8 (2/2)
Douglas Brinkley's (2006) tome on the Katrina disaster provides historical depth and presents an impressive breadth of knowledge of the socio-political, cultural and environmental factors leading up to the disaster. Though most actors are presented as people caught up in larger processes beyond their full understanding or control, there is no shortage of villains in this narrative. Yet he reserves special rancour for the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin. Making painfully clear the racial tenor of the critique, he observes that the pro-business mayor has long been called an 'Uncle Tom' by his detractors. Brinkley a.s.serts that the reason Nagin failed to order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, when it would have saved lives and prevented thousands from suffering, was because he was afraid to anger his patrons in the business community whose wealth is maintained with the profits from tourism.
As the post Katrina political repercussions continue to unfold, the partisan battles become increasingly shrill, and the mainstream press dutifully reproduces the battles for public consumption, it remains to be seen if the voices that link disaster to wider socio-economic and environmental policies that increase vulnerabilities and reduce human security, for some more than others, will be heard over the din. (Brinkley, 2006:23) Despite the range of critical discourses following Katrina, tangible adaptive responses remain constrained. Birkland, in a study of policy learning following disaster events, undertook a review of the Library of Congress's Thomas database two months after the disaster. He found: Of the 293 items this search returned, 40 percent of the bills mentioned Hurricane Katrina in the t.i.tle, 24 percent included the work 'relief' in the t.i.tle, and the items 'recovery' and 'reconstruction' were mentioned in 9 and 5 percent of t.i.tles, respectively. The word 'preparedness' appeared in three bills (1 percent) and the word [hazard] 'mitigation' did not appear in any bill. Clearly [hazard] mitigation or even preparedness was not a major concern of Congress in the two months after the disaster. (Birkland, 2007:178) Why is it that an event with demonstrable impact on popular, political and legislative consciousness failed to translate into progressive, proactive forms of adaptation built on hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness? Birkland (2007) argues that this was a result of the lack of an organised advocacy lobby around hurricane risk management, in turn a product of 'confusion over what it takes to improve policy performance and of political constraints that prevent officials from adopting effective policies' (Birkland, 2007:178). He argues that, in the US, incremental learning has brought improvements in risk regulation such as the Flood Insurance Reform Act (transitional adaptation) but that the political leaders.h.i.+p required for more transformational acts such as the banning of home construction on the coastline which would need a rethinking of development policy remains absent; an absence made all the more stark when compared to the impacts of the homeland security agenda, which indeed has taken resource and political attention away from hurricane and other disaster risk management. This is perhaps also explained by the modest levels of popular engagement with direct democracy in the US. Levels of trust in government and the governance of basic needs and security provision were dented by Hurricane Katrina but already low (Nicholls, 2009) and a sense that it is the system itself that is rotten rather than individual politicians or even parties, as one local newspaper commentator suggests: Some political 'experts' believe that the recent hurricanes will create a demand for bigger government and a return to a New Deal-style of economics. This view is rooted in events that took place after the 1927 Mississippi River flood. But unlike the 2005 storms, government played a small role in the storm of 1927. Businessmen in New Orleans, who sacrificed St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes to save their own interests, were viewed as the villains. (Mainly because they never followed through with their commitment to reimburse the people of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes for the damages they incurred.) In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the 'villains' appear to be the inflexible and uncaring bureaucracy of FEMA, and the indecisiveness and often bickering local political officials, and the many problems related to the administration of the Road Home program. In stark contrast to the storm of 1927, many individuals and corporations were clearly willing and able to help those affected by providing food, shelter, and even jobs. Therefore, we see Hurricane Katrina creating further disgust against the 'business as usual' politics of Louisiana. History has shown us that political shenanigans are least tolerated in times of suffering and/or blatant corruption. (PoliticsLA.com, no date) As significant for some will be the impact of demographic changes wrought by Katrina with the residents of predominantly poor, black neighbourhoods being displaced through evacuation and redevelopment. A final reminder of the resilience of inc.u.mbent politicians in the US and especially New Orleans comes from the 1966 floods of the city which were also precipitated by poor government planning and levee failure during a hurricane. The inc.u.mbent mayor used disaster relief to bolster his public image and was re-elected to office a month later despite being personally responsible for the reallocation of city funds originally destined to sh.o.r.e up the levee (Abney and Hill, 1966).
Conclusion.
What can these case histories tell us about adaptation and transformation? Certainly they show that decision-making for risk management is not only a technical matter but framed by and invested in the rough and tumble of politics. Importantly this is not only politics in the narrow sense of elections but rather more broadly refers to governance: the balance of private sector, state and voluntary sector provision of goods and services including the upholding of human rights. In each case this balance, which lies at the heart of the social contract, was challenged by disaster, and in particular by failures in the established regime to both reduce risk and prevent avoidable losses as part of everyday practice before the event, and be seen to act justly and effectively in response and reconstruction.
The most dramatic political outcome, the only example of regime change, unfolded in East Pakistan, when electoral politics failed to meet popular expectations for change. This is a prime example of disaster acting as a catalyst for political trajectories already entrained pre-disaster. The succession movement successfully presented the disaster as a symbol for state failure and provided the organisational base for propelling popular discontent into the political arena.
Table 8.1 Lessons for adaptation East Pakistan (Bangladesh) Nicaragua New Orleans, USA Social contract Pre-disaster contract lacked cultural legitimacy Social contract held in place by international financial actors Popular denial of inequalities in social contract Disaster impact Slow and limited state response fuelled succession movement Opened regime to international scrutiny and pressure Revealed chronic administrative failures at all levels of governance Human security In the long-run, basic needs and human rights were enhanced following independence Lost opportunity to build capacity through governance reform Evacuation, speculation and redevelopment have changed the demography of the city; the city remains at risk Lessons for adaptation Electoral politics is sensitive to popular discontent but when not heeded armed violence can result International agendas for reform need to be built on local capacities and willingness to change Overreliance on the private sector caused gross inefficiency, loss of knowledge and human resource in the public sector The symbolic significance of disaster and failure in response and reconstruction is shown in each case. Following Mitch international actors sought to open Nicaragua's political-economy to the values of inclusive democracy. But battles lost at the level of discourse allowed distortions to appear in policy that undermined this agenda. The reinterpretation of decentralised governance as privatisation by international financial inst.i.tutions is a case in point. Reflecting the scale of shock generated by Hurricane Katrina, this event has led to multiple competing discourses, there was though only marginal impact in the delivery of response. Given the administrative failures that prefigured the disaster one might expect a greater degree of internal reflection but this was not clearly present in the federal regime so that the impacts of the disaster were in many cases exacerbated by the exploitation of reconstruction opportunities by private contractors, large and small. The lack of an advocacy coalition and possibly also deep rooted popular disengagement from politics at the time weakened oversight and reflexivity.
Table 8.1 summarises each case study. Context is critical in judging the capacity for adaptation to open scope for progressive transformation. Adaptation can be championed through instrumental policy but also as part of a more diffuse cultural reaction to risk. It is at the conjuncture of cultural and instrumental adaptations that discourse is most influential, shaping the transfer of popular complaint into political prioritising and policy. Technical a.n.a.lysis is part, but not the whole, or even necessarily a dominant element, of this process of discursive compet.i.tion which encompa.s.ses emotional as well as intellectual reasoning at a societal level. The narratives and metaphors that give collective shape to individual emotions hold the power to challenge or reinforce the status quo as adaptation to climate change becomes internalised as a social process part of history as well as a technical and policy domain.
Part IV.
Adapting with climate change.
9.
Conclusion: adapting with climate change.
Too frequently adaptation still reflects a narrow framing, which a.s.sumes that climate change is an ultimate, rather than a proximate driver of change.
(Nelson, 2009:496).
The potential, and even likely, implications of climate change for ecological and physical systems are profound and disturbing. Social systems that deliver specific management functions and organise governance serve to mediate between these impacts and people at risk. In this way understanding adaptive capacity and action requires a lens that can examine organisational behaviour and governance regimes, as well as the feelings, values and actions of individuals. Perhaps most important are the interactions between different levels of social actor (individuals and organisations) and the inst.i.tutions that give shape to social systems. Research and policy on adaptation to climate change is just beginning to recognise the full contribution of values and governance to behaviour and action. Work on adaptation is emerging from an early period in its evolution as an intellectual domain where adaptation has, as Nelson (2009) rightly observes, been narrowly framed. Until now the overriding need has been for an articulation of adaptation as a function of climate change impacts (and for some a sub-set of vulnerability). Under the influence of the UNFCCC and IPCC this has in turn required but not quite achieved a clear definition. Adaptation, though, has in the process been separated from mitigation and development. As we have seen throughout this book, climate change is affecting socio-ecological systems in many ways. The majority are compound and indirect, and many quite ambiguous, so that it is difficult to imagine science will ever be able to identify the proportion of an expected or past event that is attributable to climate change alone and so precisely what climate change adaptation, narrowly defined, should be.
As our technical understanding of climate change adaptation is accompanied by a more nuanced view that can include governance as a field of adaptation, as well as a context within which technical adaptations unfold, so the relations.h.i.+p between humanity and climate change s.h.i.+fts. Sites for adaptation become internalised within socio-ecological systems. We turn from adapting to climate change, towards adapting with climate change. This is quite a leap and also requires an admittance that anthropogenic climate change is with us now, and is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Adapting with sees climate change as internal (a product of humanity's values, decisions and actions), but also its coevolution with the environment, so that neither environmental nor social change is independent (Castree and Braun, 2001). Once the social, and governance in particular, is given more emphasis so the opportunities arising from adaptation to enhance sustainable development become more apparent, the aim of adaptation becomes not one of defensive but progressive risk management as part of a renewed sustainable development. To be sure, the efficiency based engineering and economic debates that have tended to dominate technological adaptation thus far will remain central to the material expressions of adaptation. But they will now be positioned as part of a wider social and political agenda, so that understanding our capacity for adaptation and which adaptive options are preferable becomes a social, cultural and political as well as a technical or economic judgement.
The following discussion outlines the consequences of this perspective on adaptation for future research and policy and provides a synthesis of the argument and evidence for adapting with climate change made in this book.
How to adapt with climate change?
What are the consequences of moving from seeing climate change risk as an external threat to development to accepting that it is both a product and driver of development? Beck's seminal work on risk society provides some insight into the shape that future research and a.s.sociated policy directions might take; in light of the proposals made in this book, two lessons can be taken.
First, groups in society compete not only for material wealth but also for security. In societies where wealth is achievable, security can become an overriding concern. Risk and its management is therefore a political as well as a technological concern and one where the poor are at risk of carrying a double burden when compet.i.tion leads to their being marginalised from mechanisms providing security as well as wealth, or indeed where such burdens are interpreted as unfortunate but necessary costs for the production of security and wealth for others, elsewhere or in different times. This is a politic that needs to be critiqued from the perspective of social justice, leading to a vision of adaptation as a potential tool for progressive development, not one that uncritically defends the status quo.
Second, the risk society thesis contends that increasingly the most important risks are hard to detect and require technological innovation to make them visible. For climate change this is certainly the case and includes the challenge of making future risk and the carbon costs of risk reduction tangible and actionable in the present. The advances made in climate science have recently been applied to questions of adaptation through techniques like scenario planning that seek to provide decision-makers with a range of possible futures as a basis for planning infrastructure investments. This is useful but limited. Living with climate change means accepting future hazards cannot be planned out, or even necessarily predicted. Rather than seeking ever more precise technological guidance and solutions the urgency of climate change adaptation suggests we need to learn how to live with the fuzziness of climate change. Indeed what need to be made visible are not only the physical forcing mechanisms but also the human processes driving anthropocentric climate change and the distribution of its impacts. This lesson has already been learned at the sharp end of climate change adaptation practice. Here local vulnerability a.s.sessments place at least as much, if not more, emphasis on acting as a tool to facilitate local reflection on governance and underlying development processes as they do in providing technical accuracy on climate-change-a.s.sociated vulnerability and risk (van Aalst et al., 2008; Pelling, 2007b). The need to confront climate change risk by moving from a race for accuracy to a mechanism for studying governance as part of risk a.s.sessment is spreading, and has also been encompa.s.sed in methods for the partic.i.p.atory a.s.sessment of national capacity to manage disaster risk across the Americas by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB, 2005).
How might research and policy development on adaptation move forward? Building on the discussions made in this book four priorities for research are proposed that can help to better frame adaptation as a development problem:
Diversify the subject and object of adaptation research and policy.
Early work on adaptation has rightly focused on a tightly bounded object for research and in so doing has succeeded in contributing to a clearly defined domain for policy. But if we see adaptation as a social as well as a technological phenomenon then there is a need to extend from this core. The object of a.n.a.lysis necessarily broadens from the behaviour of individuals and their constraining inst.i.tutions to include organisations, governance systems, national and international politics. In parallel the subject of a.n.a.lysis extends from economy and technology to include cultural, social and political opportunities, play-offs and costs of adaptive options. Importantly it is in the interaction of different worldviews and priorities established from viewing adaptation through these contrasting lenses that the richness of adaptation policy, potential conflict and scope for coordinated and progressive, sustainable development could emerge.
Focus on social thresholds for progressive adaptation.
Thresholds mark the tipping points from one systems state to another, and have been recognised in climate science and also through the concatenated impacts of climate change. Less work has been undertaken on thresholds between different stages of adaptation. Research on coping has long recognised the staggered nature of household responds to risk as economic pressures cause first non-productive and then productive a.s.sets to be expended and finally see the dissolution of households and migration as hazard impacts and vulnerability increase. The parsimony rule in cybernetics presents a similar guidance; that action requiring the least expenditure of resources will be undertaken first. But both coping and cybernetics focus on ex-post-adaptation; less is known about stages in proactive adaptation, which is curious given the volume of writing presenting this as the preferred adaptive form.
But focusing on a single adaptive choice or mechanism will be increasingly difficult, and miss the bigger picture of interactions between adaptations and the wider development agenda, as climate change impacts are felt through ever increasing multiple, direct and indirect pathways, often without being recognised. In this context critical thresholds will be those that set the broad scope for what is possible through adaptation and here the distinctions between resilience, transition and transformation are potentially helpful.
Recognise multiple adaptations: the vision effect.
The interaction of multiple simultaneous adaptations has been recognised across scale when, for example, household adaptations are undermined or enhanced by local government action. But this is only one axis around which adaptation and efforts to shape adaptive capacity can interact. The competing values that underpin adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation indicate a 'vision effect' operating alongside the scale effect. This points to horizontal as well as vertical compet.i.tion and complementarities in adaptation. This axis in large part explains the observed divergence between policy intention (policies) and emergence (self-organised activity) identified (Sotarauta and Srinivas, 2006) during the implementation of policy to support or enact adaptation; a gap that reveals tensions between the actions and values of competing adaptive strategies. The vision effect also helps explain difficulties in replicating, scaling-up and mainstreaming innovations that may be set within wider, contradictory visions of adaptation local efforts at transformation will have most difficulty being mainstreamed if higher levels of governance construct adaptation as an act of resilience.
Link internal and external drivers of adaptation.
s.h.i.+fting of thinking on climate change from an external process to one unfolding as part of the coevolution of humanity and the environment makes it more important to understand internal cognitive and cultural drivers for adaptation. These are no longer fringe interests but part of the nexus of internal and external drivers that shape the who, where and when of adaptive capacity and action. The possibility that different adaptive initiatives could be in compet.i.tion and lead to risk s.h.i.+fting between social groups and to non-human lives or future generations makes it all the more important to understand the deep psychological and cultural pressures that shape the propensity for different social groups to undertake particular adaptive strategies (including those that to the outside observer may appear to be self-limiting or detrimental to individual wellbeing).
Two final aspects of adaptation that researchers and policy-makers find especially difficult to grasp and that cross cut all of these emerging areas for policy and research are contingency and chance. What we do is no longer influenced only by local or even national processes and policies but also by increasingly unforeseen connections between systems, be they ecological, economic or political, worldwide. Scope for adaptation, as with any capacity, is exposed to such tele-connected linkages and this will bring surprises. Antic.i.p.ating risk in this context becomes more difficult and consequently places greater emphasis on the core beliefs and capacities of a society the generic attributes that can be applied to novel and unforeseen pressures. These lie in culture and governance, the roots of adaptation.
A synthesis of the argument.
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