Assessing Human Vulnerability to Climate Change from an Evolutionary Perspective - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 74

4.2.3 An Evolutionary Perspective

Joseph Schumpeter ( 1942 ), a pioneer of evolutionary economic thought, argued that
agents' actions are conditioned by structural factors, but the primary driver of eco-
nomic evolution is the innovative capacity of economic agents. His ideas were taken
up by Nelson and Winter's ( 1982 ) seminal work, An Evolutionary Theory of
Economic Change , which argued that, rather than constantly re-evaluating their
actions to capture the greatest returns, fi rms and individuals tend to act according to
routines - a concept that aligns well with that of cognitive heuristics, described in
Sect. 4.2.1 on the behavioural paradigm. However, beyond these routines, agents
will aim to gain a competitive advantage through activities designed to “search” for
new, more effi cient routines or technology, such as R&D or market analysis.
Adaptation occurs when a behavioural routine or technology that provides a com-
petitive advantage within local conditions is selected and retained. This process is
highly path dependent: “Through the joint action of search and selection, fi rms
evolve over time, with the condition of the industry in each period bearing the seeds
of its condition in the following period” (Nelson and Winter 1982 ).
As increasingly competitive features are selected and retained, adaptation is
thought to progress towards an optimal state in which no potential features exist that
are more competitive. However, at best, optima can only exist within local selection
environments and can only be temporary. Climatic, ecological or socio-economic
changes can lead to a different selection environment in which current routines and
technologies are less well adapted or even maladapted , resulting in an increase in
vulnerability (Barnett and O'Neill 2010 ; Rammel and van den Bergh 2003 ). Due to
the routinization, path dependency and structural conditioning of human activity,
human systems tend to exhibit a degree of inertia and are liable to get locked-in to
specifi c industrial, technological and institutional constellations. Adaptations that
limit fl exibility in response to unforeseen changes in the selection environment, such
as large infrastructure investments, are particularly liable to lead to maladaptations.
Excessive specialization within current selective pressures reduces adaptive
capacity by reducing the range of options that a system could use to cope with future
pressures: “Evolutionary systems thus can be seen to express a sort of implicit
trade-off between realizing short term local optimal (like specifi c criteria of effi -
ciency) and maintaining evolutionary potential to achieve adaptability and stable
long-term development” (Rammel and van den Bergh 2003 ). This phenomenon is
particularly evident in the case of famine in the Sahel described in Box 4.1. The
traditional pastoral and agricultural society of the Sahel had adapted a highly spe-
cialized system of reciprocity to deal with the adverse ecological conditions of the
desert. However, when structural changes caused the selection environment to shift,
the pastoralists found their nomadic lifestyle to be maladapted to the new condi-
tions. Adaptive capacity is therefore a function of diversity . Just as genetic diversity
is essential in the process of biological evolution, diversity within economic, socio-
cultural, institutional and technological spheres is an essential condition in the
adaptation of human systems (Boyd and Richerson 1985 ; Matutinuvic 2002 ;
Rammel and van den Bergh 2003 ).