Organisational change and learning across scales

The major concern in climate adaptation planning tends to focus on evaluating current risks and developing effective strategies in response to those risks. The wikiADAPT material extends this conceptual orientation to robust decision making, participatory approaches within stakeholder decision frameworks and links between climate disasters, climate information and monitoring and climate change adaptation. All of which are essential elements for sound practice and robust tools.

However, climate change responses are embedded in larger processes that are not driven by climate change, that may not require much climate change information. These processes tend to focus on resilience, multi-stakeholder processes and conflicts, and action across scales (where actors may not be easily identified).

We would like to encourage weADAPT users to develop this line of thinking. As an initial seed for discussion, Tom Downing presented four themes in a meeting of the Catalan climate change group.

Adaptation scaled up?

Environmental planning. Good practice in environmental management, biodiversity and conservation, and protecting environmental services may take on board a wide range of climate changes, but are often concerned with more immediate and constrained objectives.

Spatial planning. Integration of interventions may be promoted through planning guidance and decisions on land use, infrastructure, major facilities siting, housing and other aspects of spatial planning. This is often at a technical level, subject to rigid planning frameworks. However, once planning frameworks are agreed, there is relatively less need for further information on climate change.

Community resilience. Communities—of different sizes and complexity—are in constant states of change. Creating visions and strategies for their futures may adopt principles of climate resilience, often based on deliberative processes rather than formal methods of decision screening and evaluation of costs and benefits.

Economic integration. Strategies to deal with risk may rely on or only be available and effective if finance is available at a larger scale than the local actor. For instance, micro-insurance and micro-finance provide opportunities to ensure that individual disasters or stresses do not cause an irreplaceable loss for poor households. Equally, economic growth and integration of markets have implications for climate adaptation—both opportunities and constraints.

Themes | Frame Adaptation - Institutional themes | Risk-Monitoring | Decision-Screening | Communication

--TED 11:37, 26 November 2007 (CET)

Leadership and Adaptation

What kind of leadership is best to support adaptation processes? Here are a couple of links to some papers on Transformational and Paradoxical Leadership The 7 Transformations of Leadership [1] Paradoxical Leadership in 'Complexity and Business Success'[2]