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This paper points to the value of broadening the palette of approaches to climate change futures beyond the dominant methods of empiricist predictive trends and expert scenarios. The fi rst half of the paper contextualizes the climate change discourse within the fi eld of futures studies and explores potential points of dialogue between a number of futures approaches and the most prominent of the climate protection work. The second half of the paper introduces a case study of community based participatory approaches involving community scenario writing and community visioning, which enacts a collaborative engagement between futures researchers and climate-vulnerable communities. However, any participatory futures method chosen to facilitate climate change adaptation must be context aware in both its design and implementation if it is to facilitate adaptability and resilience in climate-vulnerable communities.

Many coastal areas throughout the world are at risk from sea level rise and the increased intensity of extreme events such as storm surge and flooding. Simultaneously, many areas are also experiencing significant socio-economic challenges associated with rural-urban transitions, population growth, and increased consumption resulting from improving gross regional product. Within this context we explore the viability of proposed adaptation pathways in Soc Trang province, Vietnam-an area of the Mekong Delta experiencing cumulative pressures on coastal livelihoods. A participatory workshop and interviews, using a combination of systems thinking and futures techniques, revealed a shared goal of sustainable livelihoods, which provides an integrated and systemic focus for coastal adaptation strategies. Emphasizing sustainable livelihoods is less likely to lead to maladaptation because stakeholders consciously seek to avoid optimizing particular system elements at the expense of others-and thus engage in broader decision-making frameworks supportive of social-ecological resilience. However, the broad ambit required for sustainable livelihoods is not supported by governance frameworks that have focused on protective strategies (e.g., dyke building, strengthening and raising, to continue and expand agriculture and aquaculture production) at the expense of developing a diverse suite of adaptation strategies, which may lead to path dependencies and an ultimate reduction in adaptive capacity for system transformation.

ABSTRACT. Adaptation is a key feature of sustainable social-ecological systems. As societies traverse various temporal and spatial scales, they are exposed to differing contexts and precursors for adaptation. A cursory view of the response to these differing contexts and precursors suggests the particular ability of persistent societies to adapt to changing circumstances. Yet a closer examination into the meaning of adaptation and its relationship to concepts of resilience, vulnerability, and sustainability illustrates that, in many cases, societies actually manipulate their social-ecological contexts rather than adapt to them. It could be argued that manipulative behaviors are a subset of a broader suite of adaptive behaviors; however, this paper suggests that manipulative behaviors have fundamentally different intentions and outcomes. Specifically, adaptive behaviors are respectful of the intrinsic integrity of social-ecological systems and change is directed toward internal or self-regulating modification. By way of contrast, manipulative behaviors tend to disregard the integrity of social-ecological systems and focus on external change or manipulating the broader system with the aim of making self-regulation unnecessary. It is argued that adaptive behaviors represent long-term strategies for building resilience, whereas manipulative behaviors represent short-term strategies with uncertain consequences for resilience, vulnerability, and the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Of greatest significance; however, is that manipulative strategies have the potential to avoid authentic experiences of system dynamics, obscure valuable learning opportunities, create adverse path dependencies, and lessen the likelihood of effective adaptation in future contexts.

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