A socionature approach to adaptation - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 222

were employed: more than six months of participant observation in rural
areas on resource management and everyday politics (user-group meetings);
over two months of consultancy work for international donor organizations
in Nepal, which provided insights into current objectives, strategies and
programmes related to climate change and forestry management; key informant
interviews with forestry professionals at national, regional and local levels
within the government, donor organizations and civil society; content analysis
of key documents including the NAPA, LAPA and Climate Change Strategy
documents; and use of the 'grey' literature published by donors working in
Nepal and globally on these questions.
a socionatural approach to climate justice
Increasingly, the literature on climate adaptation focuses on ethics and
distributional justice: who should pay, and how populations will be differently
impacted (Eriksen et al. 2011; Thomas and Twyman 2005). While rarely
explicitly mentioned, this work suggests that adaptation questions are less about
techno-engineering schemes and more about attention to social relations and
'socionature' issues. Socionature theorists argue that the distinctions commonly
drawn between 'social' change (adaptation) and 'natural' change (climate) are
both ontologically incorrect and conceptually unhelpful (Castree and Braun
2001). If we instead begin from a relational understanding of socionature, we
see that climate change is as much social as natural; similarly, adaptation cannot
occur without causing further environmental change.
Climate change is socionatural in that humans cause greenhouse gas
emissions, which drive atmospheric change. But climate change is also social
because our understanding of it cannot exist outside the social milieu. The
instruments developed to monitor change, the theories and computer models
we build are all social artefacts, designed and accepted as 'true' by humans. Thus
our comprehension of climate change is thoroughly social. This is not to suggest
that climate change is not 'real', but rather to attract attention to the implications
of how we frame the problem.
Furthermore, the political ecology and hazards literatures have shown
that when faced with natural disasters, local consequences are unpredictable
and carry with them a host of social justice issues (Ribot 2010; Turner and
Robbins 2008). Disasters can be an opportunity for more powerful members of
communities to profit, or 'luck' may in fact spare some of the most vulnerable
while afflicting the more affluent. Thus, when planning for responses to climate
change, attention to such distributional justice questions - both of impacts and
potential benefits - need to be at the centre of adaptation planning (Eriksen et
al. 2011).
The current literature on climate justice is slippery. It is difficult to find fault
with the emphasis on vulnerability and how institutions need to be designed
in order to distribute resources fairly and protect the poorest of the poor from