Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation by Mark Pelling

that they argued determined human capacity and action in response to external environmental shocks. This critical view expanded analysis from the technical attributes that surround specific adaptation decisions, to the social life in which they are embedded. Contributions included critique of the structures of humanitarianism and international development that it was argued allowed vulnerability to persist and did not support progressive adaptation in the face of environmental risk (Susman
et al.
, 1983). This critique has particular salience given the influence of ecological and systems inspired theory on the conceptualisation of adaptation within climate change science today.
     
Coevolution
    Drawing metaphorically from the language of evolutionary biology, coevolution, as proposed by Norgaard (1995), extends the cosmology of adaptation by bringing in values. It also expands the time-horizon and scale of what might be considered adaptive action from the local and immediate to global and long-term interactions. Adaptation in the context of climate change similarly extends coevolution, by including inanimate natural elements as well as biotic and human ones as subjects and forces for change (Adger and Brooks, 2003). In short, coevolution is found in the reciprocity of interacting components (including human, technological, physical and bio-chemical elements and systems) within evolutionary systems. Norgaard (1995) includes knowledge and values alongside technology, social organisation and the natural environment as categories, sites and drivers for adaptation. Norgaard also moves from a materialist (adaptation can be described through technical changes, for example, in engineering or farming practices) to a relational and constructivist epistemology (where adaptation includes changes in identity and wellbeing including humanity’s relation with the non-human) so that:
    a technological innovation or introduction from another region will affect the fitness of various aspects of social organisation, perhaps favoring a different mix of individual and community rights, or favoring more or less hierarchical ways of socially processing information. The changes in social organisation, in turn, might feedback on the fitness of other components in the technological system, or favor some types of values or types of knowledge over others. (Norgaard, 1995:486)
    Adaptation seen through the lens of coevolution is not an end point. It is a transitional and relational episode in history; one that is open to back-sliding, distortion and amplification as outcomes interact with other sub-systems in the coevolving whole. Coevolutionary processes change structure and interaction rules. They typically preclude the possibility of previous system states reoccurring. This is a distinction from the dynamic characteristics of non-evolutionary models where only status can be changed, not guiding rules. The rules in ecological systems are fixed (until our understanding of nature and physics changes) – in social and socio-ecological systems rules of culture and law are mutable.
    Coevolution emphasises change. Innovations drive the coevolutionary process, but their drivers (disaster events, macro-economic cycles, household collapse) are often not amenable to planning. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to predict with high confidence what will work best in the other subsystems as adaptations and their consequences coevolve with the whole system potentially never reaching a new equilibrium (Klüver, 2002). This challenge argues for ashift from seeking to predict and control sub-systems, and through this the whole, to a framing that argues for adaptive planning. This is achieved through the maintaining of diversity to keep options open and a preference for monitoring rather than a presumption for managing or resisting changes. Consequently discourse and the flow of information, decision-making capacity and processes and ability to implement