Read Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation for Free Online

second goal is to use these case studies to demonstrate the range of social contexts where adaptation unfolds and analysis is needed. At present the majority of analysis of adaptation focuses on local actions, with the site of analysis being the local community or household.
    Part IV (Adapting with climate change) contains the concluding chapter, Chapter 9 . This final chapter synthesises the detailed discussion made in each preceding chapter and outlines the research and policy development needs that arise from the central argument that adaptation is a social, cultural and political as well as a technological process.

2
Understanding adaptation
     
    The adapted man, neither dialoguing nor participating, accommodates to conditions imposed upon him and thereby acquires an authoritarian and uncritical frame of mind.
    (Paulo Freire, 1969:24)
    Freire warns us that without a critical awareness, adaptation is hostage to being limited to efforts that promote action to survive better with, rather than seek change to, the social and political structures that shape life chances. Similarly, Clarke (2009:21) warns that people tend to adapt to poverty by ‘suppressing their wants, hopes and aspirations’ rather than attempting to change the structures that constrain their life chances. Can the same critique be levelled at adaptation to climate change – that efforts are being directed more towards accommodating risk and its root causes rather than at the root causes themselves? The difference is between responding to drought by proving humanitarian relief to alleviate hunger, and identifying distortions in agricultural trade policy and market conditions that prevent food surpluses from moving to meet human need.
    This chapter builds on Chapter 1 by reviewing the academic literature on adaptation and adaptive capacity. The aim is to map out an analytical framework and set of linguistic tools to examine the socio-political nature of adaptation. The framework is developed in Chapters 3 –5 and applied in Chapters 6 –8. We begin by defining key terms and outlining the broad intellectual legacy that thinking about adaptation can learn from. Contemporary debates are then outlined and the notions of adaptation as resilience, transition and transformation are introduced.
An adaptation lexicon
    Adaptation is a deceptively simple concept. Its meaning appears straightforward: it describes a response to a perceived risk or opportunity. The IPCC defines climate change adaptation as ‘adjustments in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities’ (IPCC, 2008:869).
    Complexity comes with distinguishing different adaptive actors (individuals, communities, economic sectors or nations, for example) and their interactions,exploring why it is that specific assets or values are protected by some or expended by others in taking adaptive actions, and in communicating adaptation within contrasting epistemic communities. It is also important to distinguish between coping and adaptation, and adaptive capacity and adaptive action.
    Coping precedes adaptation as a concept in explaining social responses to environmental stress and shock by some 30 years, and continues to be used within disaster studies to describe many of the same processes now captured by adaptation in the climate change community. The latter has to some extent re-invented the wheel in doing this (Schipper and Pelling, 2006). With these two terms in use, approaches have been taken to demarcate separate meanings. For some coping is associated with reversible and adaptation with irreversible changes in behaviour (White
et al.
, 2004). However, work on both adaptation and coping accepts that the transition from reversible to irreversible changes is critical for measuring the collapse of system sustainability (Swift, 1989). In practice, coping and adaptation still exist as parallel concepts