Action Research to Enhance Inter-Organisational Coordination of Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific

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.

River basin governance enabling pathways for sustainable management: A comparative study between Australia, Brazil, China and France

“…Diagnosing indicator performance by actors changes the engagement from a purely rational, top-down approach decided by experts and managers to a broader view allowing ‘multiple ways of knowing’ (Barrett et al 2017 ; Delfau 2018 ) and co-learning (Gilfillan et al 2020 ). Co-learning changes the dialogue and power dynamics of basin actors in favour of a more egalitarian way in which interaction is no longer uniquely guided by preconceived ideas of users, providers, regulators and managers, but where social capacity aims for transformative sustainability learning (Barrett et al 2017 ) and adaptive governance (Folke et al 2005 ), requiring longer-term institutional reform (Sharma-Wallace et al 2018 ).…”