Climate Change, Adaptation and Vulnerability
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Climate Change, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Reconceptualizing Societal-Environment Interaction within a Socially Constructed Adaptive Landscape
Paul McLaughlin Department of Sociology 121 D Sturges Hall SUNY Geneseo Geneseo, NY 14454 [email protected]
Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation: Theory and Cases ICARUS: Initiative on Climate Adaptation Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences SDEP Initiative of the Department of Geography School of Earth Society and Environment and Beckman Institute University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign February 11-13, 2010
1 Abstract
This paper reconceptualizes current analyses of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change within a broader evolutionary theory of social change premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and corporate actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by employing alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources and exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability is treated as resulting from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood and well being. This framework combines organizational sociologists’ insights into structure– environment interaction, constructivists’ attention to agency, language, culture and values as well as political ecologists concerns with power, inequality and processes of marginalization.
2 Introduction
Recent research on climate change reinforces the growing scientific consensus that people, communities and ecosystems face significant risks in the coming century. Moreover, as it becomes clear that “even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further climate change in the next few decades” (Parry et al. 2007:71), questions of adaptation and vulnerability are increasingly coming to the forefront of investigation (Adger et al. 2009; Birkmann 2006). Although the emerging literature on these topics is generally of high quality and provides important insights, it also exhibits a lack of theoretical integration. For instance, adaptation is treated as a social process which occurs in response to climate change rather than as a theoretical concept relevant to our understanding of the causes of climate change itself. Adaptation is further differentiated from mitigation, the former conceptualized as occurring only after and to the extent to which efforts to bring about the latter fail (Orlove 2005). Moreover, different social mechanisms of adaptation are not adequately distinguished and the relationships between adaptation and vulnerability are not clearly articulated.
I address these concerns by reconceptualizing adaptation and vulnerability within a broader evolutionary theory of social change, one capable of addressing the interrelated dynamics of social structure, human agency and the environment while avoiding the pitfalls associated with essentialist and nominalist approaches to theorizing societal-environment interaction (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). Specifically, I explore the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter describes a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. Individual and collective actors simultaneously adapt to and actively manipulate this terrain by employing alternative collective action frames, mobilizing resources and exploiting political opportunities in order to legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Adaptation is conceptualized as occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational mechanisms. Vulnerability is treated as resulting from the adaptive failure of social structures sustaining individual and collective health, livelihood and well being.
I begin by discussing how the concept of an adaptive landscape, derived from biology, can be generalized to the case of social evolution and used to create an integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction. I then explore the dynamics of a socially constructed adapted landscape, including how individual and corporate actors employ various mechanisms to adapt to such landscapes, how they attempt to actively reshape them by legitimating (delegitimating) alternative social structures and how they partition landscapes through the construction (deconstruction) of boundaries demarcating social forms. I discuss how this framework can be used to conceptualize adaptation and vulnerability to climate change and conclude by summarizing the advantages of this perspective and some of its implications for further research.
Toward an Evolutionary Perspective on Societal-Environment Interaction
Prerequisites. An integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction must be capable of addressing the interrelated dynamics of social structure, human agency and the environment (McLaughlin 2001). It must explain changes in the number, size, kinds and characteristics of the social structures at various levels of analysis--e.g., habits, roles, routines, organizations. And it must conceptualize these changes both as a response to variations in the biophysical, social, economic, political and discursive environments and as a cause of them. Such a perspective must also take into account human agency–i.e., the capacity of individual and corporate actors, and the diverse cultural meanings and values they espouse, to play an independent causal role in history --by explaining how actors alter their own structural and environmental contexts. Finally, any satisfactory perspective on societal-environment interaction must be fully relational. It must treat individual and corporate actors as inextricably embedded in their biophysical and social environments.
The absence of such an integrated perspective on societal-environment interaction can be traced to the persistence of essentialism within the human ecology and political economy traditions and nominalism within the constructivist tradition (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). The former metatheoretical strategy has been 3 associated with a number of recurrent problems, including an inability to theorize the diversity of social systems in both time and space, a discounting of the role of human agency and culture, a failure to incorporate the biophysical environment as an independent causal force, ethnocentrism and a bias toward technological solutions. The latter strategy is responsible for constructivist’s inability to adequately theorize the dynamics of social structure and their tendency to subsume nature into history
McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) argue that an evolutionary perspective on social change, grounded in a critical realist epistemology, provides the best prospect for overcoming these impasses. In recent decades, evolutionary theories have emerged within several disciplines, including anthropology (Durham 1992), economics (Nelson and Winter 1982; Norgaard 1994), human ecology (Dietz, Burns and Buttel 1990; Richerson and Boyd 2005), political science (Ostrom 2000) and organizational sociology (Hannan and Freeman 1989). In contrast to older, linear developmental theories, these more recent evolutionary perspectives are premised on the rejection of essentialism and assume that history is inherently multilinear and relational (McLaughlin 2001). Moreover, paralleling Darwinian biology, they rely on the variation, selection and retention of cultural information or rules as the central mechanism underlying social change. To date, such evolutionary perspectives have not been brought fully to bear on the questions of adaptation or vulnerability to climate change.
In developing an evolutionary perspective on adaptation and vulnerability, I follow the above theorists by assuming that the transmission of social information or rules provides an analogue to biological inheritance (Dietz and Burns 1992). Social rules, in short, are replicators or the cultural equivalent of genes. Moreover, paralleling the distinction between genotype and phenotype in biology, I differentiate between replicators and interactors (Hull 1988). That is, I argue that rules only become socially relevant when they are interpreted or translated into action by individuals or groups in the form of habits, roles, routines, organizations and other patterned forms of interaction. Multiple instances of these structures constitute a population. It is the differential selection of rules within and between these populations that drives social evolution.
Adaptive Landscapes. A useful metaphor for visualizing social evolution is the concept of an adaptive landscape. As originally put forward in a biological context by Sewall Wright (1932), an adaptive landscape refers to a three-dimensional topography where the X and Y axes represent combinations of allele frequencies at different loci while the Z axis represents the fitness of each combination. G.G. Simpson (1944) later extended this model by letting the X and Y axes represent phenotypic traits. This reformulation operationalizes the landscape in terms of the structural and behavioral characteristics that enhance an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce in a given environment. In either conceptualization, the peaks of the landscape represent regions of high fitness, the valleys low fitness. The contours of the landscape, including the number, distribution and height of various peaks and valleys are dynamic and shaped by the relevant dimensions of the underlying environment (McGhee 2007; Schluter 2003). Members of a population located in favorable niches higher on the adaptive surface will tend to increase their prevalence in future generations. Thus, natural selection within this framework can be characterized as a process of local hill climbing.
The concept of an adaptive landscape can be readily generalized to the case of social evolution. The structural, behavioral and cultural characteristics of different social structures--e.g., habits, roles, routines or organizations--define the X and Y axes of the landscape, while fitness again is represented by the vertical dimension. Fitness in this case is defined in terms of a social unit’s ability to persist--i.e., reproduction in the traditional sociological sense (Burns and Dietz 1992)--and/or be propagated relative to other units with different characteristics (Hannan and Freeman 1989).1 Over time, the shape of the landscape shifts in response to changes in various dimensions of the underlying biophysical, social, economic, political and discursive environments. The resulting patterns of shifting hills and valleys influence the returns that accrue to any particular adaptive strategy. Individual social units adapt to changes in the landscape through homeostatic, developmental and rational choice mechanisms. Populations of social units adapt to the landscape through differential survival reflected in changes in the founding and disbanding rates of various social forms. 4 Theorizing the dynamics of adaptive landscapes requires that three analytically distinct but interrelated questions be addressed: (1) First, how do individual and corporate actors adapt to changes in their adaptive landscapes? (2) How and under what circumstances can individual and corporate actors modify the shape of their adaptive landscapes? and (3) How do individual and corporate actors create and defend the network boundaries which serve to partition their adaptive landscapes? While each of these questions can be posed at multiple levels of analysis, I will focus on the organizational level in the remaining discussion.
Adapting to Adaptive Landscapes. Before discussing how organizations adapt and evolve within a contested evolutionary terrain I must first clarify the multiple meanings of the term adaptation. As Toulmin (1981:177) notes, the term adaptation does not denote a single concept, but rather a "family of related concepts." Toulmin identifies four mechanisms or modes of adaptation employed within the social sciences-- homeostatic, developmental, calculative or rational choice and populational. While each of these mechanisms improves performance by bringing about a better match or fit between some social entity and its environment the causal processes utilized to achieve this fit are distinct in each case.
Organizations adapt homeostatically when they employ the flexibility built into existing organizational routines to adjust to changes in their environment. Developmental adaptation involves adjustment through organizational growth and the elaboration or addition of routines--e.g., through household diversification strategies (Ellis 1998). Organizations also adapt through calculative or rational choice mechanisms when they use conscious forethought and planning--e.g., through managerial decision making. Finally, populations of organizations adapt through differential survival (Hannan and Freeman 1989). As Toulmin (1981) notes, social scientists historically have treated these various mechanisms as competing rather than complementary forms of explanation. Indeed, the history of organizational sociology reveals a series of paradigms which alternate in their reliance upon these mechanisms (Scott 2003). The same difficulties can be found in the current literature on climate change (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008).
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can clarify and integrate these various mechanisms of adaptation. For example, in the short-term individual organizations attempt to adapt to their landscapes through homeostatic, developmental and rational choice mechanisms. Organizational sociology offers a variety of open-systems theories--resource dependency theory, institutional theory, various rational choice theories (Scott 2003)--that can be employed to describe the movements of individual organizations across adaptive landscapes. However, such analyses must be combined with longer-term populational accounts of organizational change. Given the high turnover rates experienced by most organizational populations, analyses that focus solely on the adaptation of individual organizations will fail to fully account for the spatial and temporal diversity of organizations. The field of organizational ecology focuses almost exclusively on such populational dynamics by building statistical models of rates of organizational founding, disbanding, merger and change (Hannan and Freeman 1989). The advantage of the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape is that it provides a framework which encompasses all of the above mechanisms.
Modifying Adaptive Landscapes. Individual organizations and populations of organizations, however, do not just passively adapt to their landscapes. Adaptive landscapes are contested terrains. Thus, organizations simultaneously adapt to and actively attempt to reshape their landscapes. Modifying adaptive landscapes requires the application of human agency. Unfortunately most current evolutionary theories neglect this issue. For instance, McLaughlin (2001) discusses how organizational ecologists’ reliance on the inertia metaphor to justify their use of evolutionary models has led them to discount agency. The result is a mechanistic and overly
5 structuralist image of social change, one in which adaptive landscapes are taken as given and social units are passively selected by environments that are treated as exogenous. Helmreich (1999), likewise, criticizes Lansing (1995) for failing to adequately integrate agency into his evolutionary simulations of Balinese water temple networks. I believe that the full incorporation of agency, culture and values can extend the realism and explanatory power of such evolutionary perspectives (Scoones 1999). As Dietz and Burns (1992) argue, evolutionary perspectives actually facilitate the integration of agency into social theory.
Even in biology, it is increasingly recognized that organisms can modify the distribution of local resources which can, in turn, significantly alter ecological and evolutionary patterns (Odling-Smee et al. 2003). Such processes of niche construction are even more important in the case of social evolution. That is, if individual and corporate actors are continually formulating alternative courses of action and bringing those imaginative projections to bear on current pragmatic situations, then the shape and dynamics of adaptive landscapes cannot be treated as exogenous (McLaughlin 2001). Rather, as Bourdieu (1985) suggests with his concept of a social topology--i.e., a socially constructed multi-dimensional space defined by accumulations of various forms of social and material capital--such landscapes must themselves be seen as subject to continual negotiation and contestation. Peluso and Watts (2001:25) employ a related image in their account of political ecology, arguing that “The environment is an arena of contested entitlements, a theater in which conflicts or claims over property, assets, labor, and the politics of recognition play themselves out.”
By integrating structure, agency and environment the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape provides a more comprehensive framework for conceptualizing such dynamics.2 It offers a plausible answer to the following question posed by Emirbayer and Mische (1998:964): “If structural contexts are analytically separable from (and stand over and against) capacities for human agency, how is it possible for actors to mediate or transform their own relationships to these contexts.” Within a socially constructed adaptive landscape individual and corporate actors alter their structural and, I would add, environmental contexts by employing various framing processes to mobilize resources, create and/or exploit political opportunities and construct social boundaries in order to legitimate (or delegitimate) social forms at various levels of analysis. Through such processes of niche construction actors transform their contexts of action by continually reshaping and repartitioning the adaptive landscape and, thereby, changing the probabilities of survival and reproduction of habits, roles, routines and organizations. The social and biophysical impacts of such shifts, in turn, create opportunities for and impose constraints upon subsequent action. When they alter the adaptive landscape, actors create the branching points of a dynamic, multi-linear and relational history.
Processes of legitimation (delegitimation) are thus central to understanding the dynamics of adaptive landscapes. Legitimation occurs when new social structures come to be accepted as taken-for-granted. In terms of the above framework, legitimation involves creating--as opposed to simply climbing--a new peak or fold in the adaptive landscape. This interpretation of legitimation recognizes the need to integrate both structural and cultural dynamics (Baum and Powell 1995) by combing the insights of institutional theory, organizational ecology and constructivism. For instance, institutional theorists such as Meyer and Rowan (1977) argue that achieving a taken-for-granted status allows individual organizations to obtain more resources and, thus, improve their survival chances. Organizational ecologists have extended institutionalists’ arguments to populations of organizations by demonstrating the connection between legitimation and systematic changes in founding and disbanding rates (Hannan and Freeman 1989). However, although in their theoretical formulations they acknowledge a role for agency and culture, in their empirical work organizational ecologists tend to gloss over the complex internal and external projects engaged in by both individual and corporate actors to legitimate new
6 organizational forms (McLaughlin and Khawaja 2000). A more active and historical account of legitimation requires additional insights from the constructivist tradition.
The constructivist literature on social movements emphasizes the critical role that injustice frames play in social movements’ attempts to challenge dominant ideologies (Snow et al. 1986). The values, beliefs and meanings embedded in dominant ideologies invariably reflect the interests of powerful actors. As Dietz and Burns (1992) note, powerful actors can not only determine what rules are applied in a given situation but, over time, change the distribution of rules to favor their own interests. In terms of the above evolutionary framework, this implies that powerful actors have a greater ability to shape the contours of adaptive landscapes. However, the legitimacy of the social structures, practices and meanings underwritten by a dominant ideology are always precarious and contested (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Oliver-Smith 1996). Injustice frames embodying contending visions of a just and desirable society are continually created and/or persist in various social movement abeyance structures (Taylor 1989). When mobilized, such frames have the potential to transform societies and their associated biophysical environments by changing the number, location or height of peaks on adaptive landscapes.3
Social movements are most likely to emerge when individual and corporate actors conclude that a dominant ideology is no longer providing solutions to changing political, economic, or environmental problems. As Ellingson (1995) notes, actors continually assess the legitimacy of cultural assumptions in relation to ongoing events. Thus, what is considered “natural” or “normal” in a given society may shift in response to political and economic events, changes in knowledge and technology as well as the ongoing experience of environmental variability (Oliver-Smith 1986). The weakening of a dominant ideology creates spaces in the social landscape where actors can elaborate injustice frames which not only redefine "what was previously seen as an unfortunate but tolerable situation...as inexcusable, unjust, or immoral" (Snow et al. 1986:474) but also provide a diagnosis of the problem, a proposed solution, and a rationale for taking action (Snow and Benford 1988). The creation of an injustice frame entails the formation of a distinct network of individuals who espouse a new symbolic reality. Such networks provide a basis for constructing social movement organizations (SMO’s) that embody the new frame (Clemens 1993) and use it to challenge the prevailing discourse and it’s taken-for- granted interpretations of the physical, biological, and social world.
Constructing new SMO’s and realizing broader social movement goals requires the mobilization of participants and other resources. Social movements employ various frame-alignment processes–e.g., frame bridging, amplification, extension and transformation (Snow et al. 1986)–to persuade actors to join and/or contribute resources to the movement. Resources are critical to social movement success (Jenkins 1983; McCarthy and Zald 1977) because resources translate into social power and social power, as noted, implies the ability to remold the contours of adaptive landscapes. Social movements employ this leverage in the first instance to construct a niche for the social movement itself. As a movement gains legitimacy the height of the landscape supporting its various habits, roles, routines and organizations is raised. Second, social movements apply resources to reshape the broader evolutionary terrain--e.g., by changing the normative environments of other organizations or lobbying the government to pass new legislation--in ways that reflect their interests and values. Nevertheless, adaptive landscapes and the boundaries that partition them are not infinitely pliable. The ability of social movements to effect change must be measured against existing political opportunities. As Tarrow (1998) notes, various factors--divided elites, influential allies, political access, shifting political alignments and repression/facilitation–all influence the vulnerability of governments and elites to new claims. Finally, although I have used the constructivist literature on social movements to describe how actors modify adaptive landscapes, I believe that the processes and concepts identified can be applied to both 7 movement and non-movement sectors as well as interactions between them. As Dally (1991:100) argues, “the economy, like all other spheres, is the terrain of a political struggle, and is governed not by a single logic but by a proliferation of discourses/language games.”4
Partitioning Adaptive Landscapes. New habits, roles, routines and organizations cannot attain a taken-for- granted status unless they are first seen as distinct. Thus, in order to achieve legitimacy, new social forms must be clearly demarcated through the construction of social boundaries. Lamont and Molnar (2002) argue that social boundaries are created when actors translate the conceptual distinctions they use to categorize components of the natural and social world into well-defined networks of social interaction. Processes of boundary construction (deconstruction) can occur on multiple levels of analysis. Actors are constantly promulgating new forms of property rights, creating various in-group/out-group comparisons, notions of purity/impurity and distinctions of taste and lifestyle to shape collective identities and to construct racial, gender and class categories (Alvarez 1995; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Hodgson 1999). Hannan and Freeman (1986) discuss the role of boundary construction in the legitimation of new organizational forms.
Such a moderate constructivist perspective, which conceptualizes categories as bounded networks (McLaughlin 2001), provides a crucial link between the dynamics of adaptive landscapes and questions of adaptation and vulnerability to climate change. In negotiating and contesting boundaries on multiple levels of analysis actors draw upon legal traditions, cultural repertoires and narratives to fabricate new distinctions in a continuous struggle to defend or redefine the current partitioning of adaptive landscapes. The point of these boundary struggles which invariably accompany the legitimation of new social forms is to exclude other actors from the resources being assembled in a newly constructed niche (Tilly 1998). By privileging certain actors while marginalizing others social boundaries play a critical role in determining levels of poverty and inequality by differentially distributing entitlements across populations (Sen 1981). A lack of entitlements can significantly impact adaptive capacity, thereby increasing vulnerability to climate change and other natural hazards.
Climate Change, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Adaptation to Climate Change. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape forces us to relocate the question of adaptation to climate change within a broader historical and theoretical context. Adaptation to climate change is not a new phenomenon. Rather it is the latest phase of a process of societal- environment interaction that has been ongoing for millennia. Thus, the causes of climate change as well as questions of mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability should all be conceptualized within a common theoretical framework. They all represent alternative outcomes of the same four mechanisms of adaptation--homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational--discussed above. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can help us to integrate these mechanisms and identify the conditions under which their joint operation leads to each of these respective outcomes.
For instance, from the above evolutionary perspective, understanding the root causes and driving forces responsible for climate change requires, among other things, that we identify the dominant ideology that has shaped the adaptive landscapes of organizations for the last two centuries. McLaughlin and Khawaja (2000) have argued that, prior to the emergence of the environmental movement, the dominant ideology within the United States, and arguably the rest of the “developed” world, was Manifest Destiny. This ideology consisted of an amalgam of an anti-environmental interpretation of Christianity (White 1967), a cultural belief in progress (Catton and Dunlap 1980) and the patriarchal assumptions underlying Francis Bacon’s program of scientific research (Keller 1985). These mutually reinforcing ideas provided a common rhetoric used to legitimate the thousands of distinct forms of organization, and their associated lifestyles, that are responsible for climate 8 change and other global environmental problems. These same dynamics are implicated in the processes of boundary construction and marginalization that underlie current patterns of vulnerability (see below). To give just one example, in the 1980's the Brazilian government used its own version of Manifest Destiny to legitimate the spread of cattle ranching in the Amazon. The proliferation of these organizations not only reduced biodiversity and increased carbon dioxide emissions through the cutting and burning of virgin forest, they also increased the vulnerability of local Indian and Seringueiro populations by undermining their livelihoods (Hecht and Cockburn 1990).
Mitigating climate change will require the use of both existing and newly created collective action frames to mobilize resources to challenge this dominant ideology by radically reshaping the contours of adaptive landscapes. Specifically we will need to change the number, location and height of peaks on various landscapes in order to delegitimate environmentally destructive forms of activity while simultaneously legitimating more sustainable habits, roles, routines and organizations that reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Hart 2007; Ostrom 2005). Such changes would come about through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational mechanisms of adaptation. As is common in revolutions and reform movements, these changes may also entail the creation of entirely new forms of organization and the complete elimination of some existing forms-- including attendant process of boundary construction and deconstruction (Hannan and Freeman 1987). However, as noted above, powerful actors often have a vested interest in the status quo and the capacity to thwart efforts to modify evolutionary terrains. For example, Finan (2003) has shown how large landowners in Northeastern Brazil have succeeded in turning drought relief payments and climate forecasts to their own advantage. Thus, a critical research question that needs to be addressed in this context, is how variations in the different dimensions of political opportunity across countries and time periods facilitate or constrain attempts to reconfigure adaptive landscapes.
How elites and publics interpret environmental events induced by climate change will likely play a critical role in altering such political opportunities (Ellingson 1995). While political process theorists invariably focus on how social, economic and political events impact political opportunity structures, natural disasters and other environmental changes can also destabilize (or reinforce) existing power relations (Hoffman 1999a, 1999b; Oliver-Smith 1986). As Oliver-Smith (2004:18) notes, “hazards and disasters demonstrate the exo-semiotic agency of nature.” Thus, climate induced impacts and disasters may not only call into question established values and proliferate new meanings (Oliver-Smith 1996), they may also transform political opportunity structures by dividing or uniting elites, changing the structure of alliances, increasing or decreasing political access, shifting political alignments or calling forth repression or facilitation by governments (Tarrow 1998).5 When political opportunities open, even marginalized groups may gain the capacity to affect political outcomes by altering the probabilities of survival and reproduction of social forms at various levels of analysis.
The dynamics of boundary construction and deconstruction within social movements also will play a critical role in efforts to mitigate climate change. For instance, social movement organizations advocating for sustainability must define and defend boundaries around themselves in order to stand out against the background of both competitors and opponents in their organizational field. As social movements mature they often diversify into submovements. Benford (1993) argues that distinct submovements typically emerge in response to “frame disputes”--i.e., disagreements over diagnoses of, solutions to and rhetorical strategies employed by competing SMO’s. Such boundary dynamics play a critical role not only in shaping the structure and diversity within social movements but also in determining their overall effectiveness. Movements torn by frame disputes become weak and fragmented (Frey, Dietz and Kalof 1992; Rucht 1989), while diverse movements that maintain “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) between submovements are generally more effective.
To the extent that mitigation efforts succeed, adaptation to anthropomorphic climate change will be unnecessary. However, since even the most optimistic projections suggest that mitigation efforts will not prevent significant climate change in coming decades (Parry et al. 2007:71), mitigation and adaptation efforts will need to be pursued simultaneously. As Adger et al. (2009:3) note, at a localize level adaptation and 9 mitigation efforts “are invariably intertwined and feed into each other. ” Indeed, from an organizational perspective this should be expected since the most significant dimension of any organization’s environment is typically other organizations (Scott 2003). The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can help to conceptualize and model interactions between both mechanisms of adaptation and organizational populations. For instance, organizational ecologists (Hannan and Freeman 1989) have shown how major institutional, legal or policy shifts resulting from rational planning can be incorporated into dynamic models (Tuma and Hannan 1984) of organizational founding, disbanding, merger or change using period-effect variables. Likewise, interactions between organizational populations--e.g., cattle ranches and Seringueiro rubber estates in the Amazon--could be modeled using cross-effect variables which measure how the changing density of one population impacts the vital rates of another. The human and organizational dynamics resulting from policy and technological interventions--e.g., development induced displacements resulting from dam construction (Baviskar 2001; Cernea and McDowell 2000)--related to mitigation and adaptation efforts could be modeled using similar techniques.
Climate change also will affect the population dynamics of habits, roles, routines and organizations by changing the magnitude or timing of various environmental parameters–e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea level, storm frequency and intensity, freshwater availability, the distribution of disease vectors, species ranges, crop productivity, etc. Such changes will directly, or through intermediate mechanisms, shift the number, location or height of various peaks of adaptive landscapes, altering the probabilities of survival of social units in space and time. Some of these changes, for example regime shifts in ecosystems (Peterson 2009), may be sudden and dramatic. The speed and magnitude of changes will be critical in determining whether adaptation occurs primarily through changes at the level of individual social units or through differential survival at the population level of analysis. Understanding the latter dynamics will be particularly critical given the well known limitations of rational decision making (Hannan and Freeman 1989; Simon 1997) and the likelihood that the level of accuracy and precision necessary for adjustment to climate change solely through calculative mechanisms is unlikely to be obtained (Desai et al. 2009).
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can contribute in a number of ways to the development of the robust adaptive strategies that Desai et al. (2009) argue will be needed to cope with such intractable uncertainties. First, an evolutionary framework, which conceptualizes social change as occurring primarily through trial and error, is consistent with newly emerging experimentalist approaches to environmental governance (Overdevest et al. Forthcoming). These approaches reject the notion that environmental policy must be predicated upon a Godlike ability to predict future conditions as well as the associated urge to rationally control and dominate nature.6 Instead they take the limits of human cognition in relation to the complexity and uncertainty of societal-environment interaction as an epistemological given and argue that acknowledging such limitations in no way implies an incapacity to make decisions. Rather, drawing on the pragmatist tradition, advocates of experimentalist governance argue that these limitations can be overcome by stimulating local innovation, problem solving and learning through public experiments which allow for, and even embrace, the possibility of surprises and which seek to increase democratic accountability by encouraging shared responsibility and the involvement of all stakeholders.7
The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape could be used to theorize alternative goals and strategies within an experimentalist system of governance, the interaction between various mechanisms of adaptation, the reciprocal affects among the vital rates of organizational populations, as just discussed, how alternative sets of values embedded in competing frames may be used to mobilize resources to reshape the landscape, how obstacles to adaptation--e.g., conceptualized as valleys between peaks--might be removed through policy interventions, how political opportunities and other contextual forces can constrain or facilitate such efforts and so on.8
Vulnerability to Climate Change. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can also help address some of the conceptual and theoretical challenges currently facing the field of vulnerability research. 10 The first challenge is a lack of agreement on the scientific meaning of vulnerability (Birkmann 2006). Part of the difficulty here is the diversity of entities--individuals, groups, communities, ecosystems--that are posited to be vulnerable to climate change or other natural hazards. A second challenge relates to the shortcomings of the frameworks being put forward to conceptualize vulnerability. For instance, after discussing a series of analytical models of vulnerability, Birkmann (2006:68) concludes that we need “more comprehensive and holistic approaches that take into account the dynamic nature of vulnerability as well as” the “underlying causal factors of vulnerability at different levels for different hazards.” However, as noted above, some of the broader theoretical frameworks associated with these analytical models themselves suffer from deficiencies derived from the metatheoretical strategies--i.e., essentialism and nominalism--on which they are premised (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). By locating vulnerability within an evolutionary framework that integrates structure, agency and environment, the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can help clarify the meaning of vulnerability and its relationship to adaptation. It can also facilitate our understanding of the root causes and driving forces that contribute to vulnerability. Within the context of a socially constructed adaptive landscape vulnerability can be conceptualized as resulting from the adaptive failure of the social structures--habits, roles, routines, organizations--that sustain individual and collective health, livelihood and well being (Oliver-Smith 1996). Unpacking this statement requires that we first specify which exposure unit is the focus of concern (Clark et al. 2000). For instance, if the concern is with the vulnerability of a specific social form per se–e.g., farms–then vulnerability is inversely related to the fitness of that form. If the concern is with a particular human population–e.g., farmers–than their vulnerability will be negatively correlated with the fitnesses of the social structures on which they rely for their livelihood. The argument here bears a direct relation to Sen’s (1983:754) notion of entitlements–i.e., “the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces.” As Sen (1981) suggests, shifts in entitlements reflect changes in the legitimacy/viability of various productive social roles, routines and organizations in response to variations in the social, economic, political and biophysical environment. However, as Fraser (2003) notes, Sen’s entitlement approach tends to treat the biophysical environment as static and gives insufficient attention to the capacity of human agents to modify it.
The analysis of legitimation and boundary formation processes within socially constructed adaptive landscapes provides a more dynamic framework for conceptualizing the relationship between entitlements and vulnerability. Other things being equal, vulnerability is likely to be higher for individuals who have been, along with the social structures on which they depend for their livelihoods, marginalized by previous iterations of legitimation and boundary formation. Such actors are likely to find themselves in high risk environments and/or with a limited entitlement set. As Torry (1979) notes, marginal locations generally imply a greater exposure to risks. For example, poor people, women and lower status ethnic groups are more likely to have risks imposed upon them–e.g., by being constrained to live in neighborhoods which host hazardous facilities, regions with high levels of disease, poor soils, higher probabilities of landslides or, as dramatically illustrated by recent events in Haiti, in housing that is ill-equiped to withstand earthquakes (Bullard 2005; Comfort et al. 1999; Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004; Hodgson 1999; Pulwarty and Riebsame 1997; Tierney 1999). As political ecologists emphasize, the restriction of populations to such marginal locations is often achieved through the active construction and--sometimes violent--defense of social boundaries (Robbins 2004; Smith 2009).
A marginal location on an adaptive landscape also typically implies limited or unreliable access to resources. As noted above, the point of the boundary struggles which accompany the legitimation of new social forms is to exclude other actors from resources.9 The resulting lack or instability of entitlements place restrictions on the number and types of short-term strategies--homeostatic, developmental or rational choice-- that can be deployed in the face of shifts in adaptive landscapes. That is, poverty and inequality influence 11 baseline vulnerability (Adger 1999; Kawachi, Kennedy and Wilkinson 1999; Tarlov and St. Peter 2000; Wilkinson 1996). Since poor people have the fewest assets, they reach the threshold of vulnerability first (Swift 1989). Moreover, marginality not only implies a greater sensitivity to environmental and other forms of change, it generally entails a more limited resilience (Bohle 1993). Both increased sensitivity and lower resilience imply that small shifts in adaptive landscapes can push a social unit below minimum levels of viability. A lack of resources also implies a limited ability to adapt through longer-term populational strategies requiring the active manipulation of adaptive landscapes.
Climate change is likely to increase risks and diminish or destabilize entitlements (Parry et al. 2007) for those located in marginalized locations on adaptive landscapes. By changing the magnitude or timing of various environmental parameters–e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea level, storm frequency and intensity, freshwater availability, the distribution of disease vectors, species ranges, crop productivity etc.--it may collapse peaks on landscapes or shift their location at rates that exceed the capacity of homeostatic, developmental, rational choice or even populational mechanisms to compensate. Moreover, as Downing (1991) notes, how the climate change debate itself is framed may, in some cases, be more important than the actual environmental impacts themselves because it may induce shifts in government policies or market processes that affect comparative advantage. The impacts on marginalized groups and regions also may be exacerbated by double exposures created by synergisms between climate change and globalization (O’Brien and Leichenko 2000).
The above comments provide only a first link between vulnerability and the dynamics of adaptive landscapes. They are useful but very broad generalizations. The difficulty is, of course, that other things are rarely equal. Although one generally would expect lower founding rates and/or higher disbanding rates of social forms in marginal areas of adaptive landscapes, we would also expect considerable variability in those rates. First, even amongst the poor there will be differences in the accumulation of natural, economic, human, cultural and social capitals (Dow 1999). Likewise, as Chambers (1989) notes, and an evolutionary perspective would lead one to expect, the poor exhibit a great diversity in livelihood and coping strategies. For instance, Bates and Pelanda (1994) argue that individual actors play multiple roles, some of which may be embedded in higher- level collectivities–e.g., an economically diversified household unit. Participation in such systems can buffer individuals from the direct impact of, say, a job loss resulting from an economic downturn. The loss of a work role by one member of a household can shift the adaptive problem from the individual to the whole household. Households, in turn, may try to insulate themselves from crises by participating in formal and informal social security mechanisms (McCabe 2002), placing the adaptive burden yet higher. Severe or sustained environmental or economic crises may eventually lead to adaptive failure on all of these levels (Sharp and Devereux 2004), resulting in distress migration, complete reliance on outside aid and varying degrees of human morbidity and mortality (Dirks 1980).
The relationship between vulnerability and the fitnesses of social structures at various levels of analysis is, thus, complex and dynamic. However, properly developed, I believe the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can contribute to our understanding of that complexity. By providing an alternative, non- essentialist framework for conceptualizing the “long-term structural and historical processes by which specific patterns of entitlements and property rights come to be distributed” (Watts and Bohle 1993:48) it can provide a conceptual bridge between the root causes and driving forces that underlie vulnerability and the levels of vulnerability experienced by specific populations. It also can provide a framework for conceptualizing programs and policies to reduce vulnerability by reducing levels of marginalization and inequality by modifying the adaptive landscapes--including social boundaries--of existing organizations or by legitimating new, more equitable and socially sustainable organizations--e.g., through social entrepreneurship (Bornstein 2007) or the promotion of cooperatives or social businesses (Yunus 2007). Moreover, these processes could be modeled using the same dynamic methods discussed above with regard to adaptation to climate change (Tuma and Hannan 1984)
12 Conclusion
Questions of adaptation and vulnerability are increasingly central to the field of climate change research. In this paper, I explored how an evolutionary theory of social change, premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape, can provide a new perspective for conceptualizing these issues while avoiding the pitfalls associated with essentialist and nominalist approaches to theorizing societal-environment interaction (McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). This perspective provides an integrated framework for conceptualizing societal- environment interaction that is conceptually robust and capable of incorporating organizational sociologists’ insights into structure-environment interaction, constructivists’ attention to agency, language, culture and values as well as political ecologists concerns with power, inequality and processes of marginalization. The concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape can be employed to conceptualize not only adaptation and vulnerability to climate change but the underlying causes of climate change itself as well as attempts to mitigate its impacts. Each represents alternative outcomes of an ongoing process of societal-environment interaction occurring through homeostatic, developmental, rational choice and populational mechanisms at different levels of analysis. Properly developed, this framework would be capable of generating more specific models and hypotheses that could be tested using a variety of qualitative and quantitative--including dynamic modeling-- methods.
In political and pragmatic terms, the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape stakes out a “middle ground between structural inevitability and voluntaristic optimism regarding our environmental future” (Buttel 1996:73). Because it conceptualizes history as inherently open-ended, multi-linear and relational, it does not contain a built-in bias toward either inevitable environmental deterioration or improvement. Likewise, while this concept recognizes the centrality of agency to the analysis of adaptation and vulnerability, it does not give agency unlimited scope (Dietz and Burns 1992). Thus, mitigating, adapting to or reducing vulnerability to climate change requires that individual and corporate actors committed to change develop alternative collective action frames, and use those frames to mobilize the resources necessary to reshape and repartition the adaptive landscape. Whether such attempts are successful or not in a given instance, will depend, as DiMaggio (1988:13) notes, on “the relative power of organized interests,” as well as the shifting constellation of political opportunities and the dynamics of the biophysical environment itself. In any of these cases, the metaphor of a contested evolutionary terrain underscores the point that questions of mitigation, adaptation and vulnerability are inherently political and moral (Hilhorst and Bankoff 2004).
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18 1 Two points need to be emphasized. First, fitness is a frame-relative rather than a frame-invariant concept (Sober 1980). That is, as in the biological case, the fitness of a particular social form cannot be defined independently of context. A social characteristic that has a high fitness in one context may have extremely low fitness in another. Second, fitness is a descriptive rather than a normative concept. Viewed from alternative moral or political standpoints, a given social form may be laudable or reprehensible. While processes of negotiation and contestation over values and beliefs play a central role in determining what social forms are fit in a given context, fitness does not determine what forms should be valued. Rather it only describes the outcome of such processes of negotiation in terms of the differential reproduction of social forms. 2 In saying that adaptive landscapes are “socially constructed” I do not mean that they are merely reifications or in any sense not real. Rather, I simply mean that both the shape and partitioning of landscapes are the products of individual and corporate actors who are acting on the basis of perceptions filtered through specific cultural frames. That is, I am employing a moderate form of constructivism which conceptualizes social categories as bounded networks (McLaughlin 2001; McLaughlin and Dietz 2008). 3 By providing a clear theoretical link between cultural frames and framing processes and the dynamics of social structure--in the form of changing probabilities of survival and reproduction of habits, roles, routines and organizations--the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape helps to explain “…how narrative and text matter and how categories and the apprehension of knowledge is linked to ecological change” (Robbins 1998:72). 4 Although space limitations prevent me from doing so here, concepts derived from actor-network theory (Callon 1986; Latour 1987) might also be used to conceptualize the legitimation of new social forms within adaptive landscapes. 5 Note the parallel between the concept of political opportunity in sociology and the notion of ecological opportunity in evolutionary theory (see Schluter 2003). 6 Indeed, both of these requirements reflect the assumptions underlying the ideology of Manifest Destiny, particular Bacon’s belief that “feminine” nature is simple and passive and thus easily understood and dominated by “masculanized” science (Keller 1985). 7 See Hart’s (2007) discussion of low cost probes and experimentation in the development of sustainable businesses as well as Yunus (2007) on the role of experimentation in constructing social businesses. 8 Although the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape is consistent with, it is in no way dependent upon an experimentalist approach to environmental governance. It could equally well be used to explain how powerful actors can use their resources, influence and ability to manipulate cultural frames to maintain the status quo by preventing the institutionalization of such a system of governance. The explicit intention of experimentalist governance it to undermine the role of such elite action (Overdevest et al. forthcoming) by increasing political access and, thus, opening political opportunity structures. By doing so it would promote change by increasing the flexibility of the adaptive landscapes of various organizational forms. Although I personally am supportive of such a political stance, unlike experimentalist approaches to governance which contain a prescriptive element derived from Habermas’ (1987) theory of communicative action, the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape is intended to be a purely descriptive theory. 9 As Geiryn (1999) emphasizes, such “boundary-work” also occurs within the domain of science itself and plays a key role in establishing the epistemic authority, legitimacy and access to resources of “scientific” versus “non-scientific” knowledge systems as well as alternative theoretical frameworks within science (Dietz, Stern and Rycroft 1989). Such dynamics should be a central focus of vulnerability research.