Building adaptive Capacity in the informal settlements of maputo - Climate Change Adaptation and Development: Transforming Paradigms and Practices - page 20

and thus characterizes vulnerability in relation to both social-ecological relations
and institutional responses to climate change impacts (O'Brien et al. 2007).
While the emphasis that is placed on each of these components will vary
according to local needs, a lack of clarity around understanding 'adaptive
capacity' means that it can easily be overlooked or underplayed. The aim of this
chapter is to show how studies of resilience can help to shed light on the nature
of the challenges that adaptive capacity must overcome. All communities live
in complex environments, where cross-scale relationships and self-organizing
dynamics make understanding the impacts of and responses to change difficult
to predict, thereby revealing uncertainty as a central feature not only of climate
change but of all aspects of life. From this perspective, the function of adaptive
capacity is not only to enable change, but to do so in ways that can reduce
the likelihood that communities in a particular social-ecological system will
experience the worst consequences of future climate change, or will find their
wellbeing undermined by current adaptation actions.
We explore this resilience framing further in 'Resilience, adaptive capacity
and development' below. In 'Adaptive capacity: power, knowledge and
experimentation' we look to understand adaptive capacity from this perspective,
identifying crucial social dimensions often overlooked by development actors.
We suggest that a focus on power sharing, knowledge and information, and
experimentation and testing in adaptation planning is necessary if climate change
responses are to be able to engage with complexity and build opportunities to meet
future change. In so doing, we seek to move towards a concrete understanding of
how resilience revises our understanding of development, and the contribution
that development can make to supporting resilience in practice. In particular,
we identify how a focus on these three components within adaptation planning
can contribute to the emergence of a flexible, adaptive governance system that
fosters local adaptive capacity. 'Adaptation planning in Maputo, Mozambique'
draws on fieldwork in Maputo, Mozambique, presenting a case study analysed
using this framework. Finally, in 'Lessons from a resilience perspective' we
present conclusions that can help to explain the role of adaptive capacity in
development under climate change, highlighting the challenges to overcoming
existing structures of power and knowledge.
resilience, adaptive capacity and development
Resilience thinking recognizes that people co-exist with and have co-evolved
within their natural (ecological) environments. One consequence is that we
live with complexity and uncertainty (Berkes and Folke 1998). In resilience
discourse, complexity arises because people and their environments, linked
together in 'social-ecological systems', are constantly changing in response to
external influences and as internal relationships are reworked (Holling and
Gunderson 2002; Walker and Salt 2006). Linear, cause-and-effect responses are
not the norm: people and environments adapt in response to external changes,