Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Governance and Resilience - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 33

Often, resilience has been seen as the flip side to vulnerability. Instead of focussing
on the exposure of a system to a threat, resilience refers to the ability of a socio-
ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same fundamental
structure, function and identity, including the capacity to adapt to stress and change,
through either recovery or reorganisation in a new context (Chapin et al. 2009 ) .
The underlying resilience or coping range of a system refers to the range of change
and variability over short periods that a system can manage, or in which major
disturbances and significant negative consequences are not observed (Yohe and Tol
2002 ) . 2 Coping capacity is the means by which people or organisations use available
resources and their abilities to face adverse consequences that could lead to a disas-
ter. In general, this involves managing resources, both in normal times as well as
during crises or adverse conditions. Coping is a related, yet distinguishably different
concept to that of adaptation and adaptive capacity, most notably in that beyond the
boundary of a coping range, the resilience of a system may reach its limit, degrading
or tipping over into a less desirable state.
Adaptation may not always yield beneficial and positive outcomes, and thus
adaptation that does not moderate vulnerability, but instead increases it, is con-
sidered to be maladaptive (Barnett and O'Neill 2010 ) ; likewise, adaptation may
enhance resilience to change at one scale, may erode it at another. Promoting adap-
tation that reduces vulnerability and builds resilience avoiding maladaptation is a
challenging and complicated process, primarily because adaptation takes place
within the context of different temporal and spatial scales, but equally due to the
competing cultural contexts and social goals that must be negotiated and balanced
to achieve successful adaptation (Adger et al. 2005 ; Wilbanks and Kates 1999 ) .
There has often been a disjuncture between the complex interactive nature of
adaptation actions in reality and the levels at which the different adaptation foci tend
to take place. Often, climate change policy decisions, including technical, 'hard'
infrastructure adaptations, adaptation or vulnerability assessments are focused (but
not exclusively) at the national levels, while the consequences of these decisions,
adaptation implementation and climate impacts are experienced (again not exclu-
sively) at regional scales or local community levels (Brunner 2010 ; Kane and Yohe
2000 ). Governance and institutional frameworks within which these policies and
decisions are formulated, implemented and experienced need to take better account
of these multi-scale dimensions. Researchers have suggested that greater inclusion,
integration and focus on institutional and social learning are requisite for addressing
these scale related challenges (Kane and Yohe 2000 ) . Moreover, attempts to under-
stand adaptation should take these different scales into account in their research.
Human actors not only are able reactively to adapt to changes, but are also seen
to have the potential to proactively adapt by planning for anticipated outcomes or
impact (Dovers and Hezri 2010 ; Engle 2010 ). This unique gift of foresight and the
ability to imagine a potential future outcome, supplemented with the ability to learn
from experience, can allow actors to develop anticipatory or proactive adaptation

2 Also refer to Downing et al. (1997) and Pittock and Jones (2000).