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of development pathways towards more equitable and sustainable low-carbon
societies stand out as among the most important adaptations to climate change,
not least because this approach can reduce the need for transformational
adaptations to the impacts of climate change.
Attempts are underway to identify criteria and metrics for assessing
transformation, and there is a frantic search for good examples of transformational
adaptation. It is important to recognize that, like adaptation, transformation is
more often a process than an event, and often takes place amidst uncertainty - as
when old ways of doing things no longer yield the desired results but new ways of
being and doing are not yet clear or firmly established. That said, conditions can
be created to support transformations that are both equitable and sustainable, and
these are often linked to learning, leadership, empowerment and collaboration
within and across groups, sectors, organizations or institutions (O'Brien 2012;
Denton et al. 2014). Recognizing that the concept of transformation can be
difficult to operationalize, below we explore what adaptation can look like
through the lens of transformation.
adaptation through a transformation lens
The case studies in this topic offer valuable insights for reducing vulnerability
through adaptation. Many of them emphasize the importance of taking the local
context and key features of local adaptive capacity as a starting point in designing
interventions, recognizing that these contexts are situated in larger structures and
societal processes that drive vulnerability. While this may seem an obvious point,
adaptation planning has often been criticized for being delinked from local needs
and vulnerability contexts, and for approaching community adaptation in a very
simplistic manner (Pelling 2011; Vincent, Næss and Goulden 2013; Schipper et
al. 2014; Nightingale this volume). There have been calls for more integrated and
holistic approaches to adaptation (O'Brien and Hochachka 2010; Schipper et al.
2014); the challenge now lies in putting such approaches into practice.
A broader and more holistic approach to adaptation involves viewing the
vulnerability context from different spatial and temporal perspectives, but also
through different lenses of abstraction. Below, we refer to three interacting
'spheres' of transformation to show how adaptation processes may be
transformed to support climate-resilient pathways for sustainable development.
These spheres - the practical, political and personal (see Figure 15.1 .) - can
be considered as distinct yet related arenas or entry points for realizing change
(Sharma 2007; O'Brien and Sygna 2013; Denton et al. 2014). Underlying this
conceptualization is the recognition that the technical and behavioural changes
essential to successful adaptation are almost always facilitated or constrained by
larger systems and structures, which are in turn influenced by diverse and often
competing worldviews and paradigms (O'Brien and Sygna 2013). We now turn
to each of the three spheres, and how the findings of the chapters in this topic
relate to them.
 
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