Abstract
Globally, it is smaller urban settlements that are growing most rapidly, are most constrained in terms of adaptive capacity but increasingly looked to for delivering local urban resilience. Data from three smaller coastal cities and their wider regional governance systems in Florida, US; West Sussex, UK and São Paulo, Brazil are used to compare the influence of scale and sector on city adaptive capacity. These tensions are described through the lens of the Adaptive Capacity Index (ACI) approach. The ACI is built from structuration theory and presents an alternative to social-ecological systems framing of analysis on adaptation. Structuration articulates the interaction of agency and structure and the intervening role played by institutions on information flow, in shaping adaptive capacity and outcomes. The ACI approach reveals inequalities in adaptive capacity to be greater across scale than across government, private and civil society sector capacity in each study area. This has implications for adaptation research both by reinforcing the importance of scale and demonstrating the utility of structuration theory as a framework for understanding the social dynamics underpinning adaptive capacity; and policy relevance, in particular considering the redistribution of decision-making power across scale and/or compensatory mechanisms, especially for lower scale actors, who increasingly carry the costs for enacting resilience planning in cities.
Highlights
If equity is a consideration of climate change adaptation policy, investing to enhance adaptive capacity requires approaches that can measure and diagnose its unequal distribution (Ziervogel et al, 2017)
The scaled property of adaptation is confirmed in this study which deploys a relational framework rooted in structuration theory to draw out actor-structure interactions in the formation and deployment of adaptive capacity
The Adaptive Capacity Index (ACI) approach offers a concrete interpretation of structuration theory, one that is nuanced through the relational lens of shadow/canonical systems
Summary
If equity is a consideration of climate change adaptation policy, investing to enhance adaptive capacity requires approaches that can measure and diagnose its unequal distribution (Ziervogel et al, 2017). Responding to the desire for an indicator framework that can respect both the scaled fixity of administrative systems and the flattening effects of socially constructed and relational interactions between actors we draw from Gidden’s structuration theory (1984) and work on shadow systems (Pelling et al, 2008). This allows the index framework to respect the social drivers of adaptive capacity in nested governance contexts. This paper presents the conceptual and methodological frameworks of the ACI before discussing empirical results and conclusions for building adaptive capacity in small and medium sized cities
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