Abstract
Climate change is a global phenomenon that has multiple local effects on people and places. Yet, climate change knowledge often travels uncomfortably across scales and needs constant re-interpretation as it is applied in different spatial contexts. This requires the examination of how scientific and local knowledge about climate change travel across social systems and shape local meanings and adaptive actions on climate change. Using an interpretive social science analysis of environmental change, this study investigates development planning as a key boundary object for handling both kinds of knowledge and explores experiential knowledge of climate change held by planning officers from the coastal landscape of the island province of Bohol, Philippines. Drawing upon face-to-face interviews, mental maps, and planning documents review, main results first characterise three experiential ways of knowing about climate change across spaces of lived experiences and spaces of maps and plans. Then, we show how planners engage with climate change adaptation by combining national, techno-scientific and local, on-the-ground ways of knowing, offering a venue in which experiential knowledge on climate change is used for building planning significance and making more grounded accounts of adaptation moving forward in planning policy and practice.
Highlights
BackgroundClimate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing society as it is a global phenomenon that has multiple local effects on people and places
These effects will increase over time and require planning and policy solutions far beyond the future that is usually imagined in the human lifespan and the world of politics
Derived from one’s own life experience, experiential knowledge ‘enables us to ask how a variety of publics make sense of climate change, as witnessed and responded to in ordinary, everyday-life scenarios’ (Brace & Geoghegan 2010:289). It is often tacit or implicit and usually not formalised or systemised. Drawing upon this conceptual lens of experiential knowledge we explore in detail one important but neglected area: discourses of climate change held by social actors involved in development planning practices
Summary
Climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing society as it is a global phenomenon that has multiple local effects on people and places. These effects will increase over time and require planning and policy solutions far beyond the future that is usually imagined in the human lifespan and the world of politics. Historically adaptation planning and policy has focused mainly at the national level (Agrawal 2010; Tompkins 2005), attention to adaptation at the local level has received an increasing interest during the last decade. Bringing together and making use of local and scientific knowledge is not straightforward (Kristjanson et al 2009) and it is often difficult for individuals and organisations to handle both kinds of knowledge
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