The role of knowledge and power in climate change adaptation governance: a systematic literature review

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The long-term character of climate change and the high costs of adaptation measures, in combination with their uncertain effects, turn climate adaptation governance into a torturous process. We systematically review the literature on climate adaptation governance to analyze the scholarly understanding of these complexities. Building on governance literature about long-term and complex policy problems, we develop a conceptual matrix based on the dimensions knowledge and power to systematically study the peer-reviewed literature on climate adaptation governance. We find that about a quarter of the reviewed journal articles do not address the knowledge or power dimension of the governance of climate change adaptation, about half of the articles discuss either the knowledge or the power dimension, and another quarter discuss both knowledge and power. The articles that do address both knowledge and power (1) conceptualize the governance of climate adaptation mainly as a complex system of regulatory frameworks and technical knowledge, (2) assume that regulatory systems can be easily adapted to new knowledge, (3) pay little attention to fluid or unorganized forms of power, e.g., negotiation, and knowledge, e.g., learning, and (4) largely neglect the interplay between the two. We argue that more research on this interplay is needed, and we discuss how puzzling and powering are a promising pair of concepts to study this.

Understanding process, power, and meaning in adaptive governance: a critical institutional reading

“…However, there is a growing recognition of the potential for generating "thicker," contextualized, and power sensitive understandings of how adaptive governance works in practice. This recognition comes both from within the adaptive governance literature (Vink et al 2013, Chaffin et al 2014, Karpouzoglou et al 2016) and from aligned literature encompassing different disciplinary perspectives on environmental governance (Jones and Sok 2015, Van Hecken et al 2015, Vatn 2015, FrickTrzebitzky 2017, Wilson 2018). More broadly, there have been several contributions that deal with the relationship between resilience thinking and social theory (Adger 2000, Cote andNightingale 2012, Brown 2014).…”

Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice

“…These recent examples notwithstanding, even scholars within the resilience field suggest that more work is to be done, particularly in relation to informal and unorganized power dynamics and the recognition of social diversity and related conflicts (Vink et al 2013, Fabinyi et al 2014. Furthermore, the critical scholarship outlined previously pushes us to consider how resilience thinking might lose its systems perspective when taken up by development practitioners, using the "episteme of surprise" (Aradau 2014) and valuation of lay and indigenous knowledge to individualize adaptive capacity building.…”

Systematic review approaches for climate change adaptation research

“…Reflecting the tradition of systematic reviews in the health sciences, health-related adaptation was the focus of six articles (Walker et al 2011;Hosking and Campbell-Lendrum 2012;Bouzid et al 2013;Cheng and Berry 2013;Poutiainen et al 2013;Toloo et al 2013). The most dominant adaptation focus within which systematic reviews have penetrated has been reviewing lessons from, and trends in, adaptation governance (Hardee and Mutunga 2010;Berrang-Ford et al 2011;Ford et al 2011;Pearce et al 2011;Ford et al 2012a, b;Larsen et al 2012;Murtinho and Hayes 2012;Biesbroek et al 2013;Kamau and Mwaura 2013;Vink et al 2013). Systematic reviews have not been restricted to this focus, however, with articles considering tourism (Kajan and Saarinen 2013), business management (Linnenluecke et al 2013), transport (Eisenack et al 2012), urban planning (Bowler et al 2010), human displacement (McLeman 2011;McDowell 2013), human management of ecosystem services (Heller and Zavaleta 2009;Charlton and Arnell 2011;Kolstrom et al 2011;Shepard et al 2011), and case studies of generalized adaptation research (Murtinho and Hayes 2012;Ford et al 2012a, b).…”

“…Qualitative extraction and analyses are commonly guided by theoretical frameworks or conceptual models used to frame the review. Vink et al (2013), for example, frame their review of adaptation governance using theoretical constructs of knowledge and power, with their theoretical framework explicitly described in the methods section and results summarized around these concepts. The predominant theories guiding the literature we reviewed included adaptation and vulnerability theory (e.g., Ford et al 2012b), statistical theory in the case of meta-analyses (Bowler et al 2010;Shepard et al 2011) and public health (Walker et al 2011;Hosking and Campbell-Lendrum 2012;Bouzid et al 2013;Cheng and Berry 2013;Toloo et al 2013).…”