Adaptation and the poor: development, resilience and transition

By Anne Jerneck, Lennart Olsson. 2008

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Risk minimization is no longer a sufficient survival strategy for poor people in livelihood systems increasingly exposed to frequent extreme events. This calls for comprehensive adaptation to climate change. Within the climate change regime, adaptation is as central as mitigation but needs to be much more explicitly addressed at local, national and global levels. There is also a need for policy renewal in other international regimes that are central to adaptation, such as environment, human rights, development and trade. Accordingly, this article addresses poverty-relevant adaptation through the medium of three discourses: development, resilience, and transition theory. Development, as a post-war project of theories, strategies and policies, spells out the links between rich and poor countries and offers modernization trajectories but few solutions for adaptation and sustainability transitions. Resilience, as an analytical framework emerging in ecology in the 1970s in reaction to ideas of equilibrium, depicts incremental changes and capacity to preserve systems within given frames but does not recognize that social change mainly implies transitions to renewed forms of production, consumption and distribution with new combinations of organization, institutions and technology. Transition theory focuses on profound multilevel changes in complex (sub)systems, thereby offering a powerful framework for theorizing empirical findings and promoting adaptation as a transition to sustainability.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b87bd1d33ff5cd5f85f93d97dd66f0e14cdc8c2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. D. Dokken
2. K. Brown
3. K. Mach
4. Jan Verhagen
5. Christopher B. Field
6. V. Barros
7. M. Mastrandrea
8. E. Corbera

In Sociology and Political Science

1. K. Brown
2. G. Rasul

In Soil Science

1. K. Brown
2. Jan Verhagen
3. Christopher B. Field
4. G. Rasul

Citations in the corpus

• The nexus approach to water–energy–food security: an option for adaptation to climate change (2016, background): “A sustainable adaptation process requires adjustments in policies, institutions, and attitudes that promote a comprehensive and integrated approach for reducing poverty and vulnerability and enhancing resilience and in a sustainable manner (Jerneck & Olsson, 2008; Kok et al., 2008).”
• Integrating development and climate policies: national and international benefits (2008, background): “This obviously means there is a need to go beyond the Framework Convention on Climate Change and to broaden the climate agenda (Kok and de Coninck, 2007; Drexhage et al., 2007; Jerneck and Olsson, 2008 ).”
• Sustainable adaptation: An oxymoron? (2011, background): “Yet Jerneck and Olsson (2008) argue that development, as a modernization project, offers few solutions for either adaptation or sustainability.”
• Climate-Resilient Pathways: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Sustainable Development (2014, background): “myriad problems associated with climate change impacts (Jerneck and Olsson, 2008).”