Sustainable adaptation under adverse development? - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 179

describe how development actors use the term adaptation 'malleably and
through the constructs of pre-existing approaches and concepts of development'
(p. 225). Adaptation research and policy have generally lacked fundamental
reflection on what overall development approach such measures represent -
for example, whether the approach is based on modernization assumptions, or
on explicitly addressing dependency relations and inequities. Instead, there has
been a 'development as usual' approach, operating on the assumption that 'more
development' will necessarily reduce vulnerability, without critical examination
of whether this will lead to ineffective or counterproductive measures (Klein
et al. 2007), or how poverty and vulnerability differ, and whose vulnerability is
to be addressed. This is highly problematic, since some types of development
may actually reinforce inequities and vulnerability, and constitute a root cause
driving the climate change problem (Brooks et al. 2009; Eriksen 2013; St Clair
and Lawson 2013).
An alternative approach to adaptation can build on critical development
theories that underscore the primacy of using a political conceptualization of
sustainability. Often emphasizing the importance of including equity, scale
and human rights in the analysis of sustainability (Adams 2001), such theories
recognize sustainable development as an intrinsically political process. This
process entails negotiating what kinds of socio-environmental arrangements we
wish to produce, how this can be achieved, what sorts of natures we wish to
inhabit (Swyngedouw 2007) and whose development goals are heeded (Munck
1999).
We conceive development pathways as sets of relations and processes that
create a trajectory of socio-economic change toward (often covert) development
goals that may encompass environmental, economic or social objectives. Such
pathways entail more or less specific visions of the 'destination' and the 'route'
to reach it, which may refer to changes in technologies, regulations, political
doctrines, economic models or value systems. Development pathways refer to
societal (national or sub-national level) rather than household-level trajectories.
Sustainable development pathways have previously been described in local
contexts (Adams 2001), but sustainability has only recently started to inform
climate change adaptation policy. Despite increasing calls to shift towards more
sustainable development pathways and the emerging literature exploring the
potential pathways for such change (Berkhout et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2011;
Westley et al. 2011; O'Brien and Sygna 2013; O'Brien 2013), not enough is known
about how this can be achieved in practice in the context of climate change.
In this chapter, we examine empirical evidence related to the four normative
principles associated with sustainable adaptation as developed by Eriksen et
al. (2011) and further described below. Then we focus on the local context of
Afar pastoralists in Ethiopia to see what sustainable adaptation may look like
in practice. This empirical research allows us to develop a deeper conceptual
understanding (described in the scetion on 'Transforming development')
of what adaptation means in terms of interventions, actions and change, and