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Rapid climate change in the UK; towards an institutional theory of adaptationResearchers Institution
Summary of Project What is it that allows some organisations (businesses, government departments or voluntary sector associations) to respond to environmental change more easily and satisfactorily than others? This project aims to start opening up enquiry in this area by drawing together perspectives on flexibility from organisational management theory, with economic and sociological research into the constraints that organisational cultures can impose on adaptation. Synthesising theory in this area will be framed by ongoing research on organisational adaptation to climate change and natural disasters conducted mainly by geographers. An output of the project will be the identification of key elements of organisational structure and management that could facilitate adaptation. Key elements will be field tested through a series of workshops and individual interviews with stakeholders drawn from the UK's agriculture industry. This will provide an opportunity to test the appropriateness of the theoretical framework and allow research users to offer feedback and identify areas for refinement. National, regional and local stakeholders will be interviewed and asked to comment on their experiences of individual organisational adaptation and the adaptiveness of the UK agriculture sector as a whole to past environmental crises (foot-and-mouth, BSE, flooding) and to possible future rapid climate change. Findings will be posted on a project website at www.liv.ac.uk/Geography/Html_use/research/rapidclimatechange/ Background/Rationale
In opening up debate the project can draw on existing perspectives from within management science, institutional economics and disasters studies that include a growing literature on adaptation to external stress and shock. The challenge is to bring these literatures together in a coherent and epistemologically consistent framework for assessing adaptive potential. Field testing of the framework contributes to work that responds to a growing demand from policy makers for techniques that can be applied today to help map out possible futures under hypothetical socioenvironments. As yet the possibility of rapid climate change has not been entertained by futurists and so the project has the opportunity to make a special contribution in this area. Key
research questions
Field testing of the theoretical framework will be oriented towards the following research questions:
Research
approach Guidelines will be piloted through interviews with national, regional and local stakeholders who will be asked to identify key vulnerabilities and pressures shaping adaptive potential within their own organisations, and the role their organisation plays in shaping the adaptive potential of other stakeholders. To solicit this information and facilitate research user input, one-day workshops will be convened in London for national and regional level stakeholders, and individual interviews conducted with local stakeholders in the Northwest region. Finally, findings will be fed back to the user community via a project website with additional dissemination through journal publications and conference papers. Intended
outcomes A secondary outcome will be an indicative study of adaptive potential within the UK agriculture sector. The study does not seek to conclusively map out a detailed examination of adaptation, but does hope to uncover key elements of the agricultural sector and of individual organisations within the sector that both enhance and constrain adaptive potential. Findings will be posted on the project website at: www.liv.ac.uk/Geography/Html_use/research/rapidclimatechange 1. Social Adaptation and Rapid Climate Change We define adaptive capacity as the potential of a social system to adapt to external stressors. Adaptation refers to material changes in the activity or configuration of a system under which key variables are conserved or enhanced (which distinguishes adaptation from degradation). Adaptation to a particular stressor or collection of stressors (such as rapid climate change) will take place in the context of a social system's wider and ongoing adaptation or degradation in the face of multiple environmental, human and technological change. Rapid climate change is defined from a social perspective, as an unexpected, counter-intuitive and dynamic stressor unfolding over 10-30 years. Adaptive capacity is contingent upon the purpose of a system. If a farmer's ability to sustain a farming livelihood fails because of rapid climate change, and they switch to a more diversified livelihood strategy (opening a B&B, for example), then this represents a degradation of their livelihood system if judged in terms of farming. However, when judged as a rural livelihood system, the new strategy could be seen as an improvement, and hence a successful adaptation. 2. Institutions The literature on natural disasters emphasises the importance of social institutions for shaping the way that environmental stress affects communities and individuals. In exploring social institutions we follow New Institutional theory in casting institutions as the formal and informal rules that shape human behaviour. A distinction is usually made between institutions and organisations. Organisations are considered agents (players of the game rather than rules), they comprise constellations of individuals and groups organised in pursuit of particular purposes. Institutions are the 'rules of the game' and can be formal (legislative) or informal (cultural). They shape, and are shaped by, individuals and organisations. Institutions have no agency or indeed membership of their own. They are sometimes treated simply as constraints (felt as corruption or inertia for example), but we are sympathetic to the view that they enable as well as constrain, providing a framework through which co-operation between individuals is possible. Institutions can provide spaces and structures for innovation, flexibility, reflection or resistance. Although this discussion of institutions treats them in isolation, in practice they are systemically interrelated. That is they have different relevancy to given decisions by given actors, and act to modify one another in particular situations. In particular we note that while formal aspects of institutional regimes are often more visible than the informal, the former often depend on the latter for their interpretation and reproduction in any context. In spite of this, informal institutions are seen as either too abstruse to tackle or worse, a source of corruption, resistance and anti-social behaviour in top-down oriented institutional analyses. Attention is inevitably directed towards formal institutions, because this is where it is thought there is opportunity for conscious design and improvement. We suggest that analysing informal institutions and their relationship to adaptation and change is a key aspect of understanding adaptive capacity, and seek to develop a framework which helps this analysis, drawing on theory from the literature on social capital and organisational learning. 3. Social capital Social capital provides a language to examine the association between the quality of interpersonal relationships within a social system, the operation and evolution of institutions and subsequent shaping of adaptive capacity to rapid climate change. We are particularly interested in the adaptive capacity of individuals and communities that arises from different forms of social capital, through the development, maintenance and evolution of institutions. Much work on social capital has been criticised for neglecting the issue of power. Here social capital refers to networked interpersonal relationships. Power is relational, existing within every social interaction. The diversity of theoretical approaches to social capital reflects the context-dependent nature of researching the subject, which means that individual projects have to be careful in the definition, operationalisation and measurement of the concept. It is supposed that institutional capacity-building and the formation of networks to enhance adaptive capacity depends on a critical thickness of social capital, motivating pressure(s) and a supportive enabling environment that inhibits the emergence of 'negative' social capital (such as that found in networks of corruption). However, where formal institutions hold sway, with participants playing roles with more clearly bounded responsibilities and social interaction and exchange of information or resources, the milieu is quite different from the informality and flexibility that characterises social capital exchanges. We are interested in the extent to which social capital allows one to understand informal institutions and the lessons for policy and practice that a balanced appreciation of informal institutions suggests. 4. Organisational Learning Organisational learning is an important concept in the management literature. Learning is seen as a core strategic capacity of an organisation in terms of both competitive advantage and survival in a rapidly changing business environment. In the sense that organisational learning is concerned with the social conditioning of capacity to respond to events, it is directly relevant to institutions and adaptation to rapid climate change. Theories of organisational learning focus on two types of social learning: (i) individual learning as it is socially conditioned, and (ii) collective learning which emerges at the organisational level. Another distinction made about learning in organisations is between single and double loop learning. The former is about efficiency, learning to undertake activities and achieve goals with increased skill. The latter is concerned with changes in the governing values of an organisation, in strategies and assumptions. Double loop learning is seen as harder, frustrated by inhibition and defensive routines and requiring cultural and personal discipline to achieve. We are interested in such distinctions, not only because they reveal qualitatively different kinds of adaptation and say something about the attendant institutional factors, but also because the relationships between them reveals the links between different forms of adaptation. Can some forms of learning result in fostering adaptations that close or advance adaptive capacity elsewhere in the system, or in the future? As well as the mainstream views of organisational learning, we are investigating two other recent lineages of organisational theory. The first, 'communities of practice' is a development of situated learning theory and focuses on the formation of individual and group identity through mutual engagement in practice. The second draws on complexity theory for insight into processes of learning and change in organisations. Both lineages focus on the informal reality of organisational life - how things get done, and question the extent to which learning and adaptation can be usefully designed or managed. They focus on engagement with the shadow network, the non-canonical set of institutions and interpersonal relationships that enable an organisation to persist. This perspective opens a space for bottom-up/adaptiveness-in-action, in addition or as an alternative to top-down/anticipatory adaptation. The question is the extent to which these can co-exist in practice and be empirically traced. Mark
Pelling Denis
Smith John
Dearing Dr Mark Pelling
Denis
Smith
 John
Dearing
Project
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