Abstract
Pacific regional organisations focusing on climate change have overlapping adaptation-related mandates. With the growing importance of regional organisations in supplying financial and technical resources for climate adaptation in small island developing states, it is important to understand how well these supranational organisations work together on these issues. In this paper, theories of regionalism and neofunctionalism, complex systems, and superordinate group identity are used to design an action research project that tests the level of coordination between Pacific regional organisations. It presents and discusses a pre-analysis plan for the project, the goal of which is to determine the ways in which virtual team structure can be used to enhance inter-organisational coordination of adaptation interventions across small, dispersed, resource-constrained country jurisdictions. The proposed study represents an important intermediary step in developing more robust climate-related organisational policies at the regional scale in the Pacific and beyond.
Highlights
Regional organisations (ROs) are increasingly providing the financial and technical resources needed to support climate change adaptation in small island developing states (SIDS), a special grouping of countries that are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change [1]
To examine the ways in which Pacific ROs can reduce competition for scarce funding, we propose to explore, alongside RO staff and personnel, how virtual team structure can help SPC and Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environmental Programme (SPREP) better work together to fight the threat of climate change
In order to account for the three different levels of theorising involved, we have framed our research with theories that provide insights into (a) the environment in which SPC and SPREP operate, (b) how organisations function internally, and (c) how people identify with an organisation and with work teams
Summary
Regional organisations (ROs) are increasingly providing the financial and technical resources needed to support climate change adaptation in small island developing states (SIDS), a special grouping of countries that are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change [1]. The vulnerability of SIDS results from factors including their smallness, reliance on natural systems, remoteness and distance from world markets, and financial and technical resource constraints [5] These development and sustainability challenges are exacerbated by climate change and highlight the need for appropriate and effective adaptation to climate change in order to avoid the loss of livelihood-supporting ecosystem services and infrastructure in SIDS [3,6]. SPC and SPREP are small organisations, and the small sample sizes would prevent us from conducting a big-N quantitative experiment Consideration of these two factors led us to conclude that an action research approach, with a strong emphasis on co-enquiry and co-learning among researchers and participants, is among the most appropriate avenues of enquiry for understanding motivations of and constraints to RO coordination among small, dispersed, resource-constrained country jurisdictions in the Pacific, at least in the initial stages. This proposal represents an important intermediary step in developing more robust, climate-related organisational policies at the regional scale in the Pacific and beyond
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