Introduction - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 6

2009). Modernization-led economic growth remains the dominant development
discourse, constituting 'development as usual'.
Climate change as a new development issue
The shortcomings of the dominant development paradigm have become even
more evident and critical in the context of climate change because existing
inequities are a key social cause of climate change vulnerability and because
energy and resource-intensive growth drive GHG emissions and hence the
climate change problem (Pelling 2011; Marino and Ribot 2012; Olsson et al.
2014). Newell (2009: 189) notes the contradictions between development as
usual and climate change:
Perhaps most alarming of all is the fact that the governments and leading
international institutions charged with serving the public interest on
climate change continue to promote a model of economic development
that is clearly unsustainable, one that is energy intensive, export-oriented,
and produces widespread social and environmental externalities. Rather
than being part of the solution, through their own activities many of these
actors are exacerbating the problem.
Nonetheless, climate change has entered into the world of development
planning and practice unaccompanied by much rethinking of 'what is new
to development thinking' (Boyd and Juhola 2009). Traditional adaptation
interventions within development have tended to focus directly on climate
impacts, without addressing the underlying causes of vulnerability that are linked
to social structures, economic relations, the distribution of power and access to
resources (Vincent et al. 2013). In practice, the focus has often been narrow and
sectoral, aimed largely at mainstreaming climate change considerations into
current activities rather than questioning how current activities and structures
contribute to the social and political drivers of vulnerability. As Tanner and Horn-
Phathanothai (2014: 6) point out, '[c]limate change issues are often relegated
to specialized environmental or disaster-response authorities that view them in
narrow technical terms. These specialized authorities are ill-equipped to respond
to the full spectrum of development challenges that climate change raises.'
The integration of adaptation activities into development activities has taken
many forms and labels, such as Climate Friendly Development, Climate Com-
patible Development, Conservation Agriculture, Climate Smart Agriculture, or
simply 'mainstreaming' adaptation into existing policies and projects, whether
related to poverty reduction, agriculture, energy, health or disaster-risk reduction
(Kok and de Coninck 2007). Leary et al. (2008: 16) describe how the adaptation
process 'needs to be integrated into policy formulation, planning, programme
management, project design and project implementation of the agencies that
are responsible for human and economic development, finance, agriculture,