Fri 16 Jul 2010
Development is not the same thing as adaptation
Posted by Ed under Climate Change, development, environment, globalization, policy, sustainable development
[5] Comments
One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development. Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value. However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming. It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals. In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other. Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now. A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster. In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought. Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice? For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation? It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations. If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable. To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this? I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level. How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.
It depends on whether you mean adaptations to the effects, or adaptations to the need to develop without contributing to hypothesised causes.
Adaptation to the effects is just a matter of a little additional forethought. Humans live across a huge range of climates, so for almost all places the technology is already there. You just need the ability to transplant it. It’s just a more flexible form of development.
But I don’t see how you can realistically develop and adapt with respect to causes. The two goals are incompatible. The situation might be different in 40 years time, but it isn’t now.
I don’t see why you can’t re-interpret ‘adaptation’ to include development. Indeed, probably the best way to obtain the resources needed to adapt to change is to develop. If existing communities are fragile to rapid change, then clearly they *cannot* be simply maintained as they are. Anticipated changes only mean that the development goal is more urgent – they have to develop *faster*, so they will be ready in time.
This is an interesting point – I think that adaptation probably takes on both meanings that you raise. However, the second also shades into mitigation. That said, I find your observation interesting because it points out the rather arbitrary distinction between mitigation and adaptation. Efforts to adapt will have impacts on regional and global climate/economy, and therefore will impact efforts traditionally thought of as mitigation.
I disagree strongly that adaptation to the effects is just a matter of a little additional forethought. I certainly agree that people around the world are already dealing with the impacts of global change – I have written a book to that effect (Delivering Development, coming soon from Palgrave – details on my website) and have a rather deep publication record trying to make this point. But adaptation is more than making a living – we are dealing with social orders and power relations that are much more durable and important than most development projects/programs acknowledge. This is one reason for the remarkable rate of project failure and unexpected outcomes seen in development today.
One adage I always impart to my grad students: there is no such thing as an apolitical, purely technical development intervention. (in other words, there are always social and political ramifications that often trump the technology or material issues)
I agree conditionally with your argument that development and adaptation are incompatible with regard to causes – if development means enabling greater consumption without considerable offset efforts, you are absolutely right. But might there be ways to think about development that don’t involve greater net consumption (though I acknowledge that “different” consumption still means consuming more of something, even if that consumption is offset – so there will be new impacts)?
Maybe we have to re-interpret development to include adaptation . . . this is more than semantic to me. I want to make sure that the goal of development (improvement) does not get subjugated to the goal of adaptation (maintenence).
When I said that adaptation to the effects of change only requires forethought, I meant over and above the social/legal changes required for development itself. Certainly *development* is more than just making a living, or any educational or technological quick-fixes. (I tend to align with DeSoto on this, but I don’t pretend to be an expert.) Development is (partly) about building a general problem-solving capacity. Adapting to change is then one problem among the many to be solved.
(If you meant something else, I’d be interested to hear more.)
And I certainly agree that people are already having to adapt to global change, although I’d add that they always have. There has always been change, and humans have been constantly battered by it. Only recently has it been possible for some of us to do something about it. The change isn’t new, but the opportunities are.
Regarding “consumption”, I think you might be using it in a particular/specialised sense. I tend to think of it as an economist would – production is solving problems people have, and consumption is having one’s problems solved. (In a similar sense to that used in Bastiat’s Sophisms.)
I think what you might mean is the somewhat more frivolous problems people turn to solving once their basic needs have been met. (Although I’ve also heard it used to mean use of natural resources.) The problem of international development is to enable people to meet their basic needs, and to have a *choice* about what comes next. After that, it’s out of our hands.
However, I believe that mitigating our impact on the Environment is one of those problems we turn to once those basic needs have been met. “Cleaning up the mess” is a form of consumption: a problem we want solved, something that we desire. They all come as a package, unfortunately.
It’s not an entirely popular view, though, so I don’t mind if you don’t agree.
I think we’re in agreement that adaptation should not and cannot confine itself to maintenance of the status quo. The status quo is fragile to change and therefore by definition not “adapted” to it. And it would be morally wrong to stop development in the name of “adaptation”. But you’re going to run into problems when it comes to *details*, as there is already a cultural paradigm you will have to work within that defines these terms quite rigidly. I am afraid I have no answers, there.
I take your point about change – to a degree. Yes, change has certainly been happening throughout human history, and people have been dealing with that change all along. However, I don’t think you are trying to suggest that all change is the same, or that today’s changes are no different from those seen in the past. The increasing integration of the global economy has created situations where minor political decisions in economic centers radiate out in often rapid and unpredictable ways, making themselves felt to a greater or lesser extent in remote parts of the Global South. This sort of connection was simply not possible until recently, and thus people now deal with a new set of issues and changes never seen before. Personally, I think the data is clear that climate change is also something new under the sun – not that there has never been climate change before, but the speed and scope of current changes exceeds anything for which we have records. So I would argue that the changes and the opportunities are quite new . . . and that new opportunities and changes continue to arise all the time.
This is important, because it speaks to the limits of local (indigenous) knowledge. In my own work in Ghana, I have been amazed at the ability of villagers to make the most of a relatively unforgiving environment. However, with the steady decline of precipitation we have seen over recent decades in West Africa, and the changing seasonality of that precipitation, their existing understandings of the environment and how to manage it are coming apart. Further, these changes are coming on them very rapidly (within 1-2 generations), leaving little time to adjust to new circumstances (leaving aside the fact that the new circumstances become old pretty quickly, as the environment continues to change).
I’m not familiar with your use of production and consumption – I am using them in common economic form. Production is the making of something (typically goods), while consumption is the use of those goods. Production typically requires the use of resources (human and natural) – some of which are transformed into a new product, and others are lost/used up in the act of production. The act of consumption uses up the rest of these resources (more or less).
I do not see, however, how you can disaggregate things like environmental protection from basic needs – most of the folks I work with, and indeed most people in the Global South, have livelihoods based on natural resources. If the rain doesn’t fall, the farm doesn’t grow, and needs don’t get met. There is no way to fix this without addressing environmental protection – this is one of our fundamental failings in development, treating the environment as an externality. And this leaves aside the issue of adaptation – I’m simply talking about environmental protection in a world where change was not happening. Once we see that the way we use the environment affects that environment, not only at the local scale, but also globally, it becomes obvious (to me) that adaptation and mitigation are two sides of the same coin.
While we agree that adaptation cannot be limited to the maintenance of the status quo, the status quo is not at all fragile. I’ve done quite a bit of work looking at livelihoods and adaptation, and have found that the maintenance of the status quo is integral to livelihoods and adaptations – indeed, in many cases efforts to maintain the authority of the powerful outweigh material considerations like maximizing income or food availability. I’m writing an article now that demonstrates how the social status quo was maintained in a village despite significant pressures and opportunities after a new road was constructed through it. I’m working on a reframing of livelihoods around the idea that they are as much forms of local governance as means of making a living in an effort to get right at what you are talking about at the end of your post. We’ll see if I can pull it off.
It’s true that not all change is the same. On the other hand, when society’s horizons were nearer, even fairly common sorts of changes would be new to the people facing them. We wouldn’t have had the shared experience to draw upon.
I thought, from your earlier comment, that you didn’t want to get dragged in to another argument on global warming? But I can oblige, if you wish. We don’t have global records that I would rely on in any degree further back than about 70 years ago (number of weather stations in Central Africa, in 1850?), so we can’t say for sure whether this is new. Even then, Phil Jones reported in his BBC interview that there were periods both in the early part of the 20th century and the later part of the 19th that matched the rate of the modern rise.
We do have local records for some places though, and these make clear that the present changes are *not* unprecedented, either in speed or magnitude. The Central England Temperature series from about 1680 to 1733 showed a rise that was longer and larger than the modern one, peaking only a fraction of a degree below the modern peak. On a local scale, which is all anybody sees anyway, changes *such as we have seen so far* are not new. (Whether the future change will be is another question. The *predictions* are far outside of recent historical bounds.)
Going further back, the Mayans collapsed when the rains failed, the southern Sahara was wet and green up until about 5400 years ago, the Holocene optimum about 8000 years ago is generally reckoned to have been warmer than the present, the Bond interstadials such as the Minoan warm period, the Roman warm period, and the Medieval warm period recur throughout history – and are correlated with the rise and fall of civilisations. (Rising when it warms and falling as it cools, of course.) These civilisations have all faced dramatic effects from climate change.
Defining production as “the making of something” misses the essential economic feature, concentrating on an accidental one. I can ‘make’ garbage. I can ‘make’ CO2. I can ‘make’ toxic waste. These don’t count as economic production, though, because they’re undesired – it is the fact that people *want* the goods being made that makes it “production”. Likewise there are services people provide that don’t involve the manufacture of something tangible. From an economic point of view, these are traded and considered comparable to physical goods, there is a market in them, we expend resources on performing them. Indeed, taking in raw materials and simply *rearranging* them to produce something useful is the performance of a service – the boundary is somewhat fuzzy. The essential feature that defines their role in the economy is that they are desired. That they are physical rather than intangible makes no more difference to the economics than if they are painted white or red.
Likewise, with “using up” resources one has to be careful about how it is phrased. For material goods, the material of which they are made does not disappear when we are done with them. The resource one is talking about is often to do with their *arrangement* – concentrated or diluted, part of a working mechanism or a broken one.
You say that if the rains don’t fall, the farm doesn’t grow, and basic needs don’t get met. But that depends, does it not, on whether you have water storage dams, and irrigation, and water well extraction, and desalination? Sometimes the rains don’t fall. How do you want to deal with it? You can build a dam, and flood this valley and all the wildlife it contains. Or you can build it further away, at greater cost and inconvenience, but causing less damage. Or you can have your crops and animals die every few years, when the drought comes round again. Meeting basic needs says you build a dam – and if the more damaging one is the only one you can afford, then you build that. Environmental protection says you build it to suit the wildlife rather than yourself.
It’s not so simple, of course, but I can’t fit everything into a blog comment. I hope you’ll understand if I’m not being precise.