Hartmut Fünfgeld

Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation: The Importance of Framing

In the Australian policy context, there has recently been a discernible shift in the discourse used when considering responses to the impacts of current weather extremes and future climate change. Commonly used terminology, such as climate change impacts and vulnerability, is now being increasingly replaced by a preference for language with more positive connotations as represented by resilience and a focus on the ‘strengthening’ of local communities. However, although this contemporary shift in emphasis has largely political roots, the scientific conceptual underpinning for resilience, and its relationship with climate change action, remains contested. To contribute to this debate, the authors argue that how adaptation is framed—in this case by the notion of resilience—can have an important influence on agenda setting, on the subsequent adaptation pathways that are pursued and on eventual adaptation outcomes. Drawing from multi-disciplinary adaptation research carried out in three urban case studies in the State of Victoria, Australia (‘Framing multi-level and multi-actor adaptation responses in the Victorian context’, funded by the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (2010–2012)), this article is structured according to three main discussion points. Firstly, the importance of being explicit when framing adaptation; secondly, this study reflects on how resilience is emerging as part of adaptation discourse and narratives in different scientific, research and policy-making communities; and finally, the authors reflect on the implications of resilience framing for evolving adaptation policy and practice.

Opening and Closing the Future: Climate Change, Adaptation, and Scenario Planning

The gales of climate change blow the future open and closed. In response, we are having to learn to live with a renewed notion of limits and a novel level of uncertainty. One emerging governance response is a turn to scenario planning, which generates narratives about multiple futures refracted out from the present. Like climate change itself, scenario planning, and the broader field of futures studies it is part of, is historically and socially positioned, belying its application as a mere method or tool. This paper discusses the growing turn to scenario planning within government climate change adaptation initiatives in light of parallel shifts in governance (eg, interest in efficiency and wicked problems) and adaptation efforts (eg, framed as risk management or resilience) and their shared roots in the ambiguities of sustainable development. It provides an extended introduction to a theme issue that provides, overall, a nested discussion of the role of scenario planning by government for climate change adaptation, noting how governance, climate change adaptation, and scenario planning all fold together the motifs of openness and closedness. This paper engages with the emerging field of future geographies and critical interest in future orientations to highlight the way societys growing engagement on climate change adaptation exposes, critiques, replicates, and amplifies our existing orientations to the future and time and their politically contested and embedded character. It points to the way the motif of open futures can be both progressive and conservative, as political and economic interests seek to open up some futures while closing down others in the name of the ambivalent goals of adaptation and sustainable development.

Keywords in planning: what do we mean by ‘community resilience’?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we critically explore the combination of a dynamic, multilayered understanding of community with an open-ended, ‘emergent’ understanding of resilience, and highlight the relevance for planners. We argue prevailing planning policies and practices on community resilience tend to work with rather simplistic, one-dimensional understandings of both ‘community’ and ‘resilience’. The multiple layers of meaning that are embedded in the word community are ignored when it is treated as an add-on intended to give underlying ideas about resilience planning greater public appeal. Apart and together the concepts of community and resilience bring into play a host of tensions between, for example, continuity and change, resistance and adaptation, inclusion and exclusion. This paper offers a framework for ensuring that these important considerations are openly negotiated within transparent normative frameworks of planning policy and practice.

The Significance of Adaptation Framing in Local and Regional Climate Change Adaptation Initiatives in Australia

A number of commonly used approaches have emerged in local climate change adaptation planning, which can be considered as different ways of framing the meaning and purpose of adaptation. The significance of framing in adaptation planning is to date largely unexplored in adaptation research and practice. Yet both social and institutional drivers of adaptation framing can set the course for adaption planning for local or regional governments. This chapter examines the concept and social drivers of explicit and implicit adaptation framing and also draws on the relevant findings from 20 regional and local adaptation projects and initiatives across a wide range of sectors, scales and locations in Australia. The results from this analysis confirm the significance of transparent adaptation framing for effective project scoping. In particular, they point to the likelihood of needing to adjust the project scope throughout the lifespan of an adaptation initiative as the underpinning frames change, and additional climate change implications, as well as non-climatic factors influencing the project, emerge. Building on these findings, future studies into the framing of local adaptation processes can further contribute to both adaptation theory and practice.

Introduction: Approaches to Climate Change Adaptation in Cities

The academic and policy discourse on how cities can best address the impacts of climate change is still relatively new and often mainly concerned with how city administrators, politicians and civil society leaders can best access and interpret the latest climate change science to assist in their local decision-making processes.

Institutional Tipping Points in Organizational Climate Change Adaptation Processes

Despite increasing awareness of the urgency to respond to climate change through adaptation, progress with climate change adaptation differs considerably across social contexts, even within seemingly uniform institutional environments. Only a part of these differences in engaging in adaptation can be explained by differentiated exposure or sensitivity to climate change hazards. Institutions, and institutional change, play important roles in enabling or constraining adaptation at the social group scale. This paper borrows the concept of tipping points from the natural sciences (Lenton et al. 2008; Lenton 2013) and applies it to social processes of climate change adaptation by focusing on processes of institutional change towards and beyond ‘institutional’ tipping points. Different stages of institutional change, where social groups switch from one dominant attractor regime to another, are discussed and illustrated. Empirical research conducted in two organizations in the local government and primary health care sector in Australia are used as examples for how institutional adaptation occurs and how institutional tipping points can be identified. Reflecting on these examples, the paper reviews the conceptual value-add of the institutional tipping points concept, while also discussing its epistemological and methodological limitations.

Climate Change Risk Management for a Suburban Local Government: The Case of Kogarah, Australia

This paper examines the risk management process undertaken by Kogarah City Council to address climate change impacts using the tools and resources developed by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability through its Adaptive and Resilient Communities Program. The paper focuses on the experiences, challenges and learnings of the council when working through the different stages of the program. It highlights some of the strategies and initiatives Kogarah City Council has implemented in order to achieve its main climate change adaptation goals and objectives. This paper is therefore intended as a ‘case study’ for other local governments planning to carry out a risk management process within their organisation. It is concluded that the key immediate outcome of the program for Kogarah City Council was internal capacity building that was achieved by enabling staff to collaboratively engage with each other in a structured and facilitated manner.

Beyond the tools: supporting adaptation when organisational resources and capacities are in short supply

Climate change adaptation is increasingly concerned with how organisations develop capacity to adapt to uncertain futures. A participatory action research project conducted in Victoria, Australia, examined how health and social service organisations developed their organisational adaptive capacity through the use of adaptation decision-support tools. It can be challenging for any organisation to select and apply a decision-support tool, but this is particularly the case where resources and capacities are limited. For most organisations, climate change is only one of a complex set of dynamic stressors they must consider in meeting organisational goals. This paper shows that while decision-support tools can help co-generate knowledge and facilitate customised organisational adaptation processes, for them to be practically helpful for organisations with limited resources and capacities, intensive collaborative and discursive processes are needed to adjust such tools to fit specific organisational contexts and needs. Facilitators and participatory approaches that enable co-inquiry can play a critical role in supplementing scarce resources and initiating adaptation processes that go well beyond the scope and purpose of the decision-support tool used. Organisations working effectively with decision-support tools to adapt to climate change will need to feel ownership of them and have confidence in modifying them to suit their particular adaptation needs and organisational goals.