Balancing Structural Con fl icts Across Scales to Develop and Mobilise Adaptive Capacity - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 292

and dangerous trajectory, or faced with a sudden shock, by mobilising its ability
to reactively adapt. On the other hand, predictability is linked to the need for legal
certainty and guidance for building longer term transformational potential. It also
refers to long term policy planning that enables a system to become proactive in
its adaptation to a particular type of extreme. In order to not only develop adaptive
capacity, but mobilise it to both variability and larger scale changes, the cases
elucidate the importance of building both reactive and proactive adaptive
capacity.
While proactive adaptive capacity can be associated with predictability and
guidance at higher levels, reactive capacity is enabled through flexibility and
autonomy at lower governance levels. One of the major challenges in climate
change adaptation is therefore navigating this balance between fostering the
flexibility needed to deal with an increase in the likelihood of complex and unex-
pected changes from climate change (Ebbesson 2010 ) while maintaining the
certainty and guidance for longer term preparedness through legislative, regula-
tory and policy frameworks.
Other studies have focussed on the high level trade-offs that policy and deci-
sion makers face in any democratic system when considering climate change risks
and adaptation, through socio-political and economic factors (Tompkins and
Adger 2005 ). Short term political cycles, limited public attention on longer term
challenges and judgements on risks and costs of climate change dilute the urgent
context in which climate mitigation and adaptation should take place. Tompkins
and Adger ( 2005 ) refer to the trade-offs between cost, risks and socio-political
factors as being 'encompassed in the shape of the indifference curve between
reactive and anticipatory management' (p 565), which are navigated by the insti-
tutional landscape made up of government and civil society actors, as well as
individual agents. While in their article, both mitigation and adaptation are the
unit of analysis, similar trade-offs are identified within the focus on adaptation
alone. Trade offs are also present in decision making on investments at different
governance levels for adaptation. Decision makers must decide at what level, and
in what form (social, technical, financial) to invest limited resources (temporal,
fi nancial, educational).
Figure 14.1 suggests a representation of how this adaptation trade-off manifests
across the suggested core tension in adaptive capacity. The figure purposefully does
not represent this as a linear regression, from highly predictive enabling proactive
adaptation while highly flexible facilitating reactive adaptation. It is not suggesting
a linear relationship between the two elements of adaptive capacity, but more an
intersecting connection, with elements of proactive adaptive capacity enabling
succesful reactive adaptive capacity (e.g. TRC). Likewise, increasing numbers of
reactions to extreme events may have the potential to impact longer term prepared-
ness for climate change, by taking advantage of windows of opportunity to push
through plans relating to adaptation. The proceeding section further discusses how
this tension manifests across the different indicators, while the following section
will propose a multi-scale framework to address the tension in the process of devel-
oping both reactive and proactive adaptive capacity.