Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation by Mark Pelling Read Free Book Online Page B

as a bridging concept between cultural ecology and natural hazards research. They conceptualised the interaction of social and natural systems through backward and forward flows in energy and material. This helped to provide some quantitative modelling purchase but was not further developed. But many elements of adaptation introduced in this period do reoccur in contemporary debates. This includes an interest in the temporal staging of adaptive actions, on the possibility of mal- or sub-optimal adaptation, and in later work on social context as a root cause of adaptive actions. With its base in ecological understandings of systems dynamics this perspective used parsimony (rather than equity) as a measure of effectiveness in adaptation. Under this rubric adaptive actions should not require any unnecessary or excessive commitment of resources. Should initial adaptations prove insufficient additional actions would be taken so that adaptation unfolds in a sequential and rational pattern of increasingly resource-intensive interventions (Slobodkin and Rappaport, 1974). The ecological origins of this approach to adaptation inspired this rationalist logic and also removed any discussion of values or justice. The aim of adaptation was to maintain stasis in the face of environmental perturbations, not to enable progressive change in social or socio-ecologicalsystems. A contemporary critic, Morren (1983), also regarded the cybernetic approach as being limited by focusing on loss reduction not prevention.
    Under the cybernetic approach, adaptive capacity was approached through the notion of flexibility: ‘uncommitted potentiality for change’ (Bateson, 1972:497). The principal of parsimony meant that loss of flexibility (opportunity for future adaptive actions) was seen as a particularly significant cost of adaptation. Much effort was put into developing typologies of flexibility and adaptation and comparing this with specific environmental pressures. Counter to the rule of parsimony, great variation was observed in the actions taken by people facing similar hazards (Morren, 1983). By supporters of this approach such findings were considered as irrational actions by those at risk. Critics argued that while the cybernetic approach had made progress in providing a framework that recognised social context as a mediating pressure on the environment, shaping risk and adaptation, it did not have the conceptual tools to analyse these relationships. Analysis of adaptation was trapped at the level of information access, transmission and decision-making apparatuses. Deeper social relations of production and power were not included.
    One outcome of this failing of the cybernetics approach, which continues to influence work on adaptation and vulnerability to disaster risk today, was to provide the inspiration for the self-styled, alternative school (Hewitt, 1983). The alternative school sought to reveal the structural root causes shaping risk by drawing from neo-Marxist dependency theory. Within this tradition, Watts argued that:
    the forces and social relations of production constitute the unique starting point for human adaptation which is the appropriation and transformation of nature into material means of social reproduction. This process is both social and cultural and it reflects the relationships to and participation in the production process. (Watts, 1983:242).
    For Watts, adaptation went beyond human responses to environmental change or natural hazard to incorporate all processes of environmental transformation and interaction with the natural world including extraction for wealth creation. This key conceptual contribution continues today with the realisation that climate change adaptation is but a part of deeper and broader processes of social change and inertia. In analytical terms the key contribution of the alternative school was to open a theoretical framework grounded in critical theory for the analysis of the structural constraints